adoptive moms can get the baby blues, too

Recently, I was talking to a friend of mine who is also an adoptive mother. We were discussing the way society seems to believe adoptive mothers simply bounce back after baby, as if they are immune from the anxiety and the depression (and the the fear and chaos and sleep deprivation) that mothers who gave birth tend to experience. It was an a-ha! moment for me because I realized then how right she was. We had a great deal of support from friends and family during Carmen's entry into our family, and I was fortunate to escape the baby blues (this go 'round) that often accompanies new motherhood -- but not everyone shares that same luck. I've been told before how lucky I am to have the joy of a newborn without the pain of giving birth, and as someone who has also given birth I can understand the intention behind the comment.

After all, I had a c-section with Ethan that was a far cry from routine and my issues continued into the postpartum period for sometime. Of course, my husband had a nice chunk of paid paternity leave following the birth of our child so I wasn't alone at home and, moreso, I'm pretty sure we had visitors every moment of every day bringing by food, helping out. Our pediatrician was on call for all of my new mom questions and when I cried to my OB that I was feeling very depressed and anxious about breastfeeding failures, I got the support I needed -- including a handy phone number to a counselor who specialized in postpartum depression and anxiety. While, no, I didn't just have my body stitched back together when I strapped Carmen into the car seat upon hospital discharge, I still had a newborn in my care who we were just beginning to start the bonding process with. No one was sleeping, I had another child at home desperate for normalcy and my attention, and life was just supposed to snap back to where it was -- including my husband having to go back to work right away. I won't pretend I didn't cry those first few nights from the exhaustion and stress of it all, the conglomerate of happy disbelief and overwhelmed exhaustion wreaking havoc on my body.

For many adoptive mothers, the bonding begins when the baby comes home. You don't have the option of caring for the child in utero. You don't get those moments bonding over food cravings and sleep patterns, or the way the baby moves to the beat of a certain song. You don't particularly know whose baby photos she resembles more, or whose allergies she has inherited. In our case, we visited our daughter in the NICU and she still legally had a different last name than ours. Most of the nurses were understanding and knew we were adoptive parents, but there were a couple of greeters who explained in great detail we would need parental permission to visit. Ouch. You do a lot of explaining and guessing in those early days, which is really unnatural in terms of mothering. I felt admittedly very self-conscious about having to answer "I don't know" to most of the questions on our newborn check-up at the pediatrician because I was her mother -- how could I not know? I'm pretty sure I legitimately brought a family tree print-out to Ethan's first visit with everyone's allergy or ailment clearly marked. For me, as someone whose body carried a terminally ill child and who gave birth to death and then delved into the pits of infertility, I struggled mostly with wanting to feel accepted as a mother. I wanted people to stop asking me if I wanted their breastmilk -- a well-intentioned offer that read more like a reminder of all the ways my body was inferior to everyone else's -- and to stop speaking to me like I found a baby on the side of the road who I had no connection with ("do you think she knows who you are?"). There's that anxiety when the baby cries and you don't know how to calm her -- in Carmen's case, it was silent reflux -- when logic falls by the wayside and you're wondering if she doesn't accept you as her mother and what if she doesn't love you with the unconditional love that you're already pouring all over her? For some adoptive mothers, bonding is hard and bonding takes time. For some adoptive mothers, mothering begins as a routine and an adjustment period until one day it just becomes as natural as breathing -- but sometimes that takes time, and sometimes it takes work. Sometimes it causes great stress and great sadness and there is no OB who pulls you aside to slip you a little piece of paper with a counselor's phone number written on it.

