Just Another Day In Paradise

My Mother’s Day wasn’t perfect. The weekend brought rain and snot. At one point, I found myself huddled in a car with a crying, snotty Baby Girl and a crying, cold Joseph, watching the soccer game that Joseph was supposed to be playing in (I kind of deserved this, since I had completely underestimated how cold it was—it is NOT supposed to be 35 degrees in May—and had forgotten to bring gloves or a hat for Joseph). I didn’t get to sleep in on Mother’s Day, as I’ve learned that me sleeping in only leads to a grumpy husband who didn’t get enough sleep, and then no-one is happy. So I got up with the kids, bright and early. I didn’t get the tulips I wanted, even though I sent my husband an e-mail that said, “FYI, I like tulips.” Apparently the message was too subtle. I changed my outfit twice before going to church and still had massive amounts of snot on my shirt when we arrived. We ate out at restaurant for lunch, but between a squirmy baby who had missed her nap and a hyper 5 year old who literally *jumped* out of his chair four times, I didn’t get to eat my food until it was cold. There was laundry to be done, a house to be cleaned, and dinner to be made. And nobody else volunteered to take over those duties.

So, my Mother’s Day wasn’t perfect. But I chose to love it anyway.

I chose to love it because I know full well that there are too many women who ache to be mothers and are struggling on their journey to get there. Woman who will spend Mother’s day trying desperately to forget that the one thing they want—to have a baby to snuggle and kiss and rock to sleep at night—seems to be only a distant dream that will never become a reality. Women who have lost babies who were part of them, if only for the briefest moment in time. I know this because I was one of those women. And so I chose to love the snot and the tears and the laundry and the chaos because they are part and parcel of this amazing gift called motherhood.

I chose to love it because my son has another mother, his Ethiopian first mother, who didn’t get to see him jump off of chairs today. As grateful as I am for the joy that this amazing little boy brings into my life and as much as it physically takes my breath away when I think about the prospect of not having him here, I will never forget that my joy comes at the expense of another mother’s loss. I wish I could reach out to his first mother to tell her that Joseph is safe, and he is happy, and he is loved. Oh, how he is loved. But I can’t. And so I chose to love the day and this boy and all his energy to honor the sacrifice his birthmother made. And I chose to love the day because I am heartbreakingly aware of how, with just the smallest twist of fate, I would not have had the chance to hug this little boy and watch him jump off chairs, and see him grow up before my eyes.

I chose to love it because, all over the world, there are mothers who can’t feed their children or keep them warm or keep them sheltered from the rain. On my Mother’s Day, I got to give my children food without thinking twice about how I would make this happen. I got to clothe them, and when they were cold, we got to snuggle in a car, protected from the rain. And when they were sick, I got to wipe their noses with a clean cloth and give them medicine to ease their pain and tuck them into warm beds. I got to give them warm bathes and clean clothes. I got to keep them safe. So I chose to love the day because I know how extraordinarily lucky I am to be able to give those gifts to my children and how many mothers would do anything to be able to do these simple things for theirs.

I chose to love the day anyway because behind the joys of motherhood, there is a sadness that always lingers in the shadows. I miss my mom. I miss her smile and oh, how I miss her voice. Her voice, the one that had the ability to make me feel safe and warm and loved all over. I miss that feeling, the one of complete and utter unconditional love that only a mom can evoke. I miss her profoundly and deeply and achingly. And yet the grief is bittersweet. The bitterness is obvious. The sweetness is the clarity that such a loss brings about the brevity of life. That clarity shapes my days. I chose to love the day because I truly understand, down to my very core, that these moments with my children are excruciatingly, breathtakingly brief.

I chose to love my Mother’s Day. Though it wasn't perfect, it was full of moments that were oh-so-sweet. I woke up to Joseph spontaneously shouting, “Happy Mothers’ Day!” with no one to remind him to do so (remember, my husband was still sleeping). My baby girl woke up and smiled at me with her two new teeth peeking out. My husband presented me with a Dairy Queen cake which I had also requested (okay, so truth be told, my e-mail actually read: “FYI I like tulips and Dairy Queen cake.” He just went for the cake part instead of the tulips part). I felt my mom’s presence in church. At dinner that night, Joseph insisted I get the first piece of cake and crawled over into my lap to give me a kiss. I got to hug my children and watch them play and to put them to bed with full bellies, clean pajamas, and warm blankets. My day wasn’t perfect. But it was more than I deserved. And it was more than enough.

The Beauty That Remains: Ramblings on Being an Adoptive Mama

I distinctly remember when I learned that before being allowed to adopt, we were going to be required to attend a two day crash course on adoptive parenting. I recall being so excited to adopt, so ready to bring a baby into our home, and so annoyed that I had to jump through more hoops to get there. I remember thinking it very unfair that everyone else got a free pass at parenting. After all, no certificate of parental competence was required to give birth to a child. Why should potential adoptive parents have to go through such trials and tribulations to prove their worth? I was sure that adoptive parenting would be no different than parenting a child who I had conceived and carried and was beyond frustrated that the professionals were telling me otherwise. But as grumpy as I was about the "educational experiences" in which I was being asked to participate, they were required. So off I went. To be educated.

