This morning, an email arrived from ACES Connection, a nonprofit which has focused in the past on the negative impact adverse childhood experiences — like abuse, neglect, addiction or mental illness within a family — can have on a child’s future physical and mental health. The organization announced a rebranding as PACES Connection, adding an emphasis on the beneficial “positive childhood experiences” that can build strength and resiliency.
“Although the knowledge of ACES science liberated a lot of people by explaining their lives, it also depressed a lot of people if they weren’t provided information about resilience,” the email read. “In reality, adversity and positive experiences work together, all the time, throughout your life, in your body and in your brain, in your communities.”
This seemed like an important (if belated) acknowledgement and that it came on St. Patrick’s Day was, for me, a kind of a bittersweet coincidence. Because, for the past three decades, March 17 has reminded me of how lucky I was to be born into a family of safety, security and stability and spared the kind of negative experiences that can can change the course of a life.
And of how April and Paddy weren’t so fortunate.
If you’ll indulge me in a little personal history, I’ll tell you what I mean.
When I was in my mid-30s — a single mother living in New Mexico who longed for more children and a sibling for my then 7-year-old son— I started considering adoption. In one of those “law of attraction” moments, not long after I’d begun researching the idea, my mother received a call from a friend in Arizona whose husband was an OB-GYN.
The doctor was providing pro-bono prenatal care to April, an unwed teenager whose single mother had kicked her out of the house when she became pregnant, my mother’s friend said. Did my mother know of anyone considering a private adoption?
In her second trimester, April had just learned a second set of prospective parents had withdrawn their commitment after reconsidering the baby’s mixed-race heritage (half Black/half white). Although April had previously held out for a two-parent household, she’d now concluded finding someone who could provide financial stability and a loving home was all that mattered.
Within days, I was meeting with a lawyer to draw up papers agreeing to pay for April’s living expenses and medical care until the child, due March 6, was born. By mutual agreement, it was to be a “closed” adoption; April would not see the baby nor have contact until/unless the child expressed a desire to meet his birth mother.
Needless to say, the ensuing weeks were full of anticipation. My son made plans to take his infant brother horseback riding as I unpacked the clothes and toys of his own infancy for a second round of use. Every week I checked in with April’s doctor and lawyer; every month I sent a check. They told me the pregnancy was normal, and April was healthy and at peace with her decision.
When the first week of March arrived, I barely moved from the phone, poised to board a plane to Phoenix as soon as I heard April had gone into labor. But when, by March 15, she still had not, the doctors decided to induce and my mother and I drove to Albuquerque to catch the next flight.
In the end, after the long labor typical of a first child, April delivered naturally at 10:35 p.m. on St. Patrick’s Day. The next day my mother and I went to the hospital, met the lawyer to sign the final papers, and were handed a perfectly perfect little bundle of boy.
I called him Max. We planned to remain at my mother’s friend’s home for the 48 hours Arizona required before I could cross state lines and return to New Mexico, where my already besotted son anxiously awaited his new little sib.
Even now, telling the rest of the story remains painful: How, in the final hour that it was legally possible, April contacted her lawyer to say she’d changed her mind. How I put on dark glasses I wouldn’t remove for a week, dressed the baby in the cutest outfit I’d brought with me, drove to the hospital where he’d been born and handed him to a nurse, as if returning a package that had gone to the wrong address.
Later, I would learn April had named the baby “Paddy,” that her mother had refused to reconsider her rejection and that April planned to go on welfare until she — without a high school diploma, any income or the support of the baby’s father — “got back on her feet.”
Not a St. Patrick’s Day has gone by since that I haven’t thought about Max/Paddy and April, realizing how hard the road ahead must have been for both of them. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t an impossibility that all the “positive childhood experiences” I could have provided might have been matched. I hoped I was wrong in thinking that such a rough start would inevitably stunt Paddy’s progress and possibilities, just as April’s troubled childhood had impacted hers.
I never heard about them again. More than once, I thought of reaching out — to my mother’s friend, to the lawyer, to the doctor — but I was too afraid of what I might hear. Whether they were flourishing or suffering, either way it would break my heart.
Instead, every St. Patrick’s Day for the past 30+ years I’ve read aloud this traditional Irish blessing, hoping April and Paddy managed to beat the odds.
“May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face and the rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his hand.”
No words - just thanks.
Wow. What an incredibly personal and powerfully moving story. Thank you for sharing.