For me, when Carmen first came home, everyone seemed to want to know about her birth family. While I was quick to ensure no one ever shook their heads with disgust upon the assumption she was an unwanted or discarded baby, it felt very dismissive. With Ethan's arrival, people asked if we were sleeping or eating or how much he weighed or if we needed any help with anything. With Carmen's arrival, people asked about her birth parents and were they teenagers and why did they decide on adoption and is it an open or closed adoption, anyway? For some adoptive mothers, and certainly myself, the guilt in those early days was palpable and stressful. Being bombarded with inquiries that concerned no one else but us was intense and a major trigger for my anxiety. "But how much did it cost?" people asked as I tried to let my oldest have some normalcy time at the playground. No.

When you bring home a baby you gave birth to, you bring home a baby into your home and settle yourselves into your own routine and schedule. When you bring home a baby through adoption, you have to clear your calendar for post-placement visits and finalization dates. One time in particular, I had to rush Ethan home from art class as he wailed he wanted to stay because we had to rush home to meet the social worker. And then you wonder if your house is clean enough, if they're going to mark you off for your lack of laundry skills or the banana peel browning on the kitchen table that you overlooked. You're going to wonder if they can tell you haven't been sleeping or if they're going to take your dirty yoga pants and mom bun as a sign you're failing at motherhood because you just can't look as put together as you wanted to for this occasion. You're going to have to answer questions about your relationship and life and children and make sure you have clear answers from the pediatrician with the baby's measurements and vaccination records. You just want to pass every test because you love your child so much, you do, and you don't want anyone to doubt you.

I was fortunate enough to have friends who put together a Meal Train for my family and so we were fed for those first couple weeks -- but from my research, not all adoptive mothers receive that level of care. I had missed a dentist appointment that I forgot about in the chaos of the adoption process and, when the receptionist called to scold me and reschedule me, I blurted out we just adopted a baby and I'm so tired and sorry. She was quick to point out that I didn't have the baby so my mind should be a lot sharper. She meant it as a joke, but I wasn't laughing -- and I found a new dentist, too. I began to quickly fall behind in Ethan's schedule, with his lessons and classes and playdates as well as his homeschool activities. There was a lot of pressure to bounce back, snap back, integrate myself back into everyday life because my body wasn't healing. I was apologizing a lot in those days and beating myself up with what I thought were failures but now I see was just normal life with a newborn in tow. Because a newborn is a newborn, no matter how the baby came to be.

When there's no OB appointment to follow up with every few weeks, there's no one to ask how you're doing or notice your tears. There's no one to ask how your mental health is. There's no one looking out for the warning signs of depression or anxiety in adoptive mothers as there are in women who have just given birth. I've come to realize that adoptive mothers spend a lot of time trying to remind people that they're mothers and those early days are no exception but somewhere in the exhaustion and chaos and diapers and bonding, you don't have the words for your feelings. Sometimes you're just sad. Sometimes you're just scared. Sometimes you wish you had a village huddled around you as someone who gives birth has, reminding you that you just brought a baby home and to be gentle with yourself -- and asking how they can help, if you're eating, if you're sleeping and if you're doing okay.

i didn't do a good thing

I do this thing where I hang onto the words of other people for far longer than I should. It could be from a lifetime of being insecure and second-guessing everything I say and do, but it also could be because people say the strangest things and my awkwardness simply bars me from knowing how to respond until three hours later. There was the time the woman in front of me in the Starbucks line told me that my then-two year old son looked like ET ("not Elliott, but the actual alien," she confirmed). I mean, I don't really need to go into specifics. We all know that people spew the most random, offensive garbage from their mouths more than they should and the bottom line is, I really need to stop listening so closely.

Still, it makes me pause when people learn that we adopted a child and follow that up with: that was so nice of you to do. If I try to help them dig themselves out of the hole, they just worsen the problem by elaborating how very much our adoption was a measure of charity. A good deed. A gift to some presumably abandoned, unwanted second-tier kid that will never compare to their superstar snowflake who was one adoption shy from being the next George of the Jungle.

