Thoughts about his past...

We have a big weekend coming up at our house! Only two more days until Michael's birthday!!! He'll be 2 years old on Friday!!! It will be his first birthday with us! The party planning has begun. We're having family over to our house on Saturday. He loves "handy manny" so that's our theme. Invitations have been sent. Construction-themed cake has been ordered. My dad is making home made ice cream.... I can't wait for that!! Plates, napkins, etc are ready (the house not so much!). And then Sunday is my very first Mother's Day! Which coincidentally will be our 9 month anniversary with Michael. Where has the time gone?! This time 9 months ago Matt and I were in the air, on our way across the big pond, to a place that would carve a special place in our hearts. And with all of the upcoming excitement, I'm somewhat sad. I have so many thoughts flooding my brain. This may be a long and slightly scattered post, but it's been weighing on my heart for a while and I felt like now was the time to get it out.

Why you may ask am I sad? You should be happy, Jennifer. You're celebrating your son's birthday. It's your first Mother's Day as a mom. What do you have to be sad about? I'm sad because I can't help but think about the woman on the other side of the world who gave life to our son. The woman who made it possible for me to be a mom. Without her, this Friday would just be another day. I can't thank her enough for choosing life for her child, our son. Two years ago she made a selfless decision, a decision that has forever changed the lives of so many people. A decision that I will be eternally grateful for. I can't even begin to understand what she went through. How much it possibly hurt her to leave him. But then again, the culture there is very different from ours. There's no way I could even begin to understand the why's and how's of someone and someplace that is so very different than who I am and where I'm from. I know it may not have been her decision to make. Sometimes these decisions can be forced. And it's not always the birth mother who abandons the child in some place, it's often another family member. I have no way of knowing why the decision was made or who made it. I'm assuming it was because he was born with a special need. I'm assuming they felt they had no choice. They probably felt there was nothing, medically, they could do for him. And truthfully, there probably wasn't. I saw proof of that with my own two eyes in China. But this is all assumption on our part. There are a million different scenarios that we could go through to explain it. But for the last few days I've thought about this woman, what she may be like and what she's done for Michael and our family and she doesn't even know it.

Lately, on the weekends, during nap time, Michael just will not let me put him down in the crib. He won't let me put him down anywhere. As soon as I lay him down, he cries out, it's a sad cry. It's a please don't let me go, or leave me alone cry. Therefore, I'm stuck, in the rocker or on the sofa, holding him while he sleeps. I won't lie, it can be frustrating because I'm thinking of the million and one things I need to be doing.... those endless chores that I want to get done on the weekend. (key words there being I want.) But then I look down at his sweet sleeping face... his eyes closed, his little lips parted just enough as he breathes through his mouth at times. And I think how so very lucky we are. Thank you Lord. How blessed we are that God has trusted us with this beautiful child. How I need to enjoy these moments because they will come to an end in the blink of an eye. How many other women are out there wishing they were in this position. And then....my thoughts turn to his birth parents, his birth family. Who are they? Where are they? What are they like? Does he have older siblings? How old were they when he was born? Were they old enough to wonder where he went after days or weeks of being with them, with the family? We know he was about a month old when he was abandoned. And sadly I wonder, Do they even think of him at all? Maybe they did what they had to do and didn't look back. Period. I'm not going to lie to myself or to Michael and say that I'm sure they loved him. That they only wanted the best for him. I don't know if that was the case or not. I'd like to think that a mother could never forget about a child she gave life to, but I can't truthfully say I know this was the case. And when Michael is older and begins to question his beginnings, where he came from, where he was abandoned, etc, the only real answer I can give him is I don't know. Because we don't know. And giving him any other answer would be a lie. There are so many uncertainties surrounding our son's life before us. We will never know all of the answers, and that is something we will just have to deal with. I'm sure some folks probably think I should just move on and forget. And maybe over time I will be able to accept the unknown, but I will not and can not forget why and how our son came to us. That would be a disservice to Michael, his birth parents and to us. Right now this is still too fresh to move beyond.

Growing up, heck even now, my own mom will say to me on the day before my birthday "this time xx years ago, I was sitting at home, your daddy was at work and ......" she proceeds to tell me [again] the entire story leading up to my birth. And yes, even at 33 years old, I still like to hear it! This is something I can't give my son. I can't tell him the events that surrounded his birth. But what I can tell him is how much he is loved and how I've loved him before I even laid eyes on him. I can tell him how he grew in my heart. I can tell him how we prepared for him and his arrival. Where we were and what we were doing when we got "the call" about him. I can tell him how nervous we were in the minutes leading up to his arrival at our hotel. How my heart felt like it was dropping to my feet! How we paced the floor. How the initial plan of waiting in the hotel room was cancelled at the last minute as the families decided to meet our babies in the hallway as they stepped off the elevator! How once he was in our arms we never wanted to let him go. How all I really wanted to do was curl up in a chair with him, stare at him, hold him and love him forever and ever. This may or may not be enough for him. I won't know for years to come, but I hope it is. I hope that hearing this from us and knowing and feeling how much we love him will be enough. That hearing his story, our journey to one another, will excite him just like hearing my own birth story excites me. my dear husband will often say "you should just love and only love, once you figure that out everything else will be so much easier". Oh how I wish it could be that easy!