It is National Adoption Awareness Month.
The boys are growing. They will have their own relationship to being adopted; what that means and how it feels.
Today I texted some Halloween pictures to my childrens’ birthmoms. I got a text back with a picture of her daughter in costume (Wednesday Adams- she looked amazing)….somehow, in that picture the resemblance to her brother, my son, was uncanny. More so than usual. So clearly brother and sister. Almost mirror images. How did he end up mine?
We’re in it now. No dipping our toes into the openness, we’re in it, and yes, sometimes it can feel like we’re drowning. No giant emotional moments before visits. Only excitement and butterflies. I get impatient. I want to hug and hold the woman I share motherhood with. The woman who made my child. Of course it gets more complicated. For all the magic of seeing my kids with her, there is still a constant reworking of what our family is and who is tied to who and why. And yes, my mind can go to dark places; he’ll turn away from me, he’ll feel abandoned by her. And those thoughts, or iterations of, are….a lot. We all need help navigating this. It is an unsolvable puzzle and sometimes it seems like we’ll never all fit together and what’s the point in trying? But of course, I come back, she comes back, because we know we’re better together and because ….we are mothers. Mothers show up and somehow mothers always hold up. The intimate intracacies of these relationships are precious. They can sometimes feel tenuous, but faith in one another and love that only a mother knows brings us back. I had no idea how deeply devoted to her I would be. I know we envy one another for what we each have with our child. I also know we’ll hold tight to one another for our beautiful boy.