Just, no. No, people. Adopting Carmen was not a good deed. It wasn't something nice I did for pats on the back and karma kudos points. Adoption was the choice to put ourselves out there to be considered to parent a child that we would only be able to love because a birth mother loved him or her first. I had to nix the insecure thing and tell complete strangers about myself in hopes that they would like me enough to deem me fit to raise the child they had given birth to. No pressure, right? I mean, I wore Converse shoes with heels to school in tenth grade because I didn't care what people thought of me. I submitted Bitch by Meredith Brooks as the song that best describes my life for an eleventh grade final project because I didn't care what people thought of me (I failed). I dyed my hair blue and green and purple as an adult because I didn't care what the other moms on the playground thought of me. But when it came to a birth mother reviewing our profile? I have never wanted to be liked more for my raw, vulnerable, truest self. On the other end of our profile was a mother who was about to make the most difficult, loving, selfless decision. If anyone is to be praised, it is the birth mother.

Raising Carmen is not a charitable deed. It's not something that makes me commendable or heroic or worthy of praise. Raising Carmen is the greatest honor, joy and privilege of my lifetime. It is one that I will never take for granted even on the hardest days. It wasn't a good thing I did to sit my husband down and have the conversation that my body was closed for conception purposes. It was the easiest choice we ever had to make, as loving a child should always be. What comes easier than loving a child placed so lovingly in your arms? What is easier to imagine than falling in love with a baby who was deemed yours by the birth mother who delivered her into existence?

And still, these statements are usually followed up with a "but I could never love a baby who was not my own."

But that's where you're wrong, stranger. She is my own.

She is my own, and my love for her is effortless and infinite. She is my own, and raising her is the greatest honor of my lifetime. This isn't about charity, stranger. It is she who is the prize, the most valuable gift. I am simply humbled and lucky beyond words to have been chosen to call her my daughter. I did nothing praiseworthy to get myself to this point, but I will devote my life to loving every moment of mothering her, just as I was chosen to do -- just as all mothers should.

Alchemist tee by Wire and Honey

both sides now

When Carmen joined our family, I swear I felt our entire circle of friends and family let out some collective sigh of relief. There. Life was good now, again. Life was safe and warm and happy. I would again get to know the feeling of two a.m. feedings and painful exhaustion and what it's like consoling a screaming infant as your older child runs rampant through the Target aisles. There. Life was good again, regrowing where the grass was seared at the dead end.

And it was good again. Life, I mean. It was good again for the first time in a while, like the hollow wound throbbing and bleeding in my side had been properly tended to and healed and stitched to perfection with ointment to stop the ache. There is always that reflexive wince when someone calls me a mom of two, or asks if we plan on another child, or points out how fortunate I am to have "one of each" sex, or things that seem so commonplace to regular moms. It stings just subtly enough for me to always remember that I'm never going to be a regular mom again, even though I was one once.

That's sort of what grief leaves you with as some shitty consolation prize for the ringer you've survived: pieces of normalcy, but not an entire picture. There will always be one child that my body carried who will be missing from our family photographs or holiday traditions, one child not seen when well-meaning strangers inquire about the age gap between Ethan and Carmen. You don't even know the half of it, I will think as a fast-paced montage of heartbreak and diagnosis and tragedy and death and infertility and uncertainty flash before my eyes before ending with a photograph of Carmen. Oh, sweet Carmen, with her gigantic, sparkling eyes. She is the sweetness at the end, yes. She has duct taped the normalcy back into our lives so that we function like a normal family. But there are always those reminders that normalcy is a thing of the past.

Sometimes I look back at old photographs of my husband and I when we were teenagers and just making our love known. Our engagement, our wedding. The smiles and selfies-with-film-cameras and blissful naivety that comes from thinking everything would be normal because we were normal and our lives were normal and there was nothing exciting or different about us at all. There's that little feeling of invasion that happens, too. That uneasy feeling you get when your home has been robbed while you weren't home, knowing someone has been touching your stuff and invading your privacy. That feeling sort of tags along with grief, too. Something just sort of takes a piece of you and rearranges things without your permission. The security doesn't regenerate even when life becomes better again, brighter again. It's just sort of dead, too.

