I had been expecting it since the day we first considered adopting. Yet when it happened, my heart was still shattered.
It was a simple exchange, a random interaction in the course of an already-full Sunday morning. Shoes being tied, crockpot being loaded into the van for the fellowship meal, change the baby’s diaper, has anyone let the dog go out before we leave?
From my bedroom window, Birdie and John Mark watched Mary Hannah pull out of the driveway with her friend, visiting from Georgia. Thoughtful, Birdie looked up at her big brother.
“How come her friend is here all alone? Where’s her mother?”
“Her mom just isn’t here,” he shrugged. “You know, like my real mom isn’t here?”
And suddenly, I could not breathe.
I have known this thing would happen, the words would be said. I have known that eventually I’d hear something fly from the mouth of one of my children that would bring me to tears not because of something I did, but something I did not do.
I did not give birth to all of my children.
But I am still very “real.”
We had a gentle conversation, John Mark and I. Later, when I had brushed the tears from my face and my hands were no longer trembling. I worked it into the natural banter as he helped me check the supplies in Jude’s diaper bag.
“I heard you tell Birdie that your birth mom isn’t here. Have you been thinking about her?”
“Not really.”
“Well, if you do, I’d love to talk to you about her. Because she is real, like you said. She gave birth to you. That’s why we call her your birth mom…”
And again, the same careful wording, the same act of trying to honor so many hurts and shine the light on God’s fingerprints throughout. I’ve spoken these things to this son a hundred times already, and I will do so countless times in the future. Forever. Trying to to give him words, trying to give myself words, trying to navigate the reality that our relationship has an invisible third party whose loss is felt, and grieved, and real.
John Mark nodded, oblivious to how fiercely I wanted to scoop him into my arms and shield him — us — from the uprooting of the hurts that his defining years will bring as he wrestles with the way God has written his story. I see hard days in our future, days when “my real mom” isn’t an accidental slip of semantics, but a stinging barb. Days when I cry not from a simple phrase misspoke, but from hard questions which I cannot answer. My heart will be crushed, again and again, by my children — all of them, regardless of biology. But adoption brings with it a special pain, a unique undercutting of the very way we define ourselves.
You’re not my real mom!
Yes, birthmothers are real. But the mother who rocked you through your pain as your first tooth emerged, the mother who taught you to write your name … I’m just as real. And I am the one who will hold this child I am blessed to have as my son as he questions and mourns and kicks against both of us. Together, John Mark and I will stumble along the path, stepping on one another’s toes, misunderstanding, taking offense where none is intended. We will get angry, and we will hurt one another deeply. But we will also discover that through this process God can be glorified, and His intent is that we grow ever closer to understanding His love as we experience the unconditional love of our family. We will learn that we can get it wrong. We can communicate poorly. We can be entirely unworthy. Yet we are still loved. And that love, even when we take it for granted, is very, very real.
“Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’
‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.
‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’
‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’
‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit