SPECIAL ROLE MOMS

 

There are many ways a mother is born.

Today we celebrate Birth, Surrogate, Adoptive, Foster, and Stepmoms. 

Meegan shares her experience of motherhood through adoption, and all of the emotions that go with it.

“Being an adoptive mom changed so many of my beliefs about myself, and other moms.  The moment when I realized just how far reaching our decision to adopt Reeve had really progressed was when a neighbor announced that they were going to have a baby.  My then six year old birth daughter asked, “Well, are you adopting or pregnant?” 

We had forever altered a child’s mind set about how babies make families.

 

I will say, however unpopular the statement is, that unless you are prepared to set your own needs aside, you should not adopt.  Frankly, you should not parent.  But most certainly, you should not knowingly, willingly, and over the course of years, proceed with a focused decision to incorporate another life into your own unless you are willing to also incorporate the lives of the birth family.  Would you do this to your own birth child?  Limit their access and knowledge to their history and genetics?  Curtail their emotional needs out of your own fear?  You must accept that your adopted child is blissfully, happily, ecstatically yours to raise and love and nurture. 

They also have two other parents.

Every Mother’s Day, and truthfully, all other days, I am mortified by how I entered the adoption process: my own perceived need to have another child being the focus.   I will always and forever be indebted to Tiffany for trusting me to raise her birth daughter, but my true gratefulness is that this young woman, with every possible trial and tribulation in her midst, showed me what being a mom is.  Tiffany, at age 17, demonstrated more maturity and devotion than I have ever seen in any ‘grown up’. 

Five years later, much to the shock of physicians everywhere, I delivered a sweet little 8 pound bundle.  The only person I wanted to see in the world was Tiffany.  Watching her hold my birth child, while I was raising hers, forever sealed the motherhood between us. It didn’t take a new baby to make a new mom, it took another mother.

 I wish her all the joy and wonder in the world on this Mother’s Day.”