I always had this vision that I wanted all of the things for my children that I didn't have. I want siblings and loud, magical Christmases and birthday parties with cousins. I wanted to be a grandmother who welcomed all of my children and my many grandchildren into my home on Sundays for big, boisterous dinners. There was no guarantee of that, of course. My children could all decide to not want children, to travel the world, to settle down in a yurt in Mongolia somewhere. But there's still that piece of you that goes what if and feels the quietness of your own life and wants more, louder, bigger things. The what if is hard to lose, too. It clings to you and trumps any rational thought or logic because it is fueled by grief.

In the immortal words of Tupac Shakur, it's got you staring at the world through your rearview.

There are the nights where I cry silently in bed because the happiness tickles my bones and makes my stomach flop with eagerness and joy and a general feeling of life that I can still remember thinking was gone forever. I can still feel the sorrow so deep that breathing physically aches and you're not sure that you can trudge through another day, hour, minute because your bones shake, your joints are stiff and the exhaustion is suffocating. I've come out the other side. I've climbed out of the ravine and my muscles no longer tremble and I feel refreshed, yes. I feel happiness again. Joy in it's purest form. But there are the aches that still get you when you least expect them and I know that I'll never fully recover from the injuries but I can succeed at wearing my gameface while walking it off. It's an awkward dance, an uncomfortable balancing act that accompanies life after tragedy. The ability to see life from both sides, or something.

a birth mother is not the enemy

I still can't believe she picked me.

I think this often when Carmen is looking at me with her joyful, bright brown eyes. Somewhere out there is a mother with empty arms. Not only does she not have the opportunity to watch her baby grow or reach all of her milestones, but she chose that inexplicable pain for the sake of her baby. For our daughter. Our daughter. She carried our daughter in her body and nourished her as best as she could and then gave birth to her and said goodbye. She did that because she loved our daughter too much to let her go without.

Sometimes when people scrunch up their noses and say "what kind of person would give up that beautiful baby?" or "I hope she knows this is your baby now," I wonder if they process that. If they can process that, even half of it. I wonder -- especially when they have children -- if they can understand the magnitude of the sacrifice the mother of our daughter made. I can't imagine the strength it took to admit that you did not have what it takes to provide to your child, that you weren't in the position to mother your child as they deserved to be mothered. I can't imagine the strength it took to knowingly choose someone else to parent your child, knowing the milestones you would be forever missing and the fact that your baby was calling someone else mommy forever. What kind of person, they wonder? Well, a magnificent one. A brave one. A pretty special one, even.

I mean, step back for a minute. Imagine looking through stacks of books and flipping through pictures and reading stories and looking for the people who would become your child's parents. Think about that for a minute. And understand not only the magnitude of the strength and bravery that Carmen's birth mother possesses, but the depth of the honor I carry.

She read our story, she saw our pictures and she chose us. She saw me and said "that's the one" and I'm still waiting for that to fully sink in, to feel remotely worthy. I can assure you that she isn't confused, and she understands with her tattered heart that we are Carmen's parents.

But she is her mother, too. You don't just stop being a mother when your child dies, or when you place (not give up, please) your baby into another family. To think such is to completely discredit the unrelenting bond between mother and child. Carmen will always be made up of the love of her biological mother. No time or distance or adoption will be able to take that away, and that is a comfort that brings me warmth, too. What kind of monster would want their child to feel unwanted, unloved?

Unlike most of the friends I've made in the online adoption circuit, we do not have an open adoption. There is anonymity for the most part, some level of privacy for every aspect of life except our electronically submitted photos and updates. There is loss in never having met Carmen's birth father, a loss I carry deep in my heart. I was never able to see his face -- which resembles Carmen so, so very much -- in person. When people "what kind of person" me, I wonder what part they're missing. I wonder why they can't understand the unconditional love that I feel for Carmen's birth mother who will always be without, for her siblings who will always be without, for her father who will always be without. They are related by blood to our daughter, to our world, our stars, our sunshine, our rainbow. I mean, they picked us.

