Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [31]
We looked at each other. We looked at Kate, who looked up at us. I wasn’t crying, but it was as emotional a moment as I’ve ever had in my life. I was a father.
Just fourteen hours after being born, Kate was on her first airplane ride, heading back with us to Northern California. As an aviator, I was certainly happy to get her into the air that quickly.
Two years later, another birth mother looked through thirty-six bios in a book of potential adoptive parents, and after meeting Lorrie and me, agreed to make us parents for the second time. On January 6, 1995, when the call came that the birth mother had gone into labor with Kelly, I was in Pittsburgh, receiving simulator training on the MD-80. I cut short my training and made plans to return home as soon as possible, which was the following morning.
Lorrie, meanwhile, headed to the hospital. For the birth mother, it was a very long labor, and Lorrie stayed up for twenty-four hours straight, just waiting. Unlike when Kate was born, this time Lorrie was in the delivery room, and the whole day had a cinematic feel to it. There was a huge storm outside, with rain coming down in buckets and a howling wind. Then, when Kelly was finally crowning, a nurse gasped and said, “Oh my gosh!”
Lorrie was taken aback. “What, what, what?” she said, her heart pounding.
The nurse answered, “We’ve got a redhead!”
As soon as Kelly arrived, just after 10 A.M., the doctor handed her to Lorrie, which was an overwhelming moment for her. The rain. The thunder. This new beautiful baby. And I missed it all. While Lorrie was cuddling Kelly in the first seconds of her life, I was above the clouds somewhere over Denver.
I made it to the hospital that afternoon, and seeing Kelly for the first time was another moment of instant love and gratitude. And the most amazing thing was how much Kelly looked like me when I was a baby: the shape of our heads, our eyes, our Irish coloring. I was strawberry blond as a boy. We’d later mount baby photos of me and Kelly side by side in a frame, and it was hard to tell us apart. It’s interesting how that goes in an adoption sometimes. Lorrie likes to say that we are blessed to have children who resemble us. It’s not that we need the girls to look like us, but it’s nice that they do. And over the years, it meant that if we opted not to voluntarily tell various people about the adoptions right away, we didn’t have to.
Kelly’s adoption was more complicated than Kate’s. There are a lot of factors that can slow down the paperwork—or even make it fall through. It’s hard for birth mothers to make their decisions final. They often have family pressures to consider.
Lorrie and I had to deal with some of these issues, and we struggled with the uncertainty. We passed the hours at a restaurant called Taxi’s, which was near the hospital. We ate lunch and dinner there while we anxiously waited for the paperwork to come through. We were deathly afraid, with time passing, that some bureaucratic snafu could lead other issues to unravel, and keep the adoption from being finalized. At one point, I had a very forceful conversation with the hospital administrator, telling him that the hospital had to get its act together. I was pretty worked up and assertive, but it was necessary to break the logjam.
On the day we brought Kelly home, we had her in a car seat in the back of our car. Two-year-old Kate came out of the house and stared quizzically at this baby. She thought Kelly was a new doll she was getting as a present. She’d soon know better.
Out there at the car, Lorrie and I looked at each other and I said what I was thinking: “We’re a real family now.”
As we get deeper into our marriage, Lorrie and I have become big believers in the idea that we should focus on what we have rather than what we don’t have. We have weathered some serious storms in our relationship, but on a lot of fronts, we feel closer than ever now. And we really try to live