Why did Elizabeth Eastwood decide to become a single mother? How was the Loma Prieta earthquake a wake-up call? Read the first chapter in I'm with Them: Lessons from My Children to find out.
A Wake-Up Call
October 17, 1989
It was 5:04 p.m. The first pitch in the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s was only minutes away. But was I watching the Battle of the Bay? No, I was too busy pecking away at my computer, preparing for a presentation at a teacher conference a few days ahead. I was convinced that achieving success as a curriculum developer depended on overcoming my aversion to public speaking.
An almost undetectable rumble interrupted my concentration. As seconds passed, the shaking intensified. Windows rattled. The floor seemed to move in waves. A ceramic plate fell from a shelf, shattering into sharply pointed shards. I sat frozen, taking in the unmistakable signs of an earthquake. Once adrenaline kicked in, I sprinted to safety under the doorframe. The lights flickered and the computer powered down with a whir.
When the shaking finally stopped, I rushed outside to find my neighbors congregating on their front stoops. We lived in a row of identical Victorians on a busy thoroughfare a block from San Francisco General Hospital.
“Is everyone okay?” I wanted to know.
“We’re fine,” one neighbor told me. “We were watching the game on TV when it hit.”
“There’ll probably be aftershocks,” another warned. “We should all stay outside.”
Ambulances screamed past us. Fire engines blared. The smell of smoke drifted up from the Mission District. With all public transportation halted, a stream of commuters began walking past us on their way home. Quick conversations with strangers brought us fragments of news. “No buses.” “Cars pinned down by falling debris.” “People killed.” Huddling together, we listened intently to news on a battery-charged radio: A 50-foot section of the upper deck of the Bay Bridge had collapsed onto the lower deck. My neighbor who worked for Caltrans rushed off to help redirect traffic on the bridge.
The next day, normally bustling San Francisco could have been the setting for a post-apocalyptic film. Streets were eerily empty. In the silence, I biked around the Mission District, checking in on friends. All of them survived unscathed, although one friend spent hours stuck in an elevator during the earthquake’s aftermath.
Heading to the South of Market area, I located the building many of the commuters had mentioned. The brick facade on the top floor had sheared off and plummeted to the street below, burying cars and killing several people. From there, I pedaled along the Embarcadero out to the Marina District, the city’s hardest-hit neighborhood. Shaken by the quake’s destruction, I stopped often to snap photographs: the deep fissures in the city streets, the fire-gutted apartments, a precariously tilting telephone booth, and the iconic symbol of history in the making—the 19th-century Ferry Building clock, its hands frozen at seven minutes past five.
5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5
I wasn’t hurt. My home, built on bedrock, had escaped damage. Yet those 15 seconds shook me to my core. The 6.9-magnitude jolt slowed the rush of the daily grind long enough for me to ponder more important matters than work deadlines, speaking engagements, and house repairs. My mind turned inward, forcing me to take a hard look at where I was in life. The blackout curtains removed, a blinding light exposed a truth I had been suppressing—I wanted to be a mother.
I was old—42, to be exact—and unmarried after too many years tethered to a man who balked at committing to marriage and a family. Time had passed me by, or so it seemed. I was loath to get back into the dating game. The year I turned 39, a Newsweek story famously reported that single, college-educated women over 40 were more likely to be killed by a terrorist than get married. Although the story was later debunked, it was demoralizing for single women like me. We were already tuned into the constant tick-tock of our biological clocks marking time until our inevitable loss of fertility. Men in those days seemed to view women over 35 as sirens, desperate to lure them into marriage. Or, worse, stalk them obsessively like Glenn Close’s character in the 1987 thriller Fatal Attraction.
But did giving up on finding Mr. Right mean giving up on motherhood? I knew there were other options, but was I brave enough to take the plunge?
Sperm donation was increasingly popular. My neighbor Donna conceived her daughter this way. She wanted to have her own baby, she told me, and to experience pregnancy and childbirth. “You can do it too,” she proselytized. “Go to a sperm bank. Pick a Stanford grad or an athlete or whatever genes your heart desires.”
“I’ll have to think about it,” I equivocated. For me, motherhood was more about caring for a child than reproducing my own genes, much less those of a superior male specimen. I wondered what a child would think of being brought into the world this way—conceived not in love, but in a petri dish.
