Eternal Spring

She came to me with only a blanket and one sock. Her blue eyes, big and round as blueberries, were open wide; her hair, a tangle of soft brown brush twisting in a wild halo above her soft cheeks. She knew nothing of me, and I knew only her name, but she became mine that afternoon. June. That was her name, and she embodied that sweet high heat, that burst of fragrant color in the garden, that blinding sparkle off the lake. She was my reminder of the beauty and hopefulness that June always brought me. She came into my life with only a blanket and one sock. But she brought eternal spring within her.

June and I took time to find ourselves. I was her fifth home in the short five months of her life. She was a fragile, quiet child. After a series of foster families, social workers, and specialists parading through her infancy, she had little patience for another face to forget. It wasn’t until she was eleven months old that she made a sound. One single squeal from her crib as I was cutting fabric to make a blanket for her. A yelp, a test, to see if I would come for her. And I did. I threw my scissors aside and ran down the hallway. When I reached her room, she was watching the door, that wild tangle of hair in her eyes. As I picked her up, tears slipped from my chin. “Yes. I will come for you,” I said. “Every time.”

After that there was an explosion of sound: giggles, angry screeches, babble from the car seat. June began sitting up. June began eating solid food. June began throwing her bowl from the high chair and pulling hair. At a year old she had a lot of catching up to do, but she raced forward in life with unbelievable determination and heroism.

We were a family. Me and June. June and I. A mother and her daughter.

At Christmas time June’s birth mother, Maria, finished her stint in Juvenile Detention. She had requested visitation upon her release, and a social worker would be bringing her to our house. I was nervous—terrified. What might this mean? How would this change things for us? June was my daughter. She could not be another’s.

When Maria arrived, I was ashamed. Here was a young girl, only fifteen, and small—barely reaching my shoulder. She had those same big eyes, thick brown hair, and round cheeks as June. She was shy and polite, and as nervous as me. It was ridiculous to think anyone could fear this wisp of a child. This sweet girl who had learned to fight from birth, just like her baby.

During that meeting, while we played on the floor with June, I asked Maria, “What are you doing for Christmas this year?”

She shrugged and I had to lean forward to hear her response. “I think they’re doing something at the group home. We all got $20 to spend on our secret Santa.”

“You’re not doing anything with your family?”

She watched June play with a plastic duck. “No. I don’t see them a lot. We all grew up in foster care, so we don’t really get together.”

There was a silence. Another pause in the conversation as we tried to build a bridge between us, somewhere we could meet, a place to reach one another over the fresh spring that was June.

“You should come spend Christmas with us.”

Maria seemed startled by this. “Really?”

I pushed my doubts aside and tried to look welcoming. “It would be good to have you. It will be fun. I mean, you are June’s mother.”

Her eyes dropped at this. “I don’t know.”

“Please come.”

When Christmas arrived, Maria, June, and I spent the day as any other family would. We baked cookies, watched Elf, and went for a walk in the cool winter sunshine. We showered June with kisses and presents. By the end of that day I knew that Maria was my family. She was a part of June, and therefore a part of me.

But a few days later Maria ran again. Social workers came to the house to ask if she had stopped by. But we hadn’t seen her. She didn’t have a phone, or an email. I tried looking her up on Facebook but she hadn’t posted in years.

We went through this cycle a few more times. Maria would come back for a couple months and stop by once a week for dinner. Then she would disappear again for a couple months more. The last time she ran, they put her back in Juvenile Detention. So June and I began visiting her there. She would come to us in her jumpsuit and we would all have lunch on the grass together, 20-foot-high barbed wire fences surrounding us. Maria would feed June bites from her own lunch, then they would play, and June would fall asleep against Maria’s chest while we talked, sprawled out on a gray picnic blanket.

Maria and I shared something many women don’t get to. We shared a child. We shared a life that revolved around this toddling wonder. And our love for June grew into a love for each other.

We were June’s moms.

Until one day, following a series of horrible circumstances out of our control, we weren’t. June was gone, returned to the foster system. Like that, the center of gravity fell away and life became a loose drift through time and space.

Maria was missing at the time, and I felt unable to ever face her. How could I when I had lost her child? I was supposed to protect June, keep her safe, make sure nothing bad ever happened to her again, because she had already been through so much in her small but vast life.

As I prepared to see Maria again, I began to sew. I made a blanket, a place to hold all our memories of our baby. A piece from the dress June wore to an adoption court date. A square from the blanket I had made her. A scrap from the baby sling we used when walking June through the neighborhoods. I slowly and carefully cut squares of color—pink from the sheets on her mattress, gray from the blanket we used for detention center picnics, white from the soft T-shirts we cut into burp cloths. With each slice of the scissors through the soft material I felt a fresh wound inside me. These things were gone. As deep as my joy had been in June, that was now the depth of my sorrow.

I didn’t see Maria again until years later. We had kept in touch with phone calls and emails, our relationship splintered by heartbreak. But then, in the middle of a blizzard, she called me to tell me she was having her second baby, June’s little sister. I raced through the snow, all the while praying I wouldn’t end up like the dozens of semis I saw trapped in the ditch, and that I would get to Maria in time.

When I found her standing outside her apartment, her small frame had been consumed by an enormous belly. It was incredible she didn’t fall over with how big she had become. We went together to the hospital, holding onto one another as we navigated the slippery sidewalks.

After an eternity of pain, Maria finally lay calm and peaceful with an epidural running into her spine. We sat in silence for a while, and then the words bled out of me, spilling forward onto the shiny white floor.

“I’m sorry.” My head began to swim. “I’m sorry I lost June.”

Maria looked at me with her blue eyes. June’s eyes. “It’s okay.”

“I didn’t try to.”

“I know. I know you did everything for her. It wasn’t your fault.”

This pardon from Maria washed over me. To be forgiven. To have Maria’s love and trust. Even after the worst had happened.

Hours later, I held Maria’s hand as her second daughter came into the world. Her beautiful face. Her small limbs, all scrunched together like she was still in the womb. Her big blue eyes. And her incredible mane of tangled, soft brown hair. She was incredible.

I wrapped Maria and her new baby, Leila, into the blanket I had made from June’s things.

Maria looked up at me with gleeful exhaustion. “Will you be Leila’s other mom?”

I cried. “Of course.”

She came to me with only a blanket and one sock. She came to me and gave me love, a family, a precious year and a half of memories. She gave me her mother, and now her baby sister, too. June is forever our daughter. Forever a source of beauty and hopefulness as we learn to keep living. June may be gone, but I feel her warmth still with me.