The same strange coin

An abecedarian

Adoption is redemption but also

Brokenness. Two sides of the same strange

Coin, the one we flipped five years ago and it landed on you, my

Darling boy. Your dad and I

Entered the NICU that winter evening, through the tall iron gates of

Foster care. You weighed 1 pound 12 ounces. So impossibly tiny in that isolette, machines beeping, wires protruding,

Guardian angels watching over you day and night.

How did you do it?

I wonder this often. How did you survive?

Jessica, our social worker, called me that day and said there was a miracle on the third floor of the hospital.

Kyeler—that’s the name his birth mom gave him, she told me. I walked into the darkened NICU and

Loved you in the way that any

Mother loves a child she has never met before but who needs her, which is to say: completely and utterly.

Now I can’t believe I ever didn’t know you. Does that make sense? We talk of your belly mom sometimes. We have five photos of you together, only five, but we look at them and thank God that she grew you.

Once you called her a bad mom. I understood what you meant, but I couldn’t agree. How could I ever speak ill of the woman who gave you life? Sometimes we

Pray for her, out there in the world, without you. You have so many

Questions and I have so few answers. It’s easy to romanticize our journey to becoming a family but in

Reality there are aches and pains that would not be there without the trauma of foster care and adoption. They are aches and pains that I would undergo a million times over for the gift of having you as my

Son.

This week is your birthday. You will be five!!! You told me all you wanted was a Grinch beanie and a

Unicorn. I would give you the world if I could but instead I will give you what I have, which isn’t much, but it is real (unlike the unicorn, sorry honey). What I have to give you is real love born not of my womb but of my heart, my

Very soul.

When you’re older I hope you feel free to keep asking questions. I hope I feel free to keep giving insufficient answers when I would much rather give you something black and white, like the

X-ray images we saw in the hospital of your brain and your abdomen and your heart, which had a hole in it when you were born at 26 weeks. Maybe

You will always have some sort of hole, because of everything you’ve lost, and that’s okay. I can’t fix it but I can be here, with you, all of my days, being your mother. There are a

Zillion ways your story could have ended, but it ended with our family. Together. Happy birthday, my love.