My friends Rhiannon and Mark were pursuing adoption. They would soon be parents of a Hispanic baby girl born in Texas. “You must be excited,” I said when she phoned with the news.
“To be honest,” Rhiannon confided, “I’m a little sad. I’ve always imagined that my child would have auburn hair, blue eyes, and freckles…like me.” Her reaction made me wonder if traits of mine were as important to me. Maybe my greenish blue eyes? Or my curls? Certainly not my hair color, a washed out brown I covered up with a monthly box of Clairol’s chestnut highlights.
“But yes, I am relieved that a birth mother chose us,” Rhiannon continued. “You have to advertise, you know.” She described their agency’s attempts to reach out to pregnant teens, publicizing her husband’s tenured position at a university and her nursing career.
“I’m not sure I could pull that off,” I said. “You know me. I hate self-promotion. I’ve always avoided any whiff of competition.”
Meanwhile, I learned that Gigi, a friend of a friend, was pursuing foster adoption. Her placement was an eight-year-old girl who was spending increasingly long trial visits in her home. One day, the girl threw a bowl of cereal at Gigi and stormed out of the house. Soon after, the agency retracted the placement. Saddened by the story, I had to admit that I probably wouldn’t cope well with parenting the often-traumatized children in the system.
Perhaps I should screw the lid back on my hopes of motherhood, I thought. My single life isn’t all that bad, is it?
Before I gave up, though, I spotted an announcement for an open house at a parent-led South Bay agency that specialized in international adoption. Could this be the right path for me? I wondered as I listened to the speaker. Her enthusiasm was contagious: “Children of all ages, including infants, are waiting to be adopted. We welcome singles and older couples—anyone with love in their heart.” I was confident that this agency would be honest and forthright. They seemed to care as much for the waiting children as they did their potential clients.
International adoption was complex. Each country had its own regulations. Some required aspiring parents to travel to the birthplace. In others, parents only needed to show up at a U.S. airport. The wait was lengthy in many places, shorter in others. Most limited referrals to married couples. There were exceptions, though. Countries with the highest rates of poverty tended to be more open to singles and older adults.
In all the photos on the agency walls, smiling parents toted children of color: mostly Latin Americans, South Asians, and Chinese. I could picture myself in one of those snapshots. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that international adoption was the perfect option for me.
Perhaps it should have been obvious. I have always been drawn to international travel. I spent a summer in Italy in college, many months in Mexico in my 20s, a year in London on a teacher exchange program, a month-long trek in Nepal. I eventually settled down in San Francisco’s Mission District, where my neighbors spoke Spanish, slaughtered goats in their backyards for Easter dinner, and played mariachi music into the night.
Now I had the chance to adopt a child and a foreign country.
When I announced my decision to adopt, there were naysayers in my circle of friends and family. An uncle thought children would not fit into my single lifestyle and work schedule. Friends shared stories they had read about black market babies and couples who had come home empty-handed after parting with their life savings.
Undeterred, I began the process of putting together what turned out to be a one-inch-thick “dossier” of required documents to prove my fitness to be a mother. I worried about the home study. What would my social worker make of my small house, with its rickety staircase, outdated kitchen, and impossible-to-childproof back porch? But the final report could not have been more positive.
In addition to the home study, the dossier included photos of myself and my home, fingerprints, FBI clearance, my birth certificate and passport, a medical report, local police clearance, two personal references, three letters of recommendation, a character reference from a priest, a certificate of residency and singleness, a financial declaration, a letter from my bank, savings account statements, and employment description. All the papers needed to be copied in triplicate and notarized.
“Maybe getting pregnant would have been easier,” my friend Pearl mused when she saw the stack of documents I had accumulated.
“You’re right,” I laughed. “Jumping through so many hoops isn’t required for pregnancy. No one has to prove they have a spotless criminal record to make a baby.”
That spring, two of the five women in my book club announced they were pregnant, and I gleefully chimed in with my own intentions of adopting. We looked at each other in amazement, knowing our lives would never be the same. Instead of feeling jealous of their news as I might have previously, I was exhilarated by the different path I was taking. It seemed to be everything I had ever wanted.
The Loma Prieta earthquake was an alarm clock. It was the wake-up call I needed to embark on the most daunting and rewarding adventure of my lifetime—motherhood.
