Set Free

Juno (Spoilers, no doubt)

I tend to protect myself from movies I believe will upset me. If it's about an animal likely to die, for instance, I don't go to see it. (And believe me about this, too: if something bad happens to an animal in a movie, that *is* what the movie is about for me.) If I know it will be violent, I'm not going. There are very few exceptions (I really like Denzel Washington, for instance, and he is in a lot of violent movies, so I've seen some of his, but due to my propensity for picking up his colorful expressions in those movies, even jokingly, my husband has banned going to Denzel's movies in the theatre. Naturally he can't do much about my Netflix list when he is out of town. (I really hope this reads as funny, because it is.))

Anyway, and if you think I'm on some level avoiding writing about the movie I actually saw yesterday you may be onto something, I went to see Juno yesterday, which was a bold move, because I do not like to watch movies about adoption.

Let me sum up first, then describe later. I will never hear "Sea of Love" the same way again. The sequence in which it is played (this is a spoiler, so look away and if you don't, you clearly aren't paying attention to me now or to the title of this post, so that's no longer my problem) begins with Juno in her hospital bed, her erstwhile boyfriend spooning with her, with a voiceover about how neither of them wanted to see the baby because he didn't feel like theirs, with a transition to a bunch of babies lying in their little Lucite bassinets? That killed me. I was already tearful, but that killed me. I began to sob, noisily. Good chance it was embarrassing for my daughter, but since she talked me into going to the movie all of a sudden without proper prep time, she may have brought it on herself.

Also, thanks so much, scriptwriter, for giving the baby a due date that is my birthday. Just sayin'.

On a more sane note, here is what The Princess said about it. "It's a movie about how things happen to people and you shouldn't judge them just because of those things. It's a movie about accepting people for who they are."

She told me that ahead of time. And I agree, it's pretty much about that, when it isn't about ripping Songbird's heart out of her chest and stirring up all her abandonment issues.

And because that is what it's about, it's really a movie about a girl who sticks out (figuratively, although of course literally, eventually, too), and the way she becomes more individuated, and the relationships that matter to her along the way.

It's not much of a movie about adoption. Adoption is a plot device, just as the pregnancy is. Both raise the stakes for the heroine in her journey to know who she is and who she loves.

As her father says:

In my opinion, the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you for exactly what you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you, the right person will still think the sun shines out your ass. That's the kind of person that's worth sticking with.

Much as I love that line, I have a lot of problems with the script, aside from the adoption stuff, about which my friend Lisa V wrote eloquently, and so I'll let her say it for me, because that's the part I'm having a hard time focusing on, so go here and see. Well, go anyway, but let me just add this. I am so used to thinking of my conception as a mistake that the whole mythology of mistakes and deserving adoptive parents is woven into my guts. In my sane mind, I know there is more to it, but in my belly, I'm right there with this whole concept and just want some parent, somewhere, to want and love me.

Ugh, that hurt and sounded way unevolved. That's how deep this goes.

Back to the script:

 

First, do you know teenagers who talk that way? All the time? Maybe I am sheltered, or spoiled by children who have absorbed all the Highbrow Family Values around here.

Second, as a person who is pro-choice, I was really disappointed in the portrayal of the women's health clinic. I mean, maybe I am just under the influence of living in a liberal haven of women's health care, but boysenberry you-know-whats?

Third, this is not about the script, but about the acting that overcame it. J.K. Simmons and Alison Janney are way too big for this little movie, but I loved them anyway. I loved how they talked to Juno and to each other. Don't get me started about how unrealistic it was for the dad to go and visit the potential adoptive parents and be so blithe about the whole thing. On a related note, I adore Jennifer Garner in this part.

Fourth, the few non-emotional moments of film enjoyment for me were provided by Jason Bateman in that blue sweater. Then he turned skeevy, and that was disappointing.

Fifth, the one thing I did like in the script was the father grasping for the right word to describe how wrong it would be for Juno to date while pregnant.

Sixth, Ellen Page and Michael Cera were wonderful.

And seventh and last, I loved the music. I sort of want to hear it all again, but I don't want to cry like that anytime soon.

Your comments welcome.

For My Mothers

To my mothers~

Today is your birthday.

One of you, if still living, would be 82. I wish I could imagine you at that age, but you have been gone for 14 years, and you are imprinted on me at that younger phase of life, the mid-60's, a time when I wish you could have been enjoying your grandchildren rather than succumbing to cancer.