They saw our pictures and they picked us. They sacrificed the first smile, sibling relationships, the warm sighs of a milk drunk baby ready for sleep. They sacrificed because they love Carmen with the fierceness that we do. They love her as much as we do and they picked us to love her.

Too often, the birth mother figure is painted as a villain. Someone who was inadequate, who failed somehow, who couldn't pull things together because they didn't care or didn't want to. Too often, a birth mother is someone careless and dirty, someone who is not worthy. Part of me blames the "innocent, pregnant teenager" fallacy for this -- too often, this is the only acceptable form of birth mother and, yet, statistically, it is one that truly doesn't exist as portrayed in film and on television. Carmen's birth mother is not our mortal enemy. She is not an opponent, a rival, someone on another team competing against our own.

She is the woman who gave birth to our daughter and asked me to be her mother. She picked me. And I will spend the entirety of my life fighting for her honor, and the honor of all birth families who are too often not represented fairly. How can I express my gratitude to the woman who, bleeding and stomach stapled from surgery, fought her tears and handed our daughter to us?

She picked us. She picked me. And I pick a lifetime of existing to make her proud.

carmen's gotcha day

This morning was Carmen's adoption courthouse ceremony which means her adoption is officially official! Ethan and I have been talking about this day for the past few months -- Carmen's "gotcha day." (Ethan also thinks we should call it Carmen's Forever Day, so it's a title in progress.) Ethan decided we should do pizza and a cake as an annual gotcha day/forever day tradition. Of course, it was hard to explain to Ethan the legalities since to him, Carmen was officially his sister from the moment she first came home.

A little before noon, some of our family members and close friends met us at the courthouse with our attorney and we made it official. Carmen is officially Carmen, and what we've felt in our hearts since the early morning of February 27th is now confirmed in the eyes of the law and the state of Florida.

Welcome home, my lovebug. Forever and always, you are our daughter.

what makes a family

I've been quiet on the blog more than I like. I'm chalking it up to a busy life and an even busier summer but that doesn't help the feeling that I have so! many! things! that I want to say. So many words just dying to come out. I've been busy on Instagram but that isn't the same.

Tonight I'm making peace with the chaos in my head, the words that are fighting for their chance to come out. Tonight I'm letting other things fall on the back burner for a minute because I need to speak on behalf of my daughter for a minute.

My daughter is black. Well, half. Her blackness doesn't need an apology. It doesn't need you to feign colorblindness and act like you see my skin tone in hers. Families don't have to match. Of all the things that makes a family, nowhere on the list is looking alike. My daughter doesn't look like me and that's okay, because she's my daughter and at the end of the day, our physical likeness plays no role. My daughter is black and her blackness is beautiful and wonderful and nothing that should warrant a stranger to say "maybe she won't get so dark" after inquiring about her ethnicity.

My beautiful sweet baby girl is only four months old and already I've lost count of the comments when I'm out with both children. The stares. And when my husband is with us, oh, the "that poor guy doesn't realize what his wife has been up to" giggles and whispers. When you see a white mother clutching her two babies -- one white, one much darker -- please don't walk up to her and ask her which father she's currently with. Please don't nod and ask "different dads?" with the casualness of someone asking how the weather is outside. Please don't learn my daughter is adopted (a story that Ethan loves to tell) and speak of her as if she's not really mine -- "so, is she addicted to any drugs? Was she, like, okay?" should never leak from your lips. That's my daughter you're speaking about. That's my baby. We are very open about Carmen's adoption and would love to shoot the adoption breeze all the live long day, but please, don't look down at my five year old son and then back up at me and ask me if her birth family can still "come get her if they want." Don't ask if there weren't any white babies available, or if I would have preferred a baby that shared my son's bright, blue eyes and mess of straight brown hair.

