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September 9, 2014

Bust out the champagne, it's time to smack this boat with some bubbly. All right, perhaps not. I'm not a champagne fan anyway. I am a fan of families of all kinds, all shapes, and all sizes. I love to make human connections, have real conversations, and I want to change the world. 

I have no idea what I'm doing. Let's get that right out on the table. I have never had a blog (does LiveJournal count?), and I will have some hitches and failures along the way I am sure. I appreciate your kindness, support, and interest in our story. It should not be this difficult to adopt, and we are going to be LOUD to try to change adoption for every family that has open hearts and arms. 

It's hard to pinpoint where I should begin. Do I tell you about life before marriage? What about the most boring and mundane details of our lives? I love my bath tub but do you need to know about it? Probably not, but what if....what if that little piece of real life is the connection that will reel them in. Do I tell you about 20 years of endocrine issues that have made my life difficult? Do I talk candidly about the miscarriages? Do I WANT to talk candidly about them? How do I deduce what the people will want to read? How do I create the magic formula that will end with our dreams being fulfilled? I don't know, we'll figure it out....failure is never an long term option for this girl. Failure is just a mistake to conquer and build on the back of.

I am adopted. My brother was also adopted. I have known I was adopted for as long as I could remember. Adopted never meant less to anyone I knew. It was just a label people throw out to categorize and compartmentalize the things we don't always understand. I am truly and deeply thankful that my birth mother chose to give me life. I am even more thankful that she found my parents. I was always theirs, even before I existed.

I was a Birth Mother. I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl 2 weeks after my 18th birthday. I felt that child grow and move inside me. I had never felt love or connection of that kind. How the hell was I going to make sure she came out on top? I knew that my only job was to make sure that she was going to have a good life. I would sing to her inside me and sway back and forth, loving that baby girl and trying to plan how to make our lives possible for us. Late nights being scared and an abusive boyfriend made my decisions for me. When I was 7 months pregnant I started trying to find her parents. For me, for us, it was the best and only way I could guarantee a decent shot at a life filled with more than food stamps and a bad home town. We would have been living in a trailer in a perpetual bad situation. I knew that loving that child was the only contribution I could make to her life. I hatched a plan and I made it happen, just like always. I have loved her every single day of her life, but it's a task that has been done from afar. The pictures were frequent for a long time and then they began to slow. I do not know her life. I am not her Mother. I am the Other, the one who gave, and the one who would do it all again. Her story is not mine to tell. She is not mine. She is a secret thing kept in the shadow of my heart that doesn't have words.

I will be an Adoptive Mother. There is a thing called the adoption triad. It's Birth Mother, Adoptive Parent, and Adoptee. It is weird to find myself here, trying to finish the triad. We will take wild swings, we will pursue shots in the dark, and we will finish our family because of someone else's deep love for our child.

I don't know what path this will take, or how long it will take us to get there, but we will take every swing until we catch our falling star.

-A.