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Miracle Baby: The author, age 12, and her sister Anna in 1986. Courtesy photos |
Comments (1)A Tale of Two Ages
By Melissa SiigPublished: July 19, 2010
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The Deep End
Growing up, there were always two ages that I constantly thought about. Besides the obvious “big” birthdays — turning 16, 18, and 21 — the ages of 17 and 37 always stood out in my mind. It wasn’t that I was looking forward to being that many years old, or that these were two lucky numbers with which I hoped to win the lottery. No, these two ages were special in my family, each signifying a landmark event I was always curious about how I would feel when I reached that age. And now I know.
My sister Julie was adopted when I was three years old. The fact that she was not conceived by my parents was no secret in my family. It’s something that both of us have always known; there is no memory of a singular moment when the truth was revealed. She was immediately part of our family, and the story of her adoption became part of my family’s story.
Even though we look nothing like each other — me with my dark complexion and her looking like she just got off a plane from Scandinavia — I never dwelled much on the fact that we weren’t blood related. Only one piece of information stayed with me: Julie’s biological mother was 17 years old when she gave her up at birth.
When I turned 17 that was one of the first things I thought of — I was now the age of my sister’s mother when she had given birth. About to enter my last year of high school, having a baby was one of the farthest things from my mind. As a child, 17 had always loomed in the distance; it seemed old and impossibly far away. But once I arrived there, I realized how very young it was — too young to become a mother.
That was the first “age” milestone I hit.
I am about to hit the second this month.
The reason my parents adopted Julie was because my mother could no longer have children. When I was a year old, my parents left me in the care of my grandparents in Israel while they vacationed in Australia. It was October 1973. In what would become known as the Yom Kippur War (or the October or Ramadan War to Arabs), Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack against Israel. My father flew back to his native country to join the fight while I huddled in a bomb shelter with my grandparents.
My mother, left alone in a foreign country with her husband and only child in a war zone, was under considerable stress. This did not help the fact that, unbeknownst to her, she was suffering from an ectopic pregnancy. Her fallopian tubes burst. Despite years of surgeries, shots, and medications, she was not able to get pregnant again.
Or so she thought.
Ten years later, at the age of 37 and much to everyone’s surprise, my mother found out she was pregnant. It had taken a decade for my mother’s womb to heal. I was now 11 years old, Julie eight. I’ll never forget the moment when she told us she was pregnant, how the fork practically dropped out of my mouth, or what a thrill it was when my new baby sister was born.
Now, I’m 37 years old and find myself, like my mother 25 years earlier, expecting my third child this month. I had never planned to try and have a child at the same age my mother had Anna, my youngest sister. But I had always wondered. It was such a monumentous occasion in my life and that of our family’s. We had received a gift that we all thought was impossible — that of another child and sibling. It was nothing short of a miracle.
While my pregnancy at 37 is not quite as miraculous as my mother’s, it still feels strange to walk in her footsteps. I had fortunately not experienced the event I associated with age 17, yet repeated my own mother’s history 20 years later. Call it coincidence or call it fate. I call it luck.
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