Ah, Mother’s Day! This is a picture of me with my beautiful mother in 1974.
Wishing a heartfelt happy Mother’s Day to my mom, to my mother in-law, to all you already and expecting moms, and to all my adoption mothers-in-waiting. Our children may not be in our arms but they are firmly in our hearts and enduring this process is without a doubt an act of motherly love!
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a mother. In my teens and early twenties, this holiday marked a day when I would excitedly wonder who my future children would be. “The plan" was to get married and have my first child by age 26 and my last by age 32. I wanted five children, at least one of whom would be adopted, and I wanted one horse, two dogs, two cats, maybe some chickens for eggs and, in my grandest fantasies, a milking cow! There would be a husband, who was also a best friend, who worked from home in a shed that we converted into an office. There would be flower and vegetable gardens. I would make bread from scratch and paint in my studio above the barn when the children were napping.
OK, so now you know, I’m a hippy at heart!
As it turned out, it took quite some time for even a piece of that dream to take shape, and in the meantime I found myself with a career. In my early thirties I had a conversation with a friend who, by her late twenties, was a stay at home mom with three beautiful children. She confessed to me one day that what I had, this blossoming career with lots of travel, was what she had always planned and dreamed of. I, in turn, confessed that I had never cared about having a career, and I would give it up in a second to have what she had. I used to wonder, in frustration, why it was so easy for me to set goals and achieve them on the job, but so seemingly impossible to “go after” my goal to have a family. Actually, I did try to “go after” those goals, but it was only when I learned to “let go” that life started to move in the right direction. I finally met Mark in my mid thirties. It took another few years for us to make it to the alter, and immediately after we were married, I was laid off. The resulting financial strain, and then emotional stress of starting a new job, put our plans for having children on hold.
I have always had a deep belief that things in life happen as they are meant to, when they are meant to, even when it isn’t according to my plan. This faith was tested as time wore on and my dream of becoming a mother turned into fear that I would never be a mother. Mother’s Day became increasingly difficult as my 40th birthday loomed near. In this day in age when people are having children well into their 40’s, for some reason 40 was the cutoff for me. I couldn’t really explain why. My doctor’s told me I could still have children, but for some reason when we finally found ourselves in the position to move forward last year, I could not even try. I thought maybe it was fear. Fear of not being able to carry a pregnancy to term, fear of complications, or perhaps the fear that we would need to use fertility drugs to get pregnant – not that I have any problem with other people making that choice, but I don’t even like to take asprin (yep, there’s that earthy-crunchy side again) so I knew it wasn’t an option for me. My 40th birthday came and went and as I worked through letting go of that dream, I realized that it was this “letting go” that could make my dream of adopting a reality. It was only the idea of biological children that I needed to let go of.
On this Mother’s Day, in my 41st year, I have found the man of my dreams, a man who is my best friend, a man who will be an amazing father to our children. I have the flower and vegetable gardens, three loving dogs, a well established career that I am finally grateful for. I make bread from scratch around the holidays, knitting has become my creative outlet, and we finally have two children on the way. Thankfully I have let go of the dream to have chickens and a milking cow!
My faith in life and life’s timing has been fully restored and I know that this is all happening as it was meant to. The way these children are coming into our lives is not Plan B, but the plan that was always meant to be. God, the Universe, whatever you want to call it, knew all along how our children would come to us, it just took a while for me to realize it myself!
Our dear friend Ellie is in Ethiopia meeting their daughter for the first time TODAY!
I end with an essay on motherhood by Anna Quindlen that Ellie sent me and I sent it to my mother. I hope you find these words inspiring...
All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow, but in disbelief.
I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults,
two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the
same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with
me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make
me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel
and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like.
Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move
food from plate to mouth all by themselves.
Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at
its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible
except through the unreliable haze of the past.
Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now.
Penelope Leach, T. Berry Brazelton, Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling
rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education -
all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild
Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that
if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories. What those
books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught
me, and the well-meaning relations - what they taught me, was that
they couldn't really teach me very much at all.
Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then
becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it
is an endless essay.
No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive
reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a
timeout. One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2.
When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on
his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time
my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of
research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent, this
ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing.
Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research
will follow. I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr.
Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in which he
describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and
active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who
did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was
there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he
developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last
year he went to China. Next year he goes to college. He can talk just
fine. He can walk, too.
Every part of raising children is humbling. Believe me, mistakes were
made. They have all been enshrined in the 'Remember-When-Mom-Did' Hall
of Fame. The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language - mine,
not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed.
The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare
sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came
barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I
responded, "What did you get wrong?" (She insisted I include that
here.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker
and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all
insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons
for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?
But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while
doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly
clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs.
There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a
quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1.
And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and
how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I
wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing:
dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little
more and the getting it done a little less.
Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and
what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought
someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now
I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they
demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The books
said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was
sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up
with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more
than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That's what the books
never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts.
It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.
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