One of you, wherever and however you are, turns 66 today. I don't know your health, or whether you have retired from your work, but I know there's an equal chance of hearing something this Christmas or never hearing anything again. It's been like that between us.

I used to wonder if maybe a Scorpio was just the worst sort of maternal match for this Taurus. I looked for excuses everywhere I could find them to explain my apparent inability to please or communicate with either of you. I'm doing work I love, work of which both of you, for your different reasons, disapproved.

For 46 years, I have been carrying the grief of one of you and the shame of the other at the core of my being, in my bones and muscles, in the cells of my body. I don't believe that either of you meant to lay those burdens on me, but I carried them, and until recently, no one invited me to remove them and leave them behind.

It seems I have a choice. Those deeply sad feelings have been a powerful connection to both of you, one that stretches across time and in one case, beyond life. Those feelings have at times fermented into hopelessness or resentment or self-recrimination. I have felt it coming for almost two years, the need to cut those particular cords, to stop feeding on the shame and letting the grief breathe for me.

Such a change feels drastic and unsettling, but ultimately it feels necessary.

I have compassion for you both, so unreachable and remote in your different ways. I've been trying to form relationships with distant, inaccessible people all my life, your grief and your shame, carried so unconsciously, creating barriers to those connections I so dearly wanted. I could not see the difficulties emanated from me.

So today, on your birthdays, I choose to put down these burdens, gently and with respect. I am a mother myself, a mother of a daughter, and I want to model consciousness and clarity for her. I want to mother myself, giving myself the same permission I would give my daughter: to be herself, to walk her path, to recognize any heaviness she might carry that really belongs to someone else. Our own burdens, our own losses, are enough.

With love,

Your daughter

After Lunch

I ate my carefully prepared and appropriate lunch at my desk, working to finish up a few things on my last day in the office before vacation begins on Sunday. The door buzzer startled me twice, first bringing a delivery from UPS and then bringing the voice of a young woman over the intercom.

"I need to speak to the pastor," she said. "It's a personal matter."

Out of the elevator they tumbled, a tall slim woman in her mid-twenties and her stockier husband, obviously the father of the two little girls who came in with them, smudge-faced and barefooted. The young mother spilled out their story while the little ones touched everything they could find. This never bothered me, but it worried their mother. The older girl, almost 3, went straight to the little stuffed animals on a shelf, a white cat given to me by The Princess and a lamb I received at my ordination.

I could see that the story she told held truth: too many hours in the car on a trip to research her biological family, a broken transmission that took all the money they had as a cushion to replace, no more money to get home, a 4th of July night spent in that same car when no help proved forthcoming.

Mother and father seemed sober and embarrassed by the situation in which they found themselves. It would take a lot of gas money to get home to South Dakota.

So many people sit in the pastor's study, asking for help. These two could meet my eyes. These two could shake my hand. Her story held echoes of mine.  She asked me about the reunion with my birth family and told me a little about hers. I went to foster care for a short ten days and then to my adoptive parents. She spent half a year being passed from one member of her birth mother's extended family to another until finally other arrangements had to be made.

We can't know what happened to us in those weeks and months, not really. Certainly I will never know. Is that ten day void the source of the hungers I have never been able to satisfy?

They are driving now, with the first tank of gas provided by Salvation Army, and the diapers purchased with a grocery store gift card from the Catholic church, and the cash I managed to round up to get them going. They will drive in shifts, these two young people trying so hard to find the place and the people that birthed her, perhaps learning that the real home is the one they are making with the two little ones in their car seats, holding on to a kitty and a lambie while their parents drive through the night.

A New Friend

Make new friends, but keep the old,
One is silver and the other's gold.

One of my tasks on behalf of RevGalBlogPals is to check the blogs of new applicants to the webring. Some need help adding html code, and others apply but never add the code or respond to offers to help. Some do it all themselves and are such a clear fit for our ring definition that I simply click on the button that makes their membership official.

As is true everywhere in life, some seem like perfectly nice Gals and/or Pals who I am happy to welcome. But there are others with whom I seem to "click" instantly. Something in their stories sounds familiar, or so different it's intriguing, and I want to go back and get to know them better. It doesn't become a connection unless that feeling goes both ways, and as many of our new bloggers are, well, new bloggers, they may not yet have learned that visiting back and forth and leaving comments is part of developing blogger relationships.

