Tomorrow will be Mother's Day and it will be very bittersweet for me. I think of my own mom (of course) and grandmas, but this year one other Mother has entered the picture, Rhylans China Mom! My heart goes out to my own mom who will hurt and grieve as she tells her youngest son once again "good-bye" as he deploys. Oh, the anxiety his deployments cause!! I am reminded that he has deployed before and that God was with him then and will be this time too! No better hands could he be in!! Please pray for his safety, good wisdom, and decision making to keep his unit secure and safe!!!!
In the past two weeks twice I have been asked point blank, "Do you think her birthmother ever thinks of her?" I sigh as I really have no answers but this question has arisen multiple times in my mind. I am burdened by what I will tell her as she grows...I really have NO answers. I recently read that you should begin telling them their story very young. I have practiced a few times over the last few days as I rock her to sleep and I usually become teary. I really want her to just "know" that she was adopted and grow with that fact and not "discover" it one day. So now I keep it simple by telling her she was born in China and has a China mom too, and it is SO cute she shakes her head up and down saying yes!!
I came across this blog entry on another blog and she got it from another blog....handed down. It is SO GOOD and I take NO credit, it is not mine but I wanted to share it and have it in my blog for easy access, so I can always refer to it!! I pray that someday I will be able to handle the two mommy issue as well!!
Here it is:
When my boys were little, I use to worry about handling them as teenagers. I hoped this...I wished that....
A wise woman told me not to worry about those days ahead. When I got there they would not be as tumultuous as I expected. The same grace that God gave me in the present, would be waiting for me there, in their teen years, when we arrived. God's grace, she said, is given in daily doses. She shared with me that I feared the days ahead because I did not yet have the grace I needed to live them. I only had the grace of the moment. Here we are many years after that advice, our boys are 18 and 15 and you know what? She was right! When Hope came into our lives, there was a day I fretted about with her as well. It wasn't her teen years. It was the day she would finally know that she had another Mommy. I've never experienced jealously towards her birth mother. Perhaps my time in China prior to Hope's arrival, working with oppressed women there, gave me a compassion that united me to them rather than divided me from them. I've always felt a pain in my heart for the pain in her birth mother's heart at the reality of having to give up a child. No matter the reason, whether it was purposeful because she was a girl or not purposeful because Hope was dying of heart failure and she could never provide the care she needed, a mother still had to lay the child she carried in her womb, delivered, held and nursed at the gate of an orphanage-and walk away. FOREVER. Never knowing what would happen to her. You don't dislike someone who walks in shoes that you could never wear. You respect them for doing their best with a tragic situation. Even if their best is one that has left heartache in its wake. All you can do is respect it and honor it. Casting doubt and negative feelings on her mother and her father's choice, doesn't help anyone heal. Especially my daughter. And the fact is in the end, we just don't know why Hope had to leave their lives.
