Approaching 7

My boys will only be six for three more days. It is so bittersweet for me. As we approach their birthday I become more and more emotional about it. And I feel more and more unsettled, isolated, and alone with the emotions. I can’t help thinking about the fact that I missed it— I missed their birth. I can’t articulate the intense gratefulness I feel toward their birthmother— grateful beyond my ability to express (words just seem to cheapen it). I can’t wrap my mind around my indebtedness toward the people and place of their roots— Rock (their orphanage director); all of the people who, in individual ways, contributed to granting them life for the first long eight months of their totally vulnerable lives; the country of Haiti for giving me them. It is all so much and the emotions run so wide and so deep. It is hard to explain this to anyone who has never adopted before, and I worry that expressing it just makes me look like a drama queen, making more of something than it is. Adoptive parents (many of them, at least) get it. But others seem to not. And there are lots more others than there are fellow adoptive parents. There is a deep, complicated, complex melancholy I feel about all of this.

And I know my boys feel it too. Different, of course, but kind of the same too. Lots of thoughts, lots of emotions, wide and deep. Yesterday I found them on the back porch blowing bubbles. They were tilting their heads all the way back, looking straight up to the sky, holding the bubble wands above them and blowing the bubbles straight up into the sunlight. As they saw me approaching they happily exclaimed, in unison (yeah, a twin thing, completely in unison)– “We’re blowing bubbles to our birthmother!!!!!” She is right on the surface of their minds in these days.

Today in the car on the way to school Kyle announced: “I want to be rich when I grow up.” I said, “Really? Why?” He said, “Because I want to have lots of money.” I said, “What would you do with all the money?” He said, “I’d buy a speedboat, a house, and I’d help Haiti.” He was dead serious. I told him I thought that was completely respectable. He then told me that “the first thing” he would do for Haiti is that he’d “fly an airplane over the whole country dropping thousands and thousands of soccer balls for all of the kids.”

As we count down the days to their birthday I am reminded yet again of the huge obligation that I have in mothering them. I need to do right by them. Their life story is already so extraordinary, their selves already so exceptional, their future so incredibly bright yet also so burdened. It is pressing: I need to do right by them. I need to do right by her. I need to do right by everyone who has played a role. I need to do right by Haiti. It is big, yes. And I cringe at the thought of the critiques from those who will say that I’m a drama queen for feeling/thinking/saying this, making more of something than it is. But one thing I know for sure is this: it really is this big. If anything, I am understating it.

And so I try hard to hold it all in my one heart: the truth and width and depth of how completely complicated and complex it all is, while at the same time celebrating – truly celebrating – the day of their birth.