In Which December is Also Adoption Month

I feel kind of bad that I hardly blogged at all for National Adoption Month. I feel like I should have had SOMETHING to say about it, being a birth mother and all. But I guess that's part of why I didn't say more - I am a birth mother. Every month is adoption month for me :)

It's like that for anyone who's been through something big. There might be a day or a month for cancer or adoption or civil rights or anything else. But whereas most people think about it for a day or a month, if it's personal for you, every single day is, for instance, National Adoption Day. It's not a once-a-year occasion.

I don't specifically think of adoption every single day, but I do think of Roo and, as I placed her, adoption is in there somewhere. I can't separate Roo from adoption. Without adoption, I wouldn't be blogging right now. I'd be chasing a two-year-old around, trying to keep her from breaking the ornaments on my Christmas tree.

Or not. It's the weekend, so I might not have custody of Roo today; H would. I know that having to share custody would have broken my heart. I try to remember that kind of thing whenever I get these rosy ideas about what being Roo's mother would be like. I wouldn't even get to be her mother full-time - and not just because of H. I would probably be at work today, because if I'd chosen to parent Roo, I'd be working at least two jobs to try to keep afloat. I'd have to. I mean, I'm falling under as it is with the one job I'm working now, and I only have to take care of me. I can't imagine trying to take care of someone else.

It's just ... I love her. I think I'm always going to imagine what one thing or another would be like, even though I know my imagination glosses over the reality of what it would be like. I can't help but think about her, and I can't help but miss her.

It's not always a terribly sad thing. And over time, it's become something that isn't always Roo-specific. I miss having a baby and I miss being a mother in general.

I've been told by more than one birth mother that I'm lucky because I "got to" parent Roo for a couple of months before I placed her, that they're jealous. I hate hearing that. I feel like it diminishes the difficulty of placement - like it was a breeze because I got to spend time with Roo first, or like I was always going to place her but I parented first just to see what it was like. Whenever I hear placement stories, birth moms say things about how they cherished their time in the hospital because they knew it was their only time with the baby they were going to place. They often say that they wished they had more time.

Sometimes I selfishly wish I'd had less. Not that I would ever, for anything in the world, take back a single second I spent with my baby when she was mine. But the fact that I hadn't previously made an adoption plan, that I planned to be and was in fact Roo's mother, that made it so much harder for me to place her. [I want to specify here that I'm not saying that it was any harder for me to place than it was for anyone else, but that parenting first made adoption harder for me personally.] I knew exactly what it was that I was going to miss. I had been not just a mother but Roo's mother. If I hadn't been above 100% certain about P and M, I never could have placed.

But as I said, I have moments these days where it's not baby Roo that I miss entirely; it's motherhood. I have always wanted to be a mother. I worry sometimes that Roo was my only shot at motherhood. Sometimes I feel okay with that. Sometimes I think, "Roo is enough. The time I had as her mother was enough. If that's all I ever get, I'm okay with that." Other times all I can think is how grossly unfair life is. The key is balancing those times, making sure the former is more common than the latter. I'm not quite there yet.

But I'm getting better.