PART 3 — THE YELLOW WALLPAPER
I walked across the street that evening and knocked on Karens door. My hands were shaking, but I made myself do it, for Lily.
Karen opened the door and burst into tears before I said a word. She had been waiting, she said, for me to come.
She was Lilys birth mother. She had been eighteen in 2013, scared and alone, and she had placed her baby with us through the agency in Columbus. The yellow wallpaper with the blue birds was the nursery in the home where she stayed those last weeks before Lily was born. She kept that one photo, and a whole box of them the agency had let her have.
She had not come to take Lily. She swore it over and over. She had found out where we lived, and she had moved close just to catch glimpses, to know her little girl was happy and loved and safe. She never meant for Lily to find the box.
The woman across the street had not come to break my family. She had come because she never stopped loving the baby she gave us, and she only wanted to know that she was all right.
I could have been angry. Instead I looked at this young woman who had carried a grief for twelve years, and I thought about how much Lily was loved, by both of us, and I made a choice.
We sat down, the grown-ups, and we did it the right way. Slowly. Honestly. With boundaries that put Lily first and a counselor to help us find them. Karen is not Lilys mother. I am. But Lily has room in her life for a woman who loved her enough to give her a family, and who loved her enough to only watch from a window until the truth found its own way out.
Lily knows now, in a way a twelve-year-old can understand, that she was never once unwanted. She was wanted by two mothers. There are worse things for a child to learn about herself than that.