Sudden Angels Part 7: Rod Stewart
A story precedes every child. Some are happy. Some, horrific. Our daughter’s first chapter was written in desperation. By four adults. On both sides of the ocean.
After Cliff and I settled in Wisconsin, becoming parents was the hardest challenge we ever faced. In and out of medical offices for years, we were finally referred to a Milwaukee infertility clinic. Regularly I sat in a crowded waiting room among anxious women who all silently screamed, “Why me?”
The doctor was not comforting. She could just as well have been bagging groceries. During a preliminary interview, I interrupted her monotonous speech to ask about the possibility of twins. She said, “No woman at forty on fertility drugs ever gets pregnant with twins.”
I wasn’t so sure. That Saturday I’d been in an antique store where a woman searched for a table. As she moved a few pieces aside, the owner cautioned her against touching a cradle, unless she wanted twins. “I’ve had more than one report that it’s magic,” he laughed. When they moved to another room, I touched that cradle, sliding magic up my sleeve.
I’d already added Eastern medicine’s acupuncture and herbs. Now I was mixing in a specialist’s relentless tests and drugs and calendars, requiring my presence in her office at the drop of a hat. I battled blizzards, rush hour traffic, and steaming truck jams. Always a timid driver, I learned to grip the wheel with eyes forward, racing down terrifying skyways that jetted above Milwaukee.
A woman hopped up on hope and hormones rises above her own fear.
Astonishingly, it worked. Pregnant. Finally.
Not for long. First, there was an early incident. Weeks later, the doctor announced my ectopic pregnancy required immediate surgery. She chalked up that first incident as a miscarriage. “So twins?” I asked sadly. She nodded her head.
So much for magic. Then I remembered an unusual occurrence as I drove to and from Milwaukee. The radio always played Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May,” released in 1971. Twenty years later, it was hardly a chart topper. Nevertheless, there it was. Repeatedly. Because many of those drives required Cliff, he heard it, too, but passed it off.
Not me. I didn’t hear music’s legendary bad boy. I heard the voice of an angel, insisting I would be the mother of a girl.
When we moved to Rockford, Illinois, on Cliff’s first day at work, he met a colleague with a video on his desk from Chinese Children Adoption International. Cliff brought it home. Oddly enough, in Wisconsin we’d received a letter from a Madison attorney who had begun arranging Chinese adoptions. I had been pregnant at that point. No need.
Magic has a way, doesn’t it?
After a ton of forms and nail-biting delays, we brought her home. Margaret May Yuping.
Still, that isn’t the end of the song’s value to my life.
Although the lyrics to “Maggie May” lament a lost love, the singer acknowledges her powerful impact, difficult as it was, on his heart. I see that now in the landscape of parenting. The early joys and thrilling hallmarks of a child lead to the inevitable separation. When we took her to college and she turned toward the dorm, I stood beside Cliff as tears streamed down his face. I willed myself to hear Rod Stewart singing:
Oh, Maggie, I couldn’t have tried anymore. You led me away from home, just to save you from being alone. You stole my soul, but I love you anyway.
In this YouTube video of Stewart singing “Maggie May” unplugged, he moves aside at 4:15 to give us a full view of the mandolin player strumming rock ‘n roll’s happiest refrain. Within seconds, the scattered pieces of a broken heart are mended by those silver strings, becoming the stuff of life’s great lessons.
And as Stewart bounces to the last notes, that’s what I will myself to feel whenever she walks away. I hear that mandolin, insisting I relinquish my sadness, my desperation because she is worth it all.
If ever a child was magic, surely mine is.
Oh, Maggie.
