Thank You to a Beautiful and Brave Woman

Read this touching letter to a birth mother who gave the precious gift of life.

To my daughter’s birth mother,

In a world of eight billion people, it seems impossible that my words will ever find you. Still, they’ve been on my heart for years now. Today I feel compelled to send them out wherever they may go. Maybe they will find someone else who needs to hear them. Or maybe the same sovereign hand that brought a precious baby to me will bring these words back to the one who bore her. So I send them out and trust that God will do with them whatever He sees fit.

You have sent out and trusted in far more unimaginable and enormous ways than I can ever comprehend. This is why I write.

She is playing on the floor beside me, the one who has your eyes, your smile, and your laugh. I don’t know your name, and you don’t know mine. But those small pieces of you I do know—I know them so very well. I have memorized them like a piece of my own heart now.

You must be so beautiful, because she is.

My husband sometimes says there’s an empty seat at our table, meaning maybe another child is still out there for our family. He does this to be funny, in truth. But I admit to sometimes noticing that empty chair. Except it’s not a child who is missing, in my mind. No matter how much she smiles, your empty chair in her world will always be there.

Loss is like a haunting. It involves the cutting of a vital cord, with ends left loose, never to be retied again this side of eternity. That cord searches for its other end nevertheless, with a gaping openness where there should be closure.

Sometimes it looks like seeing a face in a crowd that isn’t there. I remember searching for my own mother’s face when she left this earth too early, and I have to wonder. Are you on the other side of the world today haunted by the absence of a little girl? Do you see an empty chair too and wonder? Or look for her face in the crowd?

She looks for you. She gets lost sometimes, in her mind, whenever a brightly colored sari catches her eye, or she sees an Indian baby with her Indian mommy. Her gaze will linger, haunted by a woman she never knew.