Recently I've met someone through the ring who you may have noticed has left some comments here, RevRosa. Rosa is having surgery this morning, and I hope you will think about going over to her blog to leave good thoughts, wishes and prayers.

Rosa is one of a number of adoptive moms, both in RevGalBlogPals and not, who have become my online friends. In the past month or so, I have begun to feel the depth and breadth of healing of some old wounds related to my own mother and the way my adoption affected the mother-daughter relationship. I am grateful to all these friends, and to the spirit woven through the connections made with St. Casserole, Preacher Mom, Lisa V, Susan, Alex and others who may not even know I'm reading their stories.

This morning I'm thankful for friends, new and old and in-between.

A circle is round, it has no end.
That's how long I want to be your friend.

Strange Doings

Last week I went online to order a copy of my birth certificate. Somewhere I have an old copy, but I have squirreled it away so carefully I could not find it. Perhaps this is a sign of age. Perhaps this is a sign of being ENFP. Perhaps this gives off a whiff of chaos.

I decided that the surest way to find it would be to order a fresh copy. I sent off for mine and for #1 Son's since we were both born in that far away Southern Commonwealth and need them to get our passports.

After a lot of befuddlement, I ended up on the phone with the service that arranges quick shipping of vital records. I gave them my date and county and town of birth. I gave them my father's name and my mother's maiden name.

As an adopted person, I really have two birth certificates, one from before the adoption, and one adjusted after the adoption was final. I remember when I was seeking my birthmother almost twenty years ago, I wondered what it would be like to see the other certificate. What names would have appeared? Would my birth father's name have been on it?

When I opened the package this morning, I had a shock. Everything on it was as I expected, with one exception. My mother's name was given as "First Name, Middle Name, Maiden Name Not of Adoptive Mother But of Birth Mother."

Now, I know my birth mother's name already, so it is not new information. But what an odd sensation to see the two names in combination. And what if I hadn't already known?

I guess I will call and insist that they send me the legally correct birth certificate. Meanwhile, do I dare go and apply for a passport with this one?

It's an odd feeling to have a document that is yours, but is not yours, all at the same time.

You Say It's Your Birthday?

You say it's your birthday?
It's my birthday, too-yeah!
Lennon/McCartney, Birthday

Susan wrote about her daughter, who is turning 4 today, and she has me thinking about turning 4 on the 4th of May. I'm a little bit older than Curious Girl. This birthday brings me to 45 (not until 4:14 p.m., but who's counting?), but I do remember 4.

We lived in our old-fashioned house in Jane Austen's Village, one of those long townhouses. I loved running down the hall to the front door, especially when my daddy was coming home for lunch or at the end of the day. The room we did most of our living in was a family room/dining room right beside the kitchen that my parents put in when they bought the house. It was a very Ozzie and Harriet kitchen, with the pickled pine cupboards. They had a pass-through to the dining area, which must have been very modern when they bought the house in 1952 or so. That's where I had my birthday parties, in a room crowded with family and little friends.

At four, I was a fluffy sort of little girl, with a tiny ponytail on the side opposite my part, held with one of those little plastic barrettes in pastel colors. My "boyfriend" shared my birthday. He was the minister's son, and I was sure we would grow up and get married and be the new Rev. and Mrs. (At least I got the Rev. part right!)

At 45, I am still fairly fluffy, although my hair is a good bit longer and I've given up on pastel barrettes.

Susan wonders about her daughter, who shares with me not just a birthday, but being adopted. She wonders what Curious Girl's birth day was like, who held her, if her birth parents are thinking of her today. These questions have haunted me. I know that my birth mother held me once, against the advice of the nurses. But where I was and who was taking care of me for the two weeks until I was placed with my mother and father remains a mystery. In that era of medicated childbirth and forceps deliveries, I suspect I spent the first day or two fairly spaced out!

My mother was a social worker who "retired" after her marriage. One of her jobs had been keeping contact with foster homes for babies released for adoption, and she assured me they were good situations. I would like to believe it, but I also know she would have readily said anything to reassure me on that point.

I think there will be years, Susan, when Curious Girl may wonder these things. My brother, also adopted, says he does not. Some of us just have those, well, those inquiring, dare I say curious, personalities. She will come to her own places in the process of self-understanding. At 4, I didn't think too much about it. At 9 and 10, I thought of little else. And so it goes.

