I call my eldest son Mike “a New Year’s gift from fate”. On the last day of the year, seven years ago, I sent Bob to the store to buy something for the Christmas table, and he came back with a baby in his arms.
“What kind of miracle is this?” I stood there not knowing how to react to what was happening, and Bob put the baby in my hands and hid behind the front door, saying:
“Hold him and I’ll explain later!”
It was just the two of us. It was the first time I had ever held such a small baby. I remember standing there, watching him sleep, almost not breathing.
After a while my husband returned:
“What kind of mother is that? So I’m walking home, I go to the door and I look – the pram is at our flat, I look inside – and the child. It’s half dark in there, I shine the phone torch – no one.
I rang a neighbour and she said she didn’t know whose child it was. No one comes to her house with children and she closed the door. I stood there for twenty minutes and then decided to bring him to us. It’s cold in the stairwell and I see the blanket is thin”.
“Eh Bob, you’re lucky for an adventure, I hope he’s not yours.”
“Of course he’s not mine. What are we going to do now?”
Our thoughts were interrupted by the doorbell. The only guests we were expecting this time were our parents. My parents-in-law were the first to arrive. My mother-in-law looked very surprised.
“When did you do this?”
“It’s not ours. I found him at our apartment,” my husband replied. “You’d better tell me what to do with him.”
“Call the police, son, you’re not keeping the baby.”
“Can I keep him? “I asked quietly. Bob looked at me and in those few seconds it was clear – here was our chance!
I was over thirty at the time and Bob was thirty-five. Yes, we had everything: a good job, an apartment, a cosy country house, but our dreams of the sound of children’s feet and voices were still just dreams.
“Your husband is infertile,” the doctor told me after a long examination, “the result of an illness he suffered as a child.”
I screamed in the doctor’s office.
“Pull yourself together, there are many ways to become a mother, like adopting a child.”
“But it wouldn’t be our own baby!”
“Then take a newborn baby, get used to him or her, he or she will be your own.”
I looked at the doctor doubtfully and left the office, and then the daily worries and problems swirled around me again. I remembered this conversation a few years later, when I had almost accepted that Bob and I would not have children.
And now there was a baby in the house, and he might be a stranger, but he might be our destiny.
The next few months were very busy. We took custody of our son, renovated the guest room, and turned it into a cozy nursery.
Two years later, we took an adorable baby girl, Anna, from the orphanage.
Now our house is full of children’s voices and laughter, I can’t even imagine how my husband and I used to live alone. Yes, there are hardships, but I realize that it’s all little things when I hug my children and they whisper quietly to me, “Mommy, we love you!”
