Birth mother gave daughter piece of heart

Around Tracy Martin's neck, on a thin silver chain, hangs a small heart.

The lower right quadrant is missing, its absence marked by a jagged edge.

It is not a broken heart, really. It is a divided heart.

The missing piece has gone away with a little girl whose name, for one day, was Daizja. A little girl whose legal mother was, for one day, Tracy Martin.

Now the little girl has a new name, a new home, new parents. Now she lives several hours away from Tracy's Reading apartment.

When she went into the hospital to give birth on Sept. 23, 1995, Tracy was still undecided.

Would she take the baby home with her - a young, single mother - or would she place her baby with the couple who had written to plead for her?

They had waited three years for a baby who never came. They laid out their lives for her in a letter and sent pictures of themselves stealing a kiss and surrounded by smiling family members. They were professionals. Tracy worked two jobs and was barely getting by.

Tracy, who had never known her own father, wanted her daughter to have one. Three weeks after she found out she was pregnant, her boyfriend stopped calling and coming by. He never saw the child he fathered.

In the hospital, she looked at the pictures of the smiling couple again. They were two. She was one. They were established. She was unsettled.

"It wasn't until I held her in my arms and saw her soft, beautiful face that I knew who she would go home with," Tracy says, her words catching in her throat.

"I told her, 'I love you, Daiz, but I have to give you to someone who can love you right.' "

No jagged edges

Then she kissed her and sent her home with the couple in the pictures.

Every day she wears the divided heart. Every day she thinks about the little girl who has the missing piece.

When the girl turns 18, Tracy hopes she will bring the pendant and come looking for the woman who gave birth to her.

She hopes they will put the pieces of their heart together and have no jagged edge in between.

In the meantime, Tracy Martin has Mother's Day to deal with, and 17 more of them before she can hope to see the child she created. That is the arrangement to which she and the adoptive parents agreed.

She is not sure what to do with the day. She is not sure it is her day.

"If you talk about me, you have to say I am her birth mother," Tracy says. "The other woman will always be her mother. I will always be Tracy. That's what I want her to know me as - just Tracy."

But, of course, the little girl will always know her as much more.

She will know her as the person who created her, carried her, wanted her, loved her.

She will know her as the person who made the best decision she could for her child in a difficult time.

It is the trademark of true motherhood.

Quiet heroines

There may be no corsages or breakfasts-in-bed for Tracy and thousands of other birth mothers.

But tomorrow is their special day as well.

The world is full of quiet heroines who do selfless acts in silent ways. Tomorrow, we celebrate that group of women who have loved a child.

Some are married mothers. Some are single mothers. Some are mothers in deed, but not in name.

Among them are women like Tracy Martin, who relinquished rights but never feelings, who placed their child but never "gave her up."

Women who, in noble ways in troubled times, sent a child into the world they believed was best for him or her.

And with them, sent a piece of their heart.

Krista Ramsey's column appears in The Enquirer on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati 45202 or fax at 768-8340.

Published May 11, 1996.