Sometimes I wonder why my life played out this way, what gifts came from being of one family and in another? Do we, as those who believe in reincarnation say, choose the parents who will birth us and the family that will raise us? That feels powerful, almost frighteningly responsible. What I do know is that we choose how we work with what we are given. On this birthday, I celebrate the family my children and I have made with Pure Luck. On this day, I look at my life and my work and see many things that please me, and a few that could use a bit more effort on my part. On this day, I realize it's likely more than half over, this life. And maybe that means more now than what happened at the beginning. What will the middle and the end of the story be?

I would like you to dance (birthday)
Take a cha-cha-cha-chance (birthday)
I would like you to dance (birthday)
Dance

"Angry Enough to Die"

But God said to Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?’ And he said, ‘Yes, angry enough to die.’ (Jonah 4:9, NRSV)

I seem to have no end of connections to this week’s lectionary passages. Friday night I was just as ludicrously, futilely angry as Jonah, and I certainly felt angry enough to die. It’s an unjust world, and in those minutes I was the target of the greatest injustice.

At least that’s how it felt.

It started with a brief interaction with an apparently cranky-at-the-end-of-the-day person to whom I used to be married. He reacted to, rather than answering, a question about the weekend schedule for our two-household family, and in that reaction he struck an old nerve. When we could speak away from the children, I asked what that was all about. He nearly apologized, but stopped short and instead turned it around in my direction. “I don’t call you on it when you’re inappropriate.”

That word—inappropriate—goes to my deepest wounded places.

Remember the other day, I was writing about my mothers and how I wanted to finally get over this old misery that keeps bothering me no matter how much time goes by? Just to be sure, “the voice of the Lord came to (Songbird) a second time.” (See Jonah 3:1) And soon I was slamming doors and scrubbing the bathtub in manic fashion and finally sitting down at the top of the stairs for what became an unpleasant cry while lying on the little rug at the top of the stairs with my legs hanging over and tears running down into my ears.

The worst kinds of thoughts were running through my mind, as they do when this particular sore spot is aggravated. Obviously no one will ever think well of me, including my children, who would be better off without me…

“Yes, angry enough to die.”

I have a kind husband and an understanding almost grown-up son who witnessed the first part of the difficulties, and the three of us went out to dinner and talked about why I respond the way I do.

“That’s old stuff,” my wise son said, surprised that it stays with me.

It’s that word inappropriate, I explained. I was inappropriate from the very beginning of my life, before the beginning of my life, the result of an inappropriate set of actions.

“Nothing that resulted in you could be inappropriate,” he said.

I started to feel a little better. After all, I do have these rather nice children, don’t I? And a life partner who actually works at understanding me. We have what I dreamed of, we really do. The only thing that threatens it seems to be my inability to let go of the past, my stubborn inability to release my personal people of Nineveh and let God decide what to do with them. I am too willing to lie in the heat of the day, angry enough to die.

Jonah, Jonah, Jonah.

I don’t want to be like you, Jonah.

I felt some of the after-tremors again today as I sat in the office waiting to hear about the congregation’s vote on the budget. Could I respond to bad news in a way that didn’t involve self-destructive anger?

As it turned out, the events of the day did not put me to the test. The budget passed, which is to say I'm getting a raise, and I sat down to a quite nice potluck lunch. I even came home with an entire chocolate cake.

There is still work to do on the inner Bird. Next Sunday’s gospel lesson has Jesus casting out an unclean spirit. Maybe that will help.

On Truth

One of the things I hope for at mid-life is to finally get over the issues I've been working through for, oh, 44 years now. What's the truth of who I was born to be?

In Bird by Bird, Anne LaMott writes:

"But you can't get to any of these truths by sitting in a field smiling beatifically, avoiding your anger and damage and grief. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We dont have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not to go into. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in--then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present moment. And that moment is home."

I've spent my whole life looking for the mother I didn't have. That didn't change when I came to understand my mother better, or even when I met my birth mother. I still felt the lack of someone who would simply love me unconditionally, someone who would give me what I have given my children: a love that acknowledges our individual peculiarities and deficits and embraces them right along with the giftedness and wondrousness.

In this family, we're pretty open about naming and embracing both ends of the spectrum. I don't know how unusual that is. I just know that in my both my growing-up family and in my much more limited experience of my birth family, the accepted practice is to ignore or deny the characteristics we don't like for as long as possible, and to jettison the person who is trouble when necessary.

I'm not a sandbag on the side of a hot-air balloon. A hot-air balloon is a pretty poor model for family living. It's too fragile, too easily upset. A family needs a vehicle that is more grounded. A person needs a vehicle that is more earthed.