My daughter doesn't look like me. She doesn't look a thing like her brother, either. But you should see them together, the way he smiles and baby talks her with a "here I am, Carmie Parmie. Here I am, here's your bruh bruh" in the mornings and the way her face lights up in response. That is what makes a family. The love, the love so thick and powerful, the love that permeates through every inch of our home. That is what makes a family.

At the end of each day, I scroll through Facebook and read the combative posts debating the existence of racism in America. The next morning, I will get up and wait for the next stranger to stop me and inquire if I'm the nanny, or which of my two children is really mine.

They're both mine.

They're both my beautiful, incredible babies. They're the reason that my heart continues to beat each day.

And what makes a family, please believe, is the love that is shared between us. The unbreakable chains of unconditional love and joy and renewal and hope.

the road to carmen, or: navigating infertility

Our road to Carmen hasn't been easy. While I've been particularly vocal about my pregnancy with Wylie as well as her death, I've yet to really go into our infertility struggle in depth. Mostly this is because there isn't much to say, but on the other hand, there is so much to say. Sometimes when they find out about our infertility issues, people respond with something along the lines of "I'm lucky I have no issues conceiving." It takes all I can to smile and nod. I don't find their words particularly callous, but that's probably because I was diagnosed with unexplained secondary infertility. That means that I, too, was fertile -- until I wasn't. For both Ethan and Wylie's conceptions, I never tracked my fertile dates. Heck, I didn't even know when I was supposed to be ovulating at all -- not even a ballpark. My periods had never been too regular -- always off by a few days -- but it never seemed to matter. I didn't put much stock into trying to figure it out. Both times, we said "let's have a baby" and did, on the first try. I can recall a time in particular during my early days of Wylie's pregnancy when a friend was struggling to conceive month after month and I, in all of my empathy and intended compassion, began my statement of reassurance with "I have no issues conceiving but..." Foot in mouth. Foot still lodged in mouth, all of these years later. That's the thing about unexplained secondary infertility -- you can conceive 46 babies on the first try, but that 47th? It may not happen. And the hardest part, to me, was that there was seemingly no medical reasoning behind it.

Our infertility journey began with fear. By the second month that I wasn't pregnant, I began to panic. My husband thought I was crazy. My OB thought I was crazy, but her gentle smile never broke even over the phone when I called to voice my concerns. By the third month, I caved and purchased a package of ovulation tracking strips off Amazon. By the fourth month, I was ruled by these test strips. By the fifth month, even my OB was starting to get concerned. After all, our past fertility history was pretty, well, impressive. It was month six when we were officially referred to a fertility specialist. "It's because you're not relaxed enough," everyone said.

That, right there, I need to discuss. Can we not completely trivialize infertility? Can we not act like no one in the history of the Earth has procreated successfully while under stress or even while grieving? Can people not bounce their babies on their knee while lecturing infertile people about how "it'll happen if you just relax?" That would be great.

Anyway, the reproductive endocrinologist (that's the fancy term for fertility specialist) was gentle and kind. The nurses were holding me and wiping my tears after appointment one, which I attended alone because no one really knows how to act around people who are infertile so they avoid you or the subject entirely.

Infertility is test after test being run. Blood tests of every imaginable kind, pelvic exams that leave you reeling in pain and sure your flesh has just been scraped straight off. Biopsies and ultrasounds with wands rammed up inside of you that make you scream out in pain even when you've had them done five times already in the past week. Shots in your stomach. Pills that make your stomach turn and make you throw up and fall to your knees in cramps that make the entire situation feel even more unbearable. Even your husband gets subjected to his own levels of pride-killing humiliation.

And results that come back totally fine in every way. That's always the kicker.