Late last year, Hope began to struggle emotionally a bit. I could tell something was amiss in her heart. God has always been faithful to nudge my heart many times when my kids are struggling. I knew her struggles were China related. In other words, she was struggling with something in regards to her story. Now in preschool, and quite a smart little cookie, she can see the Mommies with growing bellies. She sees them come strolling in one day with a baby in a stroller and no longer a big belly anymore. She sees friends who get brothers and sisters from their Mommy's bellies. She ponders this. She wonders. She gives it the old college try and asks me if she came from my tummy. I start with simple answers-"You didn't come from my tummy, you came from my heart." She doesn't ask more for a while. Then another day comes and she wants to know where she was born and I tell her China (which she knows) She asks why God wanted her born in China and not here. I tell her I don't know but He decides where we are born and I'm so glad He let us come to China and give her a home and a family. She says she's glad to. Days and weeks pass. I'm thinking about how we are getting really close "to the tummy mommy talk." I strategize what to to say and don't come up with much. Such a huge concept for such a little girl. I grieve a bit that my sweet one has to mull such grown-up scenarios in her head and her heart. I press on, wanting to be prepared. We await her questions that demand answers like awaiting the birth of a child. "We're getting close," I tell my husband." "It will be soon that she asks.", preparing him and myself too. I pray real hard, ask God to just give me the words to say when the point of no return arrives. He does. Rather than her hearing it from someone else, knowing that she knows we are different and don't look alike, believing that she already knows in her heart there is another, I take the plunge. I free-fall into God's grace, His grace in the present, in the moment. I sit down with a book about families created through adoption, with a story line that includes discussion of the tummy mommy (A Family for Eve by kristan keefe Struck.) Right before I open the pages to read, it is as if time stands still. At the beginning of this book, I am still the only Mommy she is 100% aware of. When I close this book, I will begin a new journey. A journey of shared motherhood and it will last the rest of our lives together. The air I breathe in, heart beating out of my chest, is pregnant with emotion, fear and doubt. My desire to live in absolute truth and be the one who guides my daughter's perceptions of her past pushes me forward. It's not about me, it's about her. I read it and the life-long discussion begins. Fast forward several months to today. Getting ready for preschool she is eating breakfast, getting dressed in front of the TV watching Dora or so I thought. Then I hear,well, I hear a documentary playing. "She must have pushed that button on the Roku by mistake.", I guessed. A few minutes later Hope walks in and says, "Mommy. When Katie Joy comes home she needs to watch this China movie." (Katie Joy is the name we have given to our next adopted daughter, who we are in the process with now.) I realized she was watching a documentary on China, Wild China, that we both love to watch. She exits as quickly as she came. Then I hear a still, small voice,"She's looking for her China Mommy." It dawns on me that the reason she is watching this movie, so out of the blue, so randomly on a Friday morning getting ready for school, is that she is looking in the faces of the women of this movie for her mother. She enters again. "I just saw my China Mommy."
Me: "you did. How do you know it was her?"
Hope: "Because...I remember what she looked like." In a tone that sounded an awful lot like, "Gee Mom, she WAS my Mother after all."
Me: "Oh, I see. That's true. Well, you know what Hope? If I was you, I would be doing the same thing. I would be looking for her face too." Again, she exits without a word, returning several minutes later. Hope looking a little forlorn: "Mom, I miss my China Mommy." And the words I had dreaded, the words I though would cut me to the heart years ago when I imagined this day, fell on me like sweet honey. There was such a peace to it all, the peace that passes all understanding, especially my understanding. That grace, my wise older woman friend told me that would be here on this day, showed up in boundless, overflowing quantity. Me: "Hope, I know you miss her. Of course you miss her. It is okay to miss her. I would miss her too. I am so thankful you tell me that you miss her. I am so thankful that you share this with me. I want to know when you miss her so I can comfort you and hold you. It does not hurt my feelings when you tell me that you miss her. Your heart is SO big. It is big enough for two mommies. It is big enough for your China Mommy and me. I'm just glad I get to be one of your Mommies." And as quick as the conversation came, it went and she began to chatter on about something completely unrelated. While she was at school, I thought about this new journey she and I are on together. Believing her heart is big enough for both Mommies, yes, but hoping she always feels it is big enough too. But Grace will be there on the days when she isn't so sure and it will hold us and carry us through to the day when she understands that God made her heart. He healed it once when she was dying on the steps of that orphanage gate and He will heal it again when she deals with all of this one day with Jesus, just the two of them. I'm pushing her in the swings at the playground after school. Another Mom is next to us doing the same. Hope yells over her shoulder to the other Mom, "Hey, You know what? My Mom is the best Mom in the whole, wide world." And I push her swing, get misty-eyed, and I thank God for the Grace.
I found this entry because I had been fretting and praying too about the day around the corner with Rhylan, that will come fast...too fast. I watch her now and realize it is SO EASY, she has no questions that require an answer. We are close and I adore her and she loves me too! Right now I am just going to have to continue to be prayerful and SO thankful that He allowed me to find this story!!
No comments:
Post a Comment