But there was a grief I carried alongside it.<\/p>\n
Not a heavy grief.<\/p>\n
Not the kind that announces itself.<\/p>\n
The quiet kind, the kind that lives in the back of a particular drawer, the one you don\u2019t open very often but that you know is there.<\/p>\n
The grief was for the daughter I had not had.<\/p>\n
I want to be careful about how I say this.<\/p>\n
I know how it sounds.<\/p>\n
I know it can sound ungrateful, or as if the three boys were somehow not enough, and they were always enough, they were more than enough, they were everything.<\/p>\n
But a person can have everything and still carry a small quiet thing for the shape of what was not there.<\/p>\n
The boys were born in 1991, 1994, and 1999.<\/p>\n
Daniel, Nathan, and James.<\/p>\n
They are twenty-nine, twenty-six, and twenty-one now.<\/p>\n
They are large and loud and specific in the way of men who grew up in a house that encouraged them to be themselves.<\/p>\n
Daniel is an engineer.<\/p>\n
Nathan plays guitar in a band and is also, quietly, a very good accountant, which is the specific combination of a person who knows what they love and what they need.<\/p>\n
James is finishing his degree in environmental science.<\/p>\n
I am proud of all three of them with the specific unreserved pride of a parent who has watched someone become themselves.<\/p>\n
But sometimes, in the years after James left home, I would see a small girl somewhere, at the grocery store or at a park, and there would be a moment, just a moment, where the drawer would open.<\/p>\n
My name is Ellen Marsh.<\/p>\n
I am fifty-one years old.<\/p>\n
I am a high school biology teacher, which is a job that has given me twenty-three years of specific satisfaction and which I intend to do for as many more years as my body allows.<\/p>\n
My husband Michael is an administrator at St. Joseph\u2019s Hospital, which is the regional hospital fourteen minutes from our house.<\/p>\n
He is fifty-four and has been at the hospital for sixteen years and has the quality of someone who is very good at a job that requires the management of people and processes simultaneously, which is a rare combination and which is one of the reasons I fell in love with him, the competence of it, the specific way he moved through complicated situations without becoming overwhelmed by them.<\/p>\n
We have been married for twenty-five years.<\/p>\n
We are, by any reasonable measure, a very solid unit.<\/p>\n
Six months before this story begins, Michael brought home paperwork.<\/p>\n
Emergency foster care application.<\/p>\n
He put it on the kitchen table and sat down across from me.<\/p>\n
He said: I\u2019ve been thinking.<\/p>\n
He said: the boys are mostly gone.<\/p>\n
He said: the house is big.<\/p>\n
He said: and there are children who need somewhere safe tonight and we have somewhere safe.<\/p>\n
I looked at the paperwork.<\/p>\n
I said: foster care.<\/p>\n
He said: emergency foster care. Short-term. When a child needs placement immediately.<\/p>\n
I said: that could be an infant.<\/p>\n
He said: yes.<\/p>\n
He said: it could also be an older child.<\/p>\n
He said: it depends on what\u2019s needed.<\/p>\n
I said: Michael.<\/p>\n
He said: I know.<\/p>\n
He said: I\u2019ve thought about it a lot.<\/p>\n
He said: Ellen.<\/p>\n
He said: we have room.<\/p>\n
He said: we have experience.<\/p>\n
He said: we have a house that knows what children are.<\/p>\n
He said: some child is going to need a safe place tonight somewhere.<\/p>\n
He said: I want that place to be us.<\/p>\n
I looked at the paperwork.<\/p>\n
I thought about the drawer.<\/p>\n
I said: all right.<\/p>\n
We filled out the paperwork.<\/p>\n
We submitted it.<\/p>\n
We completed the training.<\/p>\n
We completed the background checks and the home study and the specific requirements of the emergency foster care process.<\/p>\n
And then we waited.<\/p>\n
Not impatiently.<\/p>\n
Just waited.<\/p>\n
Six months.<\/p>\n
Nothing came through.<\/p>\n
