Mother's Day in an Adoptive Family

My parents: I look like them, and we
have been a family my whole life.

Mother's Day is not all fun and happiness at our house.  It is not that it is bad either, but it is different when children have a family of origin.  Like many families, our kids make plans and loudly whisper secrets the week before.  They make cards and gifts and pick dandelions.  They tell me to go back to bed so they can "surprise" me and everyone works hard to celebrate me. 

However, as an adoptive mom there is a "shadow" over the day.  Some of my children acknowledge it and others think it doesn't matter, but I know it matters.  Maybe it doesn't matter at age 4 or 6, but it matters a lot by the time the kids are tweens because the "shadow" is a part of their history, their genetics and their future.  Most of my kids will have children that look more like a stranger than like my hubby and I.  That is not a bad thing, but the future will reveal more about their past and they will wonder whose nose their child has and if members of their first family were very tall and if they liked the same things. 

To make this day tougher, our children have already lost their first parents to death or abandonment or unfortunate circumstances.  The question of why does God let bad things happen is very real, especially around Mother's Day.  We don't want to rewrite the past into a fairy tale, but we don't want any of our children to ever think that they were unloved for even a second of their life!  So we focus Mother's Day on God's love.  God loves me and blessed me with the incredible experience of being mom 10 times!  God loves them and when bad things happened, He helped make a path for them to be in our family as He had planned for them.  God is the reason that we are a family, and we try to focus our thanks to God who gave birth mom's and caring orphanage workers and brought about adoptions.  It doesn't make the celebrations any simpler, but I wouldn't want it to because God had beautiful plans for each of my children and those plans started in the womb, not when I became their mom.  

"A child born to another woman calls me mommy. The magnitude of that tragedy & the depth of that privilege are not lost on me." -Jody Landers