ANDERSON — Wrapped in a blanket of white and blue teddy bears, Eli doesn’t move for most of the hour. His eyes remain closed. His chubby cheeks are soft and rosy.

His small body lays easily in the arms of his grandmother, completely content – making you wonder if he knows how lucky he is to be so safe, so protected.

Every so often his grandmother lowers her head and speaks in soft tones toward his face. She rubs her hands over his soft patch of brown hair.

This is the life – for both of them. Both are content. Neither would change a thing.

At least Pam Ehrlich wouldn’t. This is her grandson. She points to a picture in front of her — a photo that stands on the coffee table and shows this little boy’s father, her third son.

Next to that son in the photo are two other men. One whom she adopted, and one whom she gave up for adoption. Each one is smiling, wearing their church-going clothes, waiting for a wedding.

Ehrlich, see, is a woman who tells what it is like to think she could never get pregnant only to learn doctors were wrong and then feel the pain of knowing she couldn’t keep what she had wanted all those years – a child of her own.

“To be able to relinquish a child — that strength has to come from God,” Ehrlich said. “It is not something you can do by yourself.”

It is something she has passed on, told to others before. You can tell, because while she pauses in parts, the tears never escape. They are there, but they do not fall to her cheeks.

At the time, she was living in Texas and was married to her first husband. Doctors told them they couldn’t have children, that she would never be able to get pregnant. So they made a decision to adopt a child from the Methodist Mission Home, near where they lived.

When he was just a week old, Pam took her first son, Kirk, home.

About four years later, after she went through a divorce, something unexpected happened. After eight years of trying, she became pregnant. She was to be married a second time, but ultimately decided against it — she said — because she didn’t want to marry someone just because she was going to have a baby. She wanted to marry for love.

So she was going to be a single mother with one toddler son and another one on the way to raise.

About two months into the pregnancy, Ehrlich said she knew she would have to do something very difficult. Abortion wasn’t an option she even considered. But she wouldn’t be able to keep the little life growing inside her.

“I wanted to be a wife and a mother. I couldn’t wait. That’s what I wanted to do,” Ehrlich said. “I was so excited when I learned I was pregnant. But then I realized I could not provide for a 4-year-old and for an infant.”

So she contacted the same home that she adopted her first son through. And she remembers now — 28 years later — having to make the call to the home herself.

The hardest part of her story is when she relives the moment when she signed the paperwork, relinquishing her rights as a mother to her son.

She talks about how the workers at the adoption home had her read each part of that paperwork aloud — allowing the gravity of what she was doing to sink in.

They were waiting for her to change her mind.

“I would start to cry, and they’d ask me to start over,” she said, recalling the very words. “Over and over again, I had to say, ‘I relinquish my baby boy born on March 6, 1980, at 9:40 p.m.”

But the hour finally came.

After four hours, Ehrlich handed her first natural-born son, Jedd, over to a nurse.

“When you let your child go like that, its almost like they died to you,” Ehrlich said. “And after I signed all the documents, I asked them not to bring him back in the room for a last goodbye. It would have been too painful.”

Under the rules of the home, Jedd’s parents and Ehrlich were allowed to write letters back-and- forth. But everything went through the home. Addresses and anything else that would help either party locate the other were blacked out.

The arrangement was set up to protect both parties.

But then, when Jedd was in college, one of those letters came to his home with information in it about a wedding. His biological brother, Kirk, whom he had never met, was going to get married at a local university chapel.

Finally, something Jedd had wanted most of his life would happen.

With the help of a friend, Jedd tracked down a phone number for Kirk by calling the chapel where the wedding was to take place. Then it was just a matter of hours before he would finally talk to his mother, the woman who had handed him over to a nurse so many years before.

It was March 11, 2002, at 9:40 p.m. when the call came in. Ehrlich still can remember all of that.

“It was a great conversation,” she says, smiling and taking a moment to rub her grandson’s head again. “His friends were there with him when he called. I could hear them in the background.”

You can hear the joy in her voice, even today.

A prayer she had lifted to the heavens so many times had not only been answered, but in more abundance than she could have imagined, she said.

She learned Jedd had grown up on a farm and wanted to be a rancher. He was in college. He was happy. And she would develop a friendship with his adopted mother. And at that wedding, she and the rest of her family — which had grown to include another son, Jeremy — met Jedd.

That’s where the photo, the one sitting on her coffee table, was taken. Everyone in it is wearing a smile.

Now — years since that wedding, and even more years since she signed those papers — she says she had no regrets. For she has seen all the sides of being a mother.

This mother said she was able to help some unknown strangers, a couple struggling with the very thing she had struggled with years before: the inability to have a child to raise. In a way, she was able to return the blessing that another mother had given her in Kirk.

“With each child, whether you have the child or you give it up for adoption, that is your heart,” Ehrlich said. “But I think he was a gift that I could give to his parents.”

What strength there is in the true love of a mother.