Erma Bombeck Writing Competition - Winners
2007
Erma Bombeck Writing Competition
Honorable Mention
Human Interest - Dayton
Lisa Cairney
Dayton, Ohio
"From Her Mother to Her Other"
| It was a rocky place by nature. An old quarry surrounded by forestation and busy with workers and explosions and over-burdened trucks carrying stones in and out all day long. There was not a soft, sandy, or grassy place here to lay her baby, only a wide open expanse of hard ground on which to give her a last goodbye, a last kiss. I wonder if the baby was crying. I wonder if she waited in the trees to see who would rescue her daughter. Maybe she held her until she heard the trucks round the bend on the gravel road before quickly laying her down and scurrying out of sight. Maybe it was not she who brought her to the quarry, but another relative or friend. After all, the baby was only a day old and perhaps her mother was too weakened from the birth to make the journey. Whoever it was, they took great risk abandoning her there. If caught, they faced a harsh penalty. And although it seems to us a horribly cruel place to leave a child, especially a newborn, it was actually in the baby's best interest. The workers and trucks that came in and out of the quarry daily would nearly guarantee that she would be found quickly and brought to a safe haven. That baby, my baby, was sick that day, suffering from a fever. She was brought to a hospital, where she quickly recovered and then went to spend the next two years of her life in the local orphanage, waiting for another mother to answer her heart's cry to be loved. And a world away, we heard her cry. A world away, we were waiting for her. A world away, we were hoping, praying, and finally. finally.celebrating when we saw her face on the paperwork inviting us to come to China and bring her home. We didn't know her yet, but we loved her. She didn't know us yet, but we were her family.her mother, her father, her brother, her sisters.she was coming home. Since her homecoming, I have often thought of her mother a world away. I have wondered about the desperation that would drive her to abandon her baby. I have wondered about her circumstances, her life there in China. How she endured saying hello and goodbye to her newborn daughter, all in the same day. I will probably never know what happened. never get the chance to meet her, to thank her.but I can imagine. I can imagine what her sacrifice must have been like. And each day I hold my beautiful daughter, I can only whisper to this woman, this mother a world away, "Thank you." |