And you know what? I'm so very glad I did. It turns out they were right. (Damn, I hate it when that happens). Adoptive parenting is different, and in some very important ways.

Don't get me wrong. The vast majority of the time, our family just chugs along like any other family with two kids. Our lives revolve around school and soccer, play dates and T-ball, morning routines and bedtime stories. And the love our little family shares? It's beyond words. I always knew that I loved Joseph just as much as if I'd given birth to him, and then Baby Girl was born and what I had long suspected was confirmed. I've experienced both ways of building a family, and now I can stand here and tell you without a moment's hesitation: there is simply no difference in my love for the two children who have stolen my heart.

But I don't confuse the fact that my love for my children is no different from the fact that my parenting may need to be. Adoption begins in loss. Before becoming part of our family, Joseph had lost the mama who carried and gave birth to him. He had lost his first father, and his first country. By the time he arrived in my waiting arms, he had been cared for by many different people and uprooted many times. All the love in the world will never erase the fact that his little life began with such profound loss and uncertainty. While I don't know how Joseph will process his adoption--that's his to find out as he travels down the path of life--I do know that there are things I can do as a parent to support him along the way.

When he was first placed in our arms, I was very aware that he had been through much in his short time on this earth. Because I hadn't carried him for nine months in utero or fed, touched, and loved him through his first few months on earth, he didn't have any reason to trust or love me. So we shrank our world to just the three of us: Joseph, my husband, and me. We asked for no outside visitors for two weeks. We carried him in a carrier all the time, did skin-to-skin feedings, slept with him, massaged him, and responded to his every need. He grew to trust us quickly, this little boy of ours. And we fell in love with him.

That wasn't the end, though. It was only the beginning. As our journey together has unfolded, I've been constantly aware of the ways his life beginnings might shape how he processes himself and his place in this world. When I conceived Baby Girl, my first thought (after how the hell did that happen?) was to worry about how the experience of having a sibling who was born into our family would affect him. And when he started up with some challenging behaviors after she was born, I realized it called for a multifaceted approach. To help curb some of the behaviors, we implemented Love and Logic and we were very clear in our expectations for his behavior. But this wasn't enough. I also took a step back to our beginnings. I picked up my long 4 year old, folded him into my arms, and rocked him to sleep again for nights upon nights upon nights. And touched and hugged and snuggled with him, in an attempt to show him that my love for him would never be usurped by the new little being who had arrived in our lives.

And as he grows, I'm tasked with the challenge of helping him understand why he was placed for adoption. We've told him his life story for as long as I can remember, but his ability to process it changes as his little mind matures. We revisit his story often to give him a chance to ask more questions. As he gets older, I'm guessing there will be more questions and perhaps there will be more pain. This is hard to take as a mom- to know that my baby will experience pain and that, no matter how hard I try, I can't prevent this from happening. But while I can't take away his pain, I know that all I really have to do is walk next to him as he walks through it. And that I can do.

I'm also called to help him understand why his skin is a different color than ours. To help him learn that he is every bit as good and worthy as a person with "peachy" skin despite a world that bombards him with messages otherwise. To teach him about racism, both overt and subtle. To help him explain to his classmates why he looks different from us and how he came to be part of our family. To teach him to navigate the tricky terrain of curiosity from other people; to help him to know when to answer questions with humor, when to provide information, and when to just walk away. To help him learn about his birth culture while he is living in this American one. To help him process all of this while also helping him through the mundane tasks faced by any child as he learns to read and write and do math and be a kind, giving, self-confident person in a world where it's often anything but easy to do so.


Does all this overwhelm me? Sometimes. And sometimes is scares the pants off me. But when it does, I return to the quotation I hung on my fridge during our adoption process. It says, "For anyone who is in fear of the monsters that may be lurking around the corners of adoption, yes, as with anything, there are monsters to be conquered and there is that potential that they could gobble us up, which makes our actions so much more important. But please consider for a moment that as you are reading this, there is a child who is battling very real monsters alone. And imagine that when you make a commitment to take up arms, side by side with the child, how many unnecessary scars you, as a family, can prevent." Despite all the challenges we may face as a family, we are better off facing them together.

In retrospect, then, those adoption professionals were pretty smart. They spurred me to learn how to be the mom Joseph needed me to be, and for that I am very grateful. But you know what they didn't tell me? They didn't tell me how becoming an adoptive mama would change me.

They didn't tell me that how much guilt I would carry for not being the perfect mama I had envisioned. Parenting is a humbling experience for any parent, but even more so for an adoptive parent. I am ever so aware that the gift of parenting Joseph comes at the expense of another mother's loss. And so when I snap at him or send him to his room because I'm simply feeling grumpy, or engage in any other number of parenting missteps, I feel the weight of his first mom's loss on my shoulders pressing down, reminding me how lucky I am to have him in my life and how I should never, ever take it for granted.

