Secret Thoughts of an Adoptive Mother - Part 2

Firstly I have to say a huge thank you to all of you who left kind and encouraging words and prayers in response to yesterday's post. Your gentleness was a balm to my weary, anxious heart. Thanks you, thank you. This next post has been in the work for a little while. It is another reflection from Jana Wolff's 'Secret Thoughts of an Adoptive Mother' and seem to fit well with the head space I am in at the moment.

"As special as it was to witness this birth, I could do nothing to soften it's hard reality: I had been there, I had seen it, and I could never pretend that this baby had arrived by magic, in joyful ambivalence. I could never look at him without seeing her."(73-74)

I imagine that this will be one of the pieces of the adoption process that will be hardest for me. I have wanted to be a mum for as long as I can remember. I want to be the one a baby looks to for comfort, who's voice they recognize first. I want to be everything to my children. And the adoption process as beautiful as it is, doesn't offer me that illusion in the way having a biological child would. (Perhaps that is a good thing...perhaps that is the point, perhaps that is where my faith must grow...perhaps, perhaps, perhaps)

I say illusion because ultimately our children will belong to God. Whether they come from my body and share my genetics or not. They are never only mine, or only ours. However children find their way into our hearts and homes, they firstly and always belong to God.

He loves them and cares about them more than we can imagine or match. We can love with everything inside us, but God will always out love us.

There is no way that I can be everything to my children, they will need God's strength, grace, compassion to be all they are designed to be. So my job will be to teach them about Him by modeling all those things, and showing my own dependence on God day by day...suddenly, my illusion of being capable of being everything my child wold need begins to crumble -in a good way!

For our adoption story to be complete, we need there to be a mother who chooses us to parent her child. She will never be out of the equation, she is an intimate piece of this puzzle. Our child will always wonder about this woman, and may well feel a sense of loss or confusion as they begin to more fully understand the story of how they came to our family. We can hope and pray that their birth mother's choice will be understood, and that she will be known to our child in a way that eliminates some of the mystery and offers some answers and for our child, but we have no way of knowing beforehand who if her desire and situation will allow for this 'ideal' open adoption scenario.

I can never pretend that I am my baby's world. There will always be another women sharing the mother piece in their heart. While this mother may not be the one waking for night feeds or caring for them when they are sick, this woman will have given them life, and that can never and will never be forgotten. I really hope that our circumstance will allow us to embrace our child's birth mother as an extension of our family. That is our prayer.

I know that I will be mama, 'tucks them in every night' mama. My child will only have one of those, but I also hope God will give me grace as I share that Mother piece of our child's heart with their biological mother, the courageous woman who gave them life and made a choice out of love, that gave us the opportunity to be parents.

So while it may be hard at times to feel as though I will be sharing my child, I hope and pray that this feeling will be soothed by the revelation that they were never mine to begin with, that they were a gift and that it is my job as mama to love them and help them to become all they were created to be. Our story will include imperfect situations, no ones 'first choice' as Jana Wolff wrote. I know in my own strength this could cast a dark shadow over our journey, but in Him I can see that we have been given the responsibility to join in with the story he was writing not only in our lives, but also in the lives of others who find themselves pregnant and unable to parent. This is a story beyond ourselves, outside our white picket fence.

God perfect reality for our lives. Made possible only through His grace.

This blog represents a steady flow of emotions. I am a girl, it's just how we roll. While it may seem like a roller coaster - trust me it feels that way in real life - everything I write is from my heart, poor spelling included!