He asked for her!

August was a crazy month - Jackson turned 4!  Four, people!  And Addison started preschool (Jackson went last year too).  Wow, these babies are growing up!  In all of the chaos, it is always stilling when a child says something that brings you back to what matters.  Today, as I was driving the kids home from preschool Jackson said, seemingly out of the blue, "Mommy, why we don't see T any more?  I miss her.  I love her."  T is his birth mother.  And oh my gosh, my heart broke.

Let me back up.  When we began this adoption journey, the scariest thing (think like big monster with gigantic teeth dripping with saliva) was this whole birth parent situation; not the actual birth parents, just the whole situation.  We wanted to be parents SO badly, and the thought of our child having other parents was more than we could comprehend.  We feared that those other parents could somehow take away from our role in our child's life.  Would he love them more?  Or maybe just like them more?  Would he wish we were them?  Would he reserve some of his love for them and only give us some?  Could I really be his mom when another woman carried him in her womb and gave birth to him?  Very.  Scary.  Stuff.

Cut to today, in an innocent moment in the car.  My son asked for his birth mom.  And I did not feel one ounce of fear.  I just felt a little sad, because I worried about how I might engage T as she just had another baby and is deep in the infancy stage with him which has meant some distance from us (more than the already too-much-distance-for-me we already had). I asked Jackson if he missed her and he said yes.  He told me again that he loved her and I assured him that she loved him too.  I told him I would try to set up a time to see her and he said, "No! Call her now!"  I told him I would text her.  He asked if she could skype with him.  There was a sense of desperation in him that I had not heard before.  And I couldn't make it happen for him.  I texted her, and I have not heard back.  Once Jackson was placed in my arms, THIS became my biggest fear - that he would need those "other" parents and I would not be able to provide the comfort he needed.

Luckily, Jackson is 4.  While I doubt he has forgotten that conversation or his desire to see T, he has moved on emotionally from it for now.  I have some time.   But his birth father, A, has already cut all ties with us.  It was too much for him.  I just want to make sure that Jackson has access to his story, his birth family.  I just want him to be whole.  So when he asked for T today and told me he loved her, I felt nothing but desperation with him - to get him to the person he wanted to see and to assure him of her love for him.

My love for Jackson is not a love you can plan for, it is something that overtakes you and consumes you.  What I didn't know back when I had all of those fears was that this very love would be strong enough to push out any of my own fears.  I would face any scary thing on this earth for this little boy, to make him happy, to make him whole.

Adoption is a beautiful thing.