Being adopted, or more particularly my relationship with my birth mother, has been a touchy subject for some years now. At Christmas I decided to write her a letter; it had taken me a year to respond to her letter of the year before, a letter that came over two years after I wrote to tell her Pure Luck and I were getting married. As soon as I put it in the mail, I knew I had begun it the wrong way; trying to use humor in reference to myself and probably setting the wrong tone by seeming to criticize the time it took her to last respond.

I can't seem to do it right. And seeing that about myself, I want to--

you guessed it, didn't you?

Jettison the weight that is upsetting the emotional balance.

I was in Jungian Analysis for many years with a wonderful Italian woman. Whenever we got too close to the mother stuff, I would run away.

Yesterday in my mentoring group, the retired pastor who leads us spoke of those times when we feel we need our mothers, when we just want to be loved exactly as we are. Oh, God! That's the last time I want my mother, either of them. The last time.

But.

I remember in analysis how I had so many dreams about my inner masculine, so many romantic dreams. I remember being told that the important thing was to heal the inner breach, not to paste over it by attracting a real life man to fill the emptiness.

The truth is, I can't go back and get a new mother. It's a little late for that. I have to find that all-loving mother in myself, give that love to myself.

Why is that so hard? How do I let go of disappointment instead of ignoring, denying or jettisoning what is difficult?

On Sunday, during our time of Sharing Joys and Concerns, a church member asked us to pray for a co-worker who just adopted a baby. When we prayed, I did something I haven't done before. It surprised me to hear the words coming out of my mouth. I prayed for the adoping mother and the new baby, and then I prayed for the mother who had surrendered her child.

I'm still grappling with this. Would it have been better, almost twenty years ago, not to contact my birth mother? After all, I started it. Would it have been better to confine her to the role I ascribed to the birth mother we prayed for on Sunday? That role is loving enough to give away what we cannot care for ourselves, or at least that's how I named it.

But it seems like whichever mother had raised me, even if it had turned out differently, I would have had a mother who wanted me to conform to an image, a pattern, a form that had nothing to do with who I actually am.

I have been so in love with each of my children~their beauties, their oddities; I can't help wishing someone had been as besotted with me.

Mothers and Daughters

My mother used to tell me that her mother was her best friend, and while that was a nice statement about their relationship, it wounded me because I was not included.

It wasn’t until after my mother died that I realized the truth. She didn’t really want me.

Now I know it wasn’t as personal as I make it sound. What she really didn’t want was to adopt a baby. It was my father’s idea in the first place. They had been married ten years, and despite the sorts of infertility treatments available in the 1950’s, my mother had never gotten pregnant. All that dye shot through the fallopian tubes had yielded nothing, and her cycle continued to be a source of pain related to endometriosis. I’m sure my father meant it kindly when he suggested that she talk to her former colleagues at the Social Services Department about adopting a baby. After all, they both wanted a family, didn’t they?

But I believe she did not want a baby that way. She wanted her own baby. And that’s not something for which to condemn her; of course it isn’t. It’s just a sharp and painful realization when you are the baby in question and the stories you have been told about adoption all hinge on being “wanted.”

My mother—beautiful, tall, genteel, with narrow feet and slender hands, every inch a gentlewoman, introverted, quiet-voiced—was everything I wasn’t and would never be. Handy with a sewing machine or a lawn mower, organized, tidy, uncomplaining, writing a beautiful ladylike hand: more things I’m not or can’t.

I was loud, smart, dreamy, impractical, sloppy, singing, riding a bike up hill and down, trying to get away, climbing the magnolia tree, seeking a shelter, trying to understand what “mother” meant.

That narrow hand delivered a sharp smack. I don’t think anyone else ever saw her anger the way I did.

Here’s what I think. I think that the moment I was placed in her arms was not a happy one. I think that all the grief she felt over not being successful at the one thing she believed mattered, the one thing that would have made her worthy in the eyes of her parents and the world, was activated by the sight, the smell, the feeling of me in her arms.

The whole world was happy for my parents. The cards, the gifts, all carefully preserved and listed and acknowledged, were overwhelming. The other adoptive parents they knew reached out in poignant letters, sharing poems and stories.

But, oh my God, the reality of a baby also meant the ultimate truth had to be faced: she had failed. And I was the reminder. Soon she was in the hospital with another attack of endometriosis. I don’t know who took care of me. That’s as deep a mystery as where I spent the ten days between leaving the hospital and going to live with my parents.

