Alaina

How did a forty-year-old woman who had been married for twenty years, had raised three great children, and had vowed never, ever to remarry wind up married again and adopting a baby at age forty-five? Who would have thought, twelve years earlier, that I would one day divorce my husband, marry my children's piano teacher, and adopt a child, much less want to adopt and raise another child? I stand in awe at the power of this love stuff.

I witnessed myself fall in love with this man — I literally fell under a spell, which I truly believe he did not consciously cast. He was just as surprised as I was by our love, our unfathomable attraction to one another, and our sense of cosmic destiny, though God knows he would never have used those terms.

I had known Jason for five years as "the piano teacher." I wrote a check once a week for my three children's piano lessons. I would run into the living room, scribble a check, and disappear into my room to correct papers for school. He would be cordial, smile, and leave. After my separation from my husband, Jason and I would chat after the kids' lessons for a moment or two about kids, life, and his desire to find a young woman to marry and have a family. I matched him up with a couple of my best friends who were anxiously seeking husbands, and he even took one out, only to return with shrugging shoulders. "No, too wild. I actually want a simpler woman — soft, nurturing ... you know, special!" Maybe if my children hadn't insisted that we invite him to dinner one night, I might have successfully escaped into blissful singledom, a place I truly longed for after twenty years of trying to please a host of people. But no. Instead, I said, "Sure. Ask him over." I had no clue what was to happen.

That evening, I volunteered to play a game of stare-down with him since he was beating my children handily, round after round. They would sit across from one another on the floor and try to make the other laugh. As a normal, red-blooded Leo female, I couldn't resist the game and wanted to prove my regal standing by showing this guy what I could do with my eyes. Thus, I stepped into destiny's web, totally unsuspecting. I sat down in front of this man whose athletic body, muscular and trim, seemed almost boyish next to my motherly figure. I crossed my legs and intended to have some fun with him. I fixed my green, feline eyes into his black-brown ones and waited. What happened was extraordinary. I was trying to think of something else so as to not start laughing or giggling, when suddenly my entire being was swept up into his eyes, and I felt myself being dragged into them. I tried to look away but was helpless, truly paralyzed. I whirled and whirled into the darkness and observed how he was not the person I thought he was. I felt naked and sexual, primitive and vulnerable, trapped, and even a little afraid. I used all my strength to exit his grasp on me. The kids were laughing and egging me on to win, but I had lost. More precisely, I was lost. Suddenly, the spell was broken when he blinked and pulled away sheepishly. "That's not fair!" he said.

From that night on, my life changed. Months later, when we were in love and there was no going back, I learned that he had felt the same thing but had thought I was doing it to him. Soon I was standing on a mountaintop stark naked, screaming about the wounds of my life and claiming freedom from the past. Some months after that, I discovered that part of me had been asleep before I met Jason, and his stubborn love was forcing me to face every demon I had ever created. One year after our stare-down, I was standing in my backyard reciting wedding vows I had written. I began painting for the first time, and I dreamed that with this man I could adopt a child and begin another family, despite the incredulous reactions of most of my friends. "What has happened to Alaina?" What, indeed!

We couldn't have been more different from one another. He was neat; I was messy. His toothpaste tube was always rolled up tidily; mine was, well, messy. He lived in shorts and tennis shoes; I liked to dress up. He was a spendthrift; I was a spender. I would have never picked him out of a lineup of possible suitors, or he me. He was darker than my type, shorter than my type, too alternative a lifestyle for my type. I always played it safe. After my childhood, who wouldn't? No, this man was not for me. I was too old for him, too tall for him, and I couldn't have any more children, the main item on his list. I was definitely not the Miss Right you take home to Mama: "Oh, Mom, I want you to meet this nice middle-aged woman I met at work and her three teenagers." No, I was definitely not the pick of the week. But what I was, was the best woman in the world for this man — well, maybe not the man whom the world knew: carefree-cute, tennis-playing, piano-playing Mr. Charm. But I was the right woman for the real man: brooding artist, secret-keeping man whose world lay deep within him and whose heart was wounded and vulnerable. I was the woman for that man. Or so I thought.

In our own way, we brought to one another a first-time quality: first conscious commitment, first transparency of the soul to another soul, first union of the spirit. These things could not be seen with the naked eye, and they certainly defied what everyone who knew us could see, but we knew what no one else could know: that it is very dangerous to get into a stare-down contest. Very dangerous, indeed!

But that's not really where this story begins.

Alaina

I am in a hospital. Many people are milling around whom I do not know. I feel a compulsion to go to the bathroom. Alone in the stall, I suddenly feel that undeniable feeling of giving birth. There, all alone, I deliver a baby girl. She does not cry, and I notice that her face is very mature. Her eyes, green like mine, look up at me trustingly. I am afraid she might not survive. She seems so serious for a baby.

A stern nurse comes in and shouts, "Have you not cut the cord? You idiot! The child will die." She hands me a scissors, and I try to cut the cord. Tiny filaments separate from the main cord, but the cord will not break. The baby seems weaker, yet she looks so trustingly into my eyes that I must proceed. After much effort, the last filament is broken through. The baby is now separate from me. Suddenly, I am alone with her in front of a large mirror. I place the child's face next to mine. To my utter amazement, our faces, hers and mine, become one.

Wasn't this the dream that started my journey to Jason? Wasn't this the dream that placed my unsteady feet on the path of awakening? As the resistant filaments of my past clung tenaciously to my unconscious mind, I knew that I, the real me, was yet to be born. I had no way of knowing then that this self-discovery would destroy my marriage to Johann, hurt my children terribly, and strike a death blow to the family I called my own. In the years to come, I would break all the rules: divorce my husband of twenty years, defy my family to marry Jason, unearth family secrets that lay asleep in my cellular memory, and blame everyone for my pain. I would also send three children off to college, adopt a baby, be forced to choose between Jason and my family of origin, and ultimately begin to put the pieces of my life back together.

When I was finished (although I doubt that one...