I Became a Mother in a Convenience Store Parking Lot

I became a mother in the parking lot of a Uni Mart convenience store in Pleasant Gap, Pennsylvania. A kind of town never once a blink of promise. I imagined it an easy target for eighty dollar robberies and drug deals, only for it’s smallness and inconsequential existence.

Every mother has a story for how they earned their name. Stories highlighted by emergencies, last minute decisions, flights to exotic locations, incredible agony and strength. Holding onto those stories I want to tell you mine.

Back to the Uni Mart, I parked my car in the corner space closest to the dumpster. I didn’t want the employees to get excited for a customer. Two empty car seats properly attached to the back seats of my Pontiac Grand Am. After a few minutes, a car pulled up beside me. Marjorie, a thirty something petite woman with blonde hair got out and began unhooking both boys from their car seats.

It was March 28th, 2008. The late winter air was cold and placid. Justin, gorgeous blonde hair and blue eyes that swallowed you into his sorrowful face. He was six weeks shy of turning three years old. He only weighed twenty one pounds. Justin didn’t smile. Marjorie handed him easily to my partner, Nate, and he carried him over to our car and put him in the left side car seat.

Justin went willingly, quietly, without complaint. In fact, he didn’t make a sound at all.

In half a second, she freed Dominic. Thick brown hair and warm brown eyes. He smiled at Marjorie’s keys jingling in her hand and made a play to grab them. Just fifteen months old, and a more hearty twenty five pounds, he slipped right onto my left hip. It felt so natural, like I’d been carrying him on my hip for the entirety of his life.

I secured Dominic in the car and Marjorie opened her truck. All of Justin and Dominic’s belongings fit into the trunk of Marjorie’s car. Two black trash bags of clothes, a box of diapers, a thick green blanket for Justin. Three stuffed animals. It fell easily into our car.

Marjorie also had a trash bag with a few toys “bought for them by their biological mom.

For Justin, a box of fake dollar store matchbox cars, and a few infant toys for Dominic in bold reds and blues peering out the top of the bag. She said “All these boys need is just someone to love them,” “The agency begged me to keep them, adopt them, but I only do it short term because of my illness. I’ve always been clear about that”

She closed her truck, and said goodbye as she backed out of her parking spot and headed home. The whole thing took five minutes. So very formal it felt as if this kind of thing happens every day. Maybe it does, I didn’t know. It was a first for me.

When I slid back into the passenger seat I looked back to see Dominic, in his burnt orange winter jacket and black winter hat. He was staring at his hand, and put his finger in his mouth to lick something off. He smiled, content with his finger finding.

I was officially, unofficially, a mom. Still just a foster parent, potential adoptive parent. There were no guarantees, but adopting the boys was a good chance. The boys were full biological brothers, each sharing the closest bond in blood to each other, with the same set of biological parents. They came from a disintegrated family destroyed through poverty, trauma, and violence. It put into motion the path to find the four of us in this car, all together. The Uni Mart, the cold March weather, and the total unknown.

I’d like to say I drove off into the sunset, that love and the act of total unconditional loving was enough. Enough to fix the pain, and broken promises of good intentions. However I tried, my love was never enough to change the facts.

Justin was not eating, Marjorie told me through an email a week before Uni Mart. A psychological choice I accurately assumed, a protest of his injustice. He also stopped using the toilet, and was back in diapers. For a toddler, it was all he could to argue his point. Whatever was happening was unfair, and confusing, and chaotic. I didn’t know, no one knew, that he had permanent hearing loss in both ears. Adding to his confusion, more than not knowing where he could put down roots.

He lost several pounds, and was scheduled back at the doctor for another consult for a feeding tube. I didn’t like the idea of a feeding tube, but was being asked to make a decision. I hardly knew Justin, how could I make this critical medical decision? I used the internet, and my gut instinct to make a plan.

For our first dinner together, I made meatloaf. It felt like the food a mother might make. Tiny pieces of meat and easy to swallow potatoes. It was a real family meal circa 1950. Dominic in his new high chair, and Justin in a red, blue, and yellow booster seat that sat atop our dining room chair.

Our first act together as a family. Justin didn’t eat anything. I could barely blame him. He looked from me to Nate wondering the consequences for his protest. There wasn’t one. I had decided on a new technique for encouraging him to eat. It was day one, and going as planned.

Dominic ate his potatoes, throwing as much of it at the wall as he ate. He started to make gurgling sounds, though, and promptly threw it up on his high chair. I was told to expect this is totally normal, or at least normal for Dominic. Marjorie told me there was no known cause, or the doctor didn’t seem concerned.

Sadly, there was a serious medical reason why it was happening. I am getting ahead of myself.

The action of throwing up really pissed off Dominic. Marjorie described Dominic as having a terrible temper. He angrily picked up his sippy cup and threw it at the wall. It broke open, and milk spilled down my white kitchen wall in strings of white racing to the floor. I quickly got up to clean it up. Dominic took his left hand and fumbled below the high chair tray until it popped off, and he swung off of him.

It was a scene I had imagined so many times in my mind. A family. I wanted to be a mom since I was a little girl, documented by my mom in a series of holiday and birthday photos of me holding up and hugging a new doll. Motherhood was something I longed and hoped for, and assumed would be a part of my adult life.

I didn’t think I would not be able, or infertile, or somehow just fail at what every woman seemed to do so naturally. It wasn’t natural, my womanhood. Foster care was a simple choice. I chose it, purposely, forgoing fertility treatments for their cancer risk, even if I could afford them. Nate and I easily chose foster care. There wasn’t too much thought about it, of course, this is how we would adopt. I wanted it this way.

If it was on purpose, then why did I feel so unprepared? Why did the exchange at the Uni Mart make me feel dirty, and damaged? Why did it feel like a drug deal? All at once so natural as the longing to put Dominic on my hip, and as unnatural as the awkward family meal. Prepared so lovingly, but discarded effortlessly.

As I cleaned up dinner, Nate and I laughed at the strangeness. I guess I was expecting once the boys were in my house, our house, it would just snap together like the end of the directions for a lego house. The last piece of the puzzle.

It was anything but natural. Justin and Dominic felt as much strangers in my home as actual strangers, because that’s exactly what they were, strangers. Complete human beings, small and vulnerable, but not happy to be getting new potential parents. Angry, even, at another change, another set of people to care for them.

I was told to expect it, as the normal path of foster parenting. I just didn’t realize how strange it would feel having them in my home. A formal dinner party, and my comfortable home felt uncomfortable for the first time. I couldn’t relax because they were sitting in my living room expecting something from me.

I could change diapers, and give baths, and I knew I could keep them alive. Technically, I could go through all the motions, but could I actually love them? I just didn’t know. It didn't feel natural, or meant to be, or even how I thought my children might look. They looked completely different from me.

My friend's children had a nose, or a smile I could rely on to remind me this was a natural thing. This relationship, this connection, was just the way of life. Justin and Dominic looked like Justin and Dominic- and they didn’t even look alike. Their vulnerability made me want to care for them, but I was unsure of the rest.

Still, here I was, my own sense of brokenness. My own trauma, unresolved childhood pain. I thought it would help me understand Justin and Dominic. It did, but it also didn’t give me the emotional resolve to parent their broken selves in the way I imagined.

There is so much more to tell you, though, I shouldn’t get ahead. Day one of motherhood was a triumph in undertaking, and weird in acquisition. It was the beginning of my family, but an end of Justin and Dominic’s biological one.

It would forever alter everyone’s trajectories in unimaginable ways. It was the stuff of magic, and be harder and more challenging as the days progressed.