And here’s a strange thing. They were and are my parents. A child’s heart doesn’t understand the ins and outs of adoption; a child’s heart only knows “I am loved” or “I am not loved.” The reasons why, the rational explanations, the family systems theory: none of it matters. “I am loved.” “I am not loved.” That’s all they know. I knew I was adopted; I was taught that meant chosen, special. It wasn’t until later that I realized I was the living manifestation of my mother’s disappointment. And of course you don’t have to be adopted to find yourself in that position. Her first experience of me opened up her darkest places, and we shared that intimate space together for the rest of her life.

On our trip to New York last month, The Princess and I were sitting together on the train. We had our little trays down to hold the weight of the books we were reading. She looked at my hands, those sturdy peasant hands of mine, and said, “Mom, our hands really are just alike.” “Yes, they are.” “I like them. Lily told me one day that I had fat hands, but I told her they aren’t fat hands; they’re strong hands, and I like them. And Mom--” “Yes, honey.” “I’m glad we have the same hands.”

My daughter has my hands, and they are beautiful.

Bone of My Bone

It was a busy little morning here at Villa Songbird. #2 Son and the Little Princess were getting ready for school. I had plans for a morning of writing at the office, followed by a year-end lunch with our nursery school staff. #1 Son had an appointment at the allergist's for his first regular allergy shot. He took off first, using my car. After he left, as I was standing in the shower, I thought, "I wish I had asked him to call me after the shot, to let me know it all went smoothly." And when the phone rang around 8:30 a.m., I thought, what a good boy, calling to give me the relief I crave.

Well, not so much.

"Mom, I'm having a reaction. I'm breaking out in hives, and I'm having trouble breathing."

Okay, Mom is making it a point not to vocally freak out and asks, "Don't you think you should go right back to the doctor's office?"

"No, I'm coming home."

The long and short of it is, he came home to use his epi-pen and when he snapped the cap off, it shot him in the thumb, where it remained lodged.

Oy.

We went back to the allergist, where they got the reaction under control with epiniephrine and albuterol, but they sent us to the ER to deal with the epi-pen. X-rays indicated that it was stuck because it had lodged in the bone.

When the pain meds made him sick and he turned white and yellow and grey, and then the anti-nausea meds made him feel better and he dozed off, I found myself looking at his ear. He's 19, grown up for most intents and purposes, but in repose, weakened and miserable, he's my baby again. His right ear doesn't curve on the top, because it folds over just a teeny bit more than the usual; it is flat. I remember the first time I noticed it, running my finger over his tiny little ear and feeling its softness. I was young and sleep-deprived and, oh! so in love with this little boy, the first person I ever knew who was actually related to me.

I had to leave the room when they actually pulled the point of the epi-pen out with forceps later in the day. I stood in the hall with my friend, the Protestant Chaplain, who was there for me, not for him. He was stoic through the whole experience, but I was weak in the knees each time I looked at the needle protruding from his thumb.

"I can't stand to be there," I said, "knowing they are pulling it out of his bone."

"Well," she said, "he is flesh of your flesh and bone of your bone."

Yes. Yes. Bone of my bone, cartilage of my cartilage, eyes of my eyes and head of my head, with the hair that grows to a little point at the nape of his neck. And even the parts that aren't like me--the flat ear, the allergies, the qualities that came from someone else--are of me now.

When my parents adopted me, a friend sent my mother this poem:

Not flesh of my flesh, Nor bone of my bone,
But still miraculously my own.
Never forget for a single minute,
You didn't grow under my heart - but in it.
-- Author: Fleur Conkling Heylinger

I don't know if it was ever really that way for my mother. I don't know if she ever looked at my hair or my eyebrows or my hands the way I have done with my three, at #2 Son's freckles or the Little Princess's hair or #1 Son's ear, and really owned them. I don't think she was ever besotted with me as I have been with each of them. But I do know how she loved my boys, how she marveled at #1 Son's "expressive feet" and how she loved the mischievous twinkle in #2 Son's blue eyes. I know how she would have treasured my daughter if she had lived long enough to know her.

Before we left the hospital, I used a washcloth to wash a little blood off my son's hand. It's a young man's hand, but not so far from the little fingers that used to wrap tight around my pinkie. It's not so long since the big baby eyes met mine the first time he was placed in my arms: from me then and of me now, grown in my heart, bone of my bone.