How I learned love

Valentines is the literal day I learned love.

I was born on December 7, 1977 and immediately relinquished by the person who cooked and bore me. According to the social workers’ records she was in denial pretty much the whole time I was in there and, once I emerged, she held me once, decided she was sure, and let me go.

I spent two months in foster care, as the charge of a person or people whose names I’ll never know, who fed and changed and (I assume) cuddled me. Who kept me alive and growing such that the periodic medical charts showed that I was progressing the way babies are generally expected to: eating, pooping, getting bigger.

Meanwhile, Charlie & Joanne Mazzola, who had been waiting on the adoption agency’s list since ’73 (after having tried on their own since they were married in ’69), waited still. They had more love in their hearts and in their lives than they could manage between them and had stayed involuntarily kidless for eight years (eight, Bob*). At some point while I was with the kind, faceless fosterpeople, my parents found out about me. Sometime later, a date—February 10—was set for them to meet me, bring me to their home, see how it went, see if it might not become a permanent situation. 

Then came a blizzard. A famous one: the blizzard of ’78. In February, because New England. It snowed for days. It didn’t stop. Cars got buried, people trapped, highways shut down. In any other circumstances I imagine Charlie—Chuck—would have had a blast… climbing snow drifts onto the roof, shoveling paths, laughing with neighbors, happy for a couple of days off from the school where he taught. No doubt this joy was dimmed—probably snuffed out entirely—since it further delayed, cruelly and impossibly, the only thing that mattered to him.

Joanne asked questions, made phone calls. Emergency vehicles? Private helicopter? Army tank? There had to be some way to get to her baby. 

Nope. Be patient. It’ll melt.

Can you imagine? I can’t.

Four interminable days later, on February 14, the roads became passable. Just. I’m sure the tires of their Fiat slid around on hard-packed slush, bumpers bopping into tall plow piles. Didn’t matter. They got to the church in the next town over where the social worker had come to meet them. With me. 

Yes. Valentines was the day we met. 

That night the aunts, the cousins, everyone who was able bodied and/or could drive, made the treacherous 20-plus-mile post-blizzard trip to the “wilderness” on the other side of Boston where my parents had made their home some years before, to everyone’s bewilderment.

The paperwork changed after that. The lines and numbers were still going in the right direction as far as bottles and poops and head circumference. Also, though, I was thriving. I was thriving. Something was different and, corny and trite as it sounds, I think that something was love. Complete, unconditional, forever. From the second they saw me. From long before that actually. Love so strong and abundant they were willing to commission a tank to come pick me up. 

I believe they still would. I know they still would. And that crowd of people would caravan again, miles further into uncharted territory, to see my face. Mere months ago one of those cousins— who I hadn’t seen in years, now well into her 70s—said that “of course” she’d get up at 4am to drive me to the airport so I didn’t have to pay a Lyft driver. I talked her down, but she wouldn’t have thought twice. These are the people who welcomed me and who, for most of my life (until I moved far away from them), were never far, and were always willing.

I’ve been dwelling for a lot of years on that original wound—the rejection—and all the ways it’s shaped me. It is a very real, foundational truth for me, and facing and processing it has been vital for my healing and growth. And as those wounds close and the lens widens I can take in a bit more of the picture. I can see—I can feel—how though there may have been nothing there for me at the very start, and by necessity only dispensed in droplets for the first little while, a tidal wave of love awaited and it would carry me, inevitably, almost violently, out into the sea of my life.

I call myself lucky a lot. And it’s true, I am. I’ve been spared and saved and buoyed more than any flawed human deserves. But I don’t know that it’s random luck so much as it is love. The cold fear of being left behind that rides in my bones is surrounded by airbags of trust. The nuclei of my cells may always be black holes of pain and confusion at being left, but the surrounding matter is—has always been—a knowing that I am safe, in some fundamental way that moves me in the most fortunate directions.

So I can’t do Valentine's day fromage. It ain’t about romance or friends or any of that, even though I [am lucky enough to] have plenty of people in my world to hug and feed chocolate to. It’s always been something deeper, more cellular. It’s been about love, but impossible (til now, kinda) to articulate.

A small portion of the welcoming committee on February 14, 1978.

Dad’s the one rockin’ the beard. He passed in 2005.

Mom’s right behind me—and has been ever since.

*Office Space reference. I couldn’t not.