Out of the Everywhere...Into the Here

In Honor of Olivia:
On the Eve of His First Birthday

January 1, 2007, Olivia arrived at the hospital in Guastatoya El Progreso, Guatemala. As pained as her heart must have been, she was there to see an obstetrician, not a cardiologist. Her circumstances had decided for her that her first child would be raised by someone else.

She didn’t know who.

She didn’t know where.

Her labor pains had begun months earlier when she realized she was carrying a life inside her. For a nineteen-year-old, uneducated woman in Guatemala, survival itself is difficult; motherhood for that same woman is nearly impossible. Olivia’s meager earnings in a tortilla factory were already insufficient. How could she support a baby?

On the advice of a friend, she had already made arrangements with an attorney to seek a permanent family for her child. And hopefully he or she would be matched with adopting parents before the adoption system in Guatemala self-destructed, as it is trying feverishly to do now.

At precisely 9:40 pm, he was born.

He, the boy without a name.

Within hours, a knock at the apartment door of Amanda Aceituno brought her family their first foster child--a tiny bundle, with deep black eyes and a mass of ebony hair; they declared his name Luis Carlos, a tribute to Luisa, Amanda’s eighteen-year-old granddaughter who provided much of his care for the first nine months of his life.

Some fault Olivia for giving him over so quickly, interpreting her actions as disregard for the life she nurtured, but I believe the situation was much different:

If she named him, she couldn’t separate from him.
If she cuddled him and inhaled his sweet smell, she could never let go.
If she asked what if?, she could not bear the enormity of her loss.

The same love that permits small women to perform physically impossible tasks, such as lifting cars from their trapped children, allowed her to say goodbye.

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Many believe that adoption should be hidden and covered, or possibly withheld until adult years when they are “able to handle it,” as if it were a shame.

Brayden will know his story.
It is not ours to withhold.

We will share every detail as his capability to understand allows. The information we don’t know, we’ll speculate. The parts that hurt, we’ll feel. The joy of triumph, we’ll celebrate.

I don’t know how he will feel about Olivia, but my prayer for him is that he will come to honor her as the woman who gave him life and loved him enough to let him live it.

God took the tragedy of infertility and the unfortunate circumstances of poverty and made something brand new.

On his first year and those to come,
we choose to remember this precious woman and honor her rightfully.