Proof of Heaven

one last great push, she gave birth to her first child.
Ann told me that she wanted so much to hold and caress me, and that
she would never forget hearing my cries until fatigue and that anesthetic
finally won out.
Over the next four hours, first Mars, then Saturn, then Mercury, and
finally brilliant Venus rose in the eastern sky to greet me into this world.
Meanwhile, Ann slept more deeply than she had in months.
The nurse awakened her before sunrise.
“I have someone I want you to meet,” she said cheerfully, and
presented me, swaddled in a sky-blue blanket, for her to admire.
“The nurses all agreed that you were the most beautiful baby in the
whole nursery. I was bursting with pride.”
As much as Ann wanted to keep me, the cold reality that she couldn’t
soon sank in. Richard had dreams of going to college, but those dreams
would not keep me fed. Perhaps I felt Ann’s pain, because I stopped
eating. At eleven days, I was hospitalized with the diagnosis that I was
“failing to thrive,” and my first Christmas and the following nine days
were spent in the hospital in Charlotte.
After I was admitted to the hospital, Ann took the two-hour bus ride
north to her small hometown. She spent that Christmas with her parents,
sisters, and friends, whom she had not seen in three months. All without
me.
By the time I was eating again, my separate life was under way. Ann
sensed that she was losing control and that they weren’t going to allow
her to keep me. When she called the hospital just after New Year’s, she
was told that I had been sent to the Children’s Home Society in
Greensboro.
“Sent with a volunteer? How unfair!” she said.
I spent the next three months living in a baby dorm with several other
infants whose mothers could not keep them. My crib was on the second
floor of a bluish gray Victorian home that had been donated to the
society. “It was a most pleasant place for your first home,” Ann told me
with a laugh, “even though it was mainly a baby dorm.” Ann took the
three-hour bus ride to visit half a dozen times over the next few months,