And they didn't tell me how adoption would so swiftly erase the lines between "us" and "them." They didn't explain how I would suddenly feel so deeply connected to Africa, how I would see my son's face in the suffering of the people that he left behind, or how his presence in my life would deepen my understanding that so many people aren't given the chance they deserve at life simply because of where they are born. And they didn't teach me how to navigate the chasm between this understanding and the reality of everyday life in this country, where everyone goes about their lives as if none of this is happening.

And they didn't tell me how adoption would open me up. How it would teach me that life was messy and how, no matter how hard I tried, life would never have been perfect anyway and so I should stop trying so hard to make it so. Or how despite my young and rather naive conviction that I knew how my life was supposed to go, adoption would teach me that there are multiple paths to happiness and I only had to let go of my preconceived notions for those paths to be revealed. And how understanding all of this would free me from the constraints of trying to be the person I thought I was "supposed" to be and allow me to be the person I was meant to be.

And they didn't tell me how many people I would meet along the journey of adoption and how those people would go from strangers to fast friends in the blink of an eye because they understood. And how, looking back, I would marvel at the idea that these amazing friendships would have been missed had life gone another way.

But mostly, they didn't tell me how much I would learn about love. They didn't tell me how my Joseph would teach me that love doesn't come from blood, that blood is not thicker than water, that nothing could be further from the truth. They didn't tell me that I would see my mom in my son, even though the two have never met and share no genes. They didn't tell me how it would bring tears to my eyes to watch deep love develop between siblings who were not born to the same mom.

And they didn't tell me how, despite anything we face along the way, our adoption journey would be full of more beauty than I could have ever imagined.

Adoption is beautiful. Pass it on.

A Child Of My Own

A Child of My Own

It’s amazing how quickly you can become sensitive to the words of others. Before my son, Joseph, came home from Ethiopia, I gave little thought to how I talked about adoption. Now that he’s home, the value of choosing words carefully has revealed itself to me in ways that I can only begin to describe. When people ask us about his ‘real’ parents, or query about whether or not we have children of our ‘own,’ I cringe. I cringe for myself, but mostly I cringe as I wonder how those words will affect his little mind’s understanding of who he is and how he came to be a part of our family.

As I try to explain myself, some people will no doubt think me picky. Others will perceive me as over-sensitive. I just think of myself as mom. And like any mom, I want what is best for my son. That means sharing our experience with others in the hopes that they will also begin to think about the power of words and the impact they have.

Let’s start with the whole “real” parent thing. When you stop and think about this, it’s fairly obvious why this wording makes adoptive parents bristle. What’s the opposite of real? Fake. Pretend. When you refer to my son’s first family as his “real” parents, you are by default resigning us to being his “fake” parents. Although you may not mean to, you suggest that I am simply pretending that I am his mom. But obviously, that’s not true. I’m about as real as they come. Pinch me and I’ll jump (in fact, sometimes I pinch myself in doubt that life can really be so good). I’ve changed my fair share of diapers, been spit up on repeatedly, gotten up ten times in one night, dried tears, been hugged more times than I can count, worried, worried, and worried some more. If that doesn’t make me real, I don’t know what does.

My son does have another set of parents. His first parents created him, carried him, and gave birth to him. We talk about them, honor them, and love them. They are very real. But we are no less so.

Another small difference in wording can be heard when I say that my son was adopted. Not is adopted, but was adopted. That may seem like a minor detail, but small words carry great meaning. Adoption shapes a child and a family, but it does not define them entirely. It is simply a way of forming a family. Just like your child was born in 2005, my son was adopted that year.

So if we want to, we will explain that Joseph was adopted. Like all other families, we love to tell the story of the day that our son joined our family. More often, though, I don’t mention it at all. It is rarely relevant to the conversation at hand. When you introduce your child, you don’t say, “this-is-my-conceived-by-invitro-son” or my “oops-she-was-an-accident daughter.” The method by which you became a family is simply not important in most conversations. The same is true of our family. Yes, Joseph joined our family through adoption. Yes, we are very proud of that detail. But there is rarely a need to distinguish our family from others.

Sometimes people will ask me, “Do you have any children of your own?” I’m never quite sure how to answer that question. At philosophical level, none of us “owns” our children. As Kahil Gibran wrote, “Our children are not our children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you, but not from you. And though they are with you, they belong not to you.” Our children belong to the future, not to us.

And yet, like all other parents, I sometimes find myself referring to Joseph as “my own son.” He lives with us, we provide for him, we love him deeply. We are listed as his parents on his birth certificate. We are there when he’s happy, when he cries, when he’s sick, when he hurts. The fact that I did not carry him in my womb is irrelevant in determining the fact that he is our child.

Still, the “child of your own” phrase is the one I hear the most. Sometimes I think this is because it is hard to understand that you can love a child by adoption as much as a child by birth; that a child by adoption really is just as much “your own.” Before Joseph came home, I don’t know that I truly understood that either. Then came the moment a tiny little boy was placed in my arms and I forgot who I was before he entered my life.

So when I tell you that I am eternally grateful that I did not initially conceive a child, I am not exaggerating. I am horrified at the prospect of not having Joseph in our lives. He is my heart and my soul and the joy of my life.

He is my son.