Ever since we were teenagers, we had planned on having two children and adopting two children. Adoption has always been on our radar, but maybe as something farther away. All you ever hear about adoption is the cost associated and the hurdles and hoops to jump through. But then you're $10,000 in the hole with fertility treatments that are wreaking havoc on your stability. There was one day in particular that I had to have my period induced and had to leave a playdate (in which many of my friends were sitting on my sofa nursing their little ones and talking about birth stories) to go have my insides dug at while sitting on the always humiliating puppy pee pad -- that day had a hard recovery period. And soon that day became the new normal because your days become consumed by the schedule the reproductive endocrinologist has you on and being hurt by everyone else living their normal lives and each time your results come back perfectly fine and no one can tell you anything except that your life, you're sure of it, is over and will never be righted again.

Anyway, one day I came home from one of those appointments to find out the treatment hadn't worked and I wasn't pregnant and I fell onto the floor in front of my bed and sobbed until I threw up and my husband held me and together we decided it was enough. In my heart of hearts, I didn't want to be pregnant. We wanted to grow our family and nothing made sense less than doing so biologically and so we decided that we would stop our infertility journey and focus instead of finding our baby. He or she was out there, or would be soon enough.

There's somewhere I'm going with this, a post brewing in my brain, but I felt like it needed a preface. Carmen gave my life back to me. She blew the wind back into my sails. She breathed new hope into our family, and some kind of normalcy back into a world that had been rocked to it's very core. She made me feel like I was a mother again, like I could mother again. She showed me that I am not broken.

Can I conceive naturally? Maybe. However, we have made the choice to take that option off the table. Loss and infertility has rendered us unable to have the "how many children do you plan on having" small talk that most mothers share on a regular basis. Much of what it is to be normal and a parent has been skewed by the cards we were dealt, but it has been Carmen to has created our new path. In all of her petite preemie presence, she has changed our lives in such a big way. She is a massive force of hope and purpose.

"I want to adopt when I'm a grown up," Ethan said the other day. "Carmen is supposed to be here in our family so we had to get her. When I'm a grown up I think my kids will be somewhere else and I'll have to bring them where they belong, too."

(To be continued, or something like that.)

of luck and love.

From the moment we adopted Carmen, we heard it:

She's so lucky to have you.

This isn't an offensive statement, of course. She is lucky to have us in the way anyone is lucky to have someone they love, someone who loves them. It is the tone used most often that irritates me most, an implication that Carmen's birth mother carried and delivered her and then simply handed her off with the carelessness of someone incapable of love. You see, Carmen was lucky to have her birth mother because she loves her with the love only a mother can possess.

Carmen's birth mother loves her with every ounce of herself. She loved her too much to bring her up in a life of instability and so she chose a lifetime of emptiness for herself for the sake of her baby. She chose to ache every day, to miss and long for a baby she loves every single day, so that her child could know security and family and stability. Those are the makings, to me, of what defines an extraordinary human being, of what define what a mother should be.

On a regular basis, I laugh and joke with fellow sleep-deprived mothers as to what sacrifices being a mother entails: yoga pants, unwashed hair, bags under the eyes, broken nights of sleep. Carmen's birth mother made a sacrifice that trumps any first-world problem sacrifice I have ever had to make. She is more mom than me, more woman than me, more strong than I could ever hope to be. She has given me my daughter and I have given her the promise that Carmen will know only love for the entirety of her lifetime. Carmen's birth mother will ache every day while only hoping that I make good on my promise. And that's the thing about adoption: I will devote every second, every minute, every hour of my lifetime making good on my promise. I will make good on my promise every moment of every day, even when my bones ache from exhaustion and both children have been simultaneously screaming for an hour. I will cherish every moment. I live to be the mother my children deserve and the mother that I have promised Carmen's birth mother I will be. For her to choose me to parent her beautiful baby girl, well, it goes without saying that I am the lucky one in this equation.

Unlike the few of my friends who have adopted, ours isn't an open adoption. We never had the opportunity to meet Carmen's birth father and though I have seen