There are now several memoirs by queer parents who have faced infertility, but this one by Rebecca and Sallyann Majoya is distinctive in also showing a couple that faced adoption loss, and in being a story that did not ultimately result in the couple adding a child to their family. Told through the alternating voices of both women, and moving back and forth between phases of their lives, this is a heartfelt memoir of reaching for a dream, but also of learning to move through grief when the dream does not become reality.
Rebecca and Sallyann were already raising two children, sons from Rebecca’s previous marriage. Sallyann, however, wanted to experience pregnancy and to raise a child from the start with Rebecca, even though she loved their sons and didn’t want them to feel excluded by this. For ten years, Sallyann tried to get pregnant (Rebecca was too old by that point), to no avail. They almost had an opportunity to foster a newborn, but the baby was kept with the mother at the last minute. They still hope to foster or adopt.
One day, they receive a call from a friend who works at a local high school. She knows a student, Delilah, who has gotten pregnant and wants to place the baby for adoption via a private adoption. The couple meet with her and she agrees to let them adopt the baby.
When the baby is born, after two years of their journey to adopt, Sallyann and Rebecca are overjoyed. They bring the child home, name him Sage, and care for him for nearly a week. Then, however, the birth mother decides she wants to raise him after all. She is still within the time that she can do this legally, so Rebecca and Sallyann must reluctantly let him go.
“So, I am just supposed to turn this peaceful baby over to some woman whose biology trumped any link I have to him?” Sallyann vents in the moment. Now, however, writing the book with the benefit of time, she reflects more charitably, “When she planned to release him, I don’t think Delilah’s intention was ever to break our hearts. But I also think that her outcome never matched her intention, because she was never clear within herself.” Now, Sallyann’s reality is that the child is growing up “belonging to other people,” but this reality could have been Delilah’s had things gone differently.
Despite the sense of loss, Sallyann says at the end that she is looking forward to continuing to grow with Rebecca. This seems a hopeful note that may not change the grief they feel, but perhaps helps them to live with it.
As Christa Craven writes in Reproductive Losses: Challenges to LGBTQ Family-Making, “losses, challenges, and disruptions to stories of ‘successful’ LGBTQ family-making are often silenced, both personally and politically.” Thanks to the Majoyas for sharing their story and helping to break this silence.
