luz means light

Posted by admin as Hot girls

It was only two weeks before Christmas, but fear, not cold, made my hands shake as I stood in the darkness of the tokyo hotel parking lot, trying to unlock my rental car. The Texas predawn air was balmy, and if I’d bothered to ask them, my relatives and friends would have assured me that I was about to set out on an errand as balmy as the weather. I was heading out to navigate my way alone, through a city of unfamiliar streets, to drive a nine-month-pregnant woman I’d met only the previous night to the hospital to deliver…my child.

A widow for one year, a mother of four—three sons under twelve and a stepdaughter just starting college—a freelance writer with a hole in her kitchen floor the size of Lake Michigan, and a hole in her heart the size of the ocean, I had decided that what I needed to do was not fix my linoleum or get a steady job—but to become a single mother to a baby daughter. The choice I’d made against all reason. It was a choice so controversial even among people who truly loved me that it had prompted more than one serious breach of friendship. After all, I was hardly fossilized, just enough past the age of forty to feel it in my knees. I could and would love and raise another child, a daughter.

But alone?

With my husband, who died of colon cancer at forty-four the previous year, I had joshed longingly about another child, but I struggled with infertility. Adoption, our only possible route to parenthood, was both risky and expensive. My dreams of another child should have faded in the cold light of reality. But though many illusions of the youth had indeed died with Dan, the idea that I’d sit myself down and write a big, fat bestselling novel and my fantasy of a baby daughter had not. I was determined. Since I knew for certain that over-forty moms (particularly those with big fannies and big families) were not exactly the dream dates of the millennium, I was reasonably sure I wouldn’t marry again.

I wondered why it was so dark. I searched the frontage roads for a bank clock, and to my horror, realized it was only two o’clock in the morning, instead of six. In my confusion, I’d set the alarm wrong! So I spent the next few hours in an all-night dinner, slugging down cups of coffee, regarding my reflection in the window and wondering who I was.

How had this happened?

I’d found out about the adoption agency from a friend. We’d met at a holiday craft fair, and delighted as I was to see my pal, it was the occupant of her shoulder backpack I couldn’t take my eyes off. He had a thick shock of dark hair and fine chiseled features of a baby Byron. His name was Jack, and my pal and her hubby had adopted him through an agency in San Antonio. I thought the agency would laugh so hard when I called that they’d never get to the point of sending me the application.

But the agency director had no problem with single parents, even widows with big holes in their floors. A few months later, I was filling out voluminous applications. And a few months after that, in the middle of Thanks-giving dinner, I got a phone call. Their was a nineteen-year-old birth mother who, against all reason, seemed to think I had the right stuff. Until just a week before, she’d been “matched” with the perfect couple, but they’d left her in the lurch when the ultrasound exam proved that the baby she was carrying was not the boy they dreamed of, but a girl.

That had been my only qualification. I wanted a girl. I figured luck would favor a little girl with three brothers to protect her. The birth mother, whose name was Luz, thought the same thing.

I pulled the car up close to the stairs of the second-floor apartment where Luz, pretty and shy and grindingly poor, but already a good and proud mother to two unplanned babies, was watching for me through a crack in the window blinds. Luz had chosen me over dozens of other two-parent families. She’d even asked me to coach her labor. She believed in me.

Luz waved to me. She’d be down in a moment. The nanny the agency had sent to mind Luz’s children had just arrived. I have five more minutes alone with my doubts.

This was the first huge decision I’d ever made entirely on my own in my adult life. It made refinancing my house look like a game of beach volleyball and starting my own business seem like getting a perm.

Now as I watched Luz open her apartment door and negotiate the slick pavement like a tightrope walker carrying a bowling ball, I let my smile show more confidence than I felt. For the moment, the lifetime commitment wasn’t all I was worried about. There was the immediate future to contend with. For though I’d given birth myself, I’d never seen a baby born.

In the hospital, as Luz was hooked up to lines and monitors that would attend the induction of labor, I noticed shafts of watery light sliding through the blinds. It had been a cloudy morning, but the sun would shine today, after all. I took it as a sign. I was ready to accept any tiding of comfort and joy.

The medicine began to drip into the tubes, and quickly, contractions commenced. Luz breathed and blew; I counted. The hours crawled past. I looked up at the clock. I called my son and friend at the hotel, and the director at the adoption agency. No, no one new was in the world yet. The contraction became more commanding, their clench gathering speed like a runaway sled. I phoned my older sons and daughter, and a sweetly intuitive nurse placed the receiver against the fetal heart monitor so that my nine-year-old son, Dan, a thousand miles due north in Wisconsin, could hear his baby sister’s beating heart. The light was changing. The son was bright at the west window; it was late afternoon and time for Luz, soothed by pain medication, to rest before pushing. I sat beside her as she moaned and slept, my cheek resting on her extended hand.

We were two single mothers—one probably too old for this and one certainly too young. It was December 8, in Catholic tradition the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and outside in the hall an Army choir was singing ancient songs about another single mother and the baby in the barn.

Soon it was time for Luz to push, and she gathered herself, silent and stoic, her clenched face like the image on an Aztec coin. Twice, she told me, “I can’t go on.” Twice, I told her she had no choice—neither of us did. I put my arms around her and we held on to one another, and in the light of that one beside lamp, its cone and the shape of a golden trumpet, in the whole universe, there were only the two of us.

And then, suddenly, slippery, just one minute after the doctor came rushing into the room, there were three—the third a baby woman who would grow up to understand all this and someday to endure it.

Together, Luz and I marveled over her tiny, flossy dark head. Our daughter for this moment. My daughter ever after. “Let Mom hold the baby,” the doctor said gently. And Luz slowly raised one hand and pointed to me.

So I stood up alone and held her for the first time. And there she was, seven pounds and fifteen ounces of earth angel and nobody’s baby but mine. I named her Francie Nolen, for a little girl in an old book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a little girl who came up strong and sure in circumstances that might have daunted a lesser spirit.

Francie might not have the inestimable benefit of a father. Her mother would have a crinkly smile and creaky knees, not bounce and sparkle. But there was some wisdom and not a little patience behind that crinkly smile. Francie would have siblings to champion her, as well as the support and comfort of all these doubters back home who’d be converted as soon as they laid eyes on her. Let them say I already had my hands full—weren’t these big hands? I would not let any of my children down, nor let them feel that raising them had strained me past my limits.

As I looked down at Francie, I could feel those limits stretch and grow. I made a promise to her and the gallant girl who had given her life and given her up. My little girl would have laughs. She would have stories, good pasta twice a week, a house full of comforting noise. And most importantly, she would never, ever go to sleep except in the knowledge that she was loved beyond…beyond reason.

That December night was five years ago. And indeed, Francie has grown up unique in many ways, but most especially in her boldness. She had the stride of a tiny prizefighter and the will of a lion cub.

Six months after her birth, my first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was published, and suddenly, we got not only a new floor where there had once been a hole, but a new chance at life. And as for the hole in our hearts, Francie’s personality helped to shrink it to bearable proportions, and one day, along came a brave young man who wanted not only me, squeaky knees and all, but all my brood, for his very own..

My husband and I were married just weeks after my second novel was published. It was called The Most Wanted, and it was in part about a young teenager who gave birth to a baby girl in terrible circumstances, but who, because of the intervention of an older woman who longed for a child, got a second chance. It was my attempt, in fiction, to correct what I couldn’t correct in life for the birth mother of my little girl. I dedicated the book to my daughters, and also to Luz, whose name, in Spanish, means “light”.