And then on a Tuesday night in November, Michael told me a coworker had been taken to the hospital and he needed to go.<\/p>\n
He said it quickly, in the way he said things when he was moving fast.<\/p>\n
He put on his jacket.<\/p>\n
He went.<\/p>\n
At 2:06 in the morning, his name appeared on my phone screen.<\/p>\n
I was awake.<\/p>\n
I was a light sleeper and I had been aware that he had not come home and had been doing the specific half-awake monitoring of someone who is waiting without exactly waiting.<\/p>\n
I answered.<\/p>\n
He said: get dressed and come to St. Joseph\u2019s.<\/p>\n
His voice was different.<\/p>\n
Not urgent in the emergency sense.<\/p>\n
Something else.<\/p>\n
Something I could not immediately name.<\/p>\n
I said: what happened? Is someone hurt?<\/p>\n
He said: no.<\/p>\n
He said: just please come.<\/p>\n
I got dressed.<\/p>\n
I drove to the hospital.<\/p>\n
Michael was waiting near the maternity ward.<\/p>\n
He was holding something.<\/p>\n
A bundle.<\/p>\n
Small.<\/p>\n
Wrapped.<\/p>\n
I stopped walking.<\/p>\n
I stood in the corridor of the maternity ward at two-thirty in the morning and I looked at my husband holding a newborn.<\/p>\n
I walked to him.<\/p>\n
I said: Michael. Whose baby is that?<\/p>\n
He swallowed.<\/p>\n
He walked to me.<\/p>\n
He placed the baby in my arms.<\/p>\n
He said: she\u2019s ours.<\/p>\n
I looked at the baby.<\/p>\n
She was very small.<\/p>\n
Dark hair, the specific dark hair of newborns that sometimes changes and sometimes stays.<\/p>\n
Her fingers were the specific perfection of newborn fingers, the size of them, the detail.<\/p>\n
She was sleeping.<\/p>\n
She breathed in the particular way of very new babies, the rhythmic small breath of someone who has just arrived at the world.<\/p>\n
Michael told me the hospital had called him because a placement was needed immediately.<\/p>\n
He said: the paperwork cleared.<\/p>\n
He said: we\u2019re approved.<\/p>\n
He said: she needed somewhere safe tonight.<\/p>\n
He said: I called you to come because I wanted you to be there when I held her for the first time.<\/p>\n
He said: I wanted us to meet her together.<\/p>\n
I was crying before he finished the sentence.<\/p>\n
Not dramatically.<\/p>\n
The quiet crying of someone who has been reached in a place they did not know could still be reached.<\/p>\n
He said: her name is Lucy.<\/p>\n
The nurses had given her the name pending her formal documentation.<\/p>\n
Lucy.<\/p>\n
I held Lucy.<\/p>\n
She stirred slightly without waking.<\/p>\n
She turned her face toward me in the specific instinctive way of newborns who are oriented toward warmth.<\/p>\n
I said: hello, Lucy.<\/p>\n
I said it very quietly.<\/p>\n
She did not wake.<\/p>\n
But she settled.<\/p>\n
I stood in the corridor of the maternity ward and held Lucy and thought about the drawer.<\/p>\n
The quiet grief for the daughter I had not had.<\/p>\n
Opening.<\/p>\n
Michael had his arm around my shoulders.<\/p>\n
He was watching the baby.<\/p>\n
He said: let\u2019s take her home.<\/p>\n
We signed the necessary documents.<\/p>\n
We were given a kit from the hospital, the practical supplies for a newborn overnight, formula and a receiving blanket and the paperwork for her care.<\/p>\n
We walked to the car.<\/p>\n
Michael drove.<\/p>\n
I sat in the back seat with Lucy because I could not put her in the car seat alone, I needed to be beside her.<\/p>\n
We were four minutes from the hospital when his phone rang.<\/p>\n
He picked it up in one hand and I saw his face change when he looked at the screen.<\/p>\n
He said: it\u2019s the hospital.<\/p>\n
He answered on the speaker.<\/p>\n
A nurse.<\/p>\n
Her voice had a quality that I recognized immediately from twenty-three years of teaching, which is the voice of someone who is holding themselves together in a situation that is requiring all of their professional control.<\/p>\n
See more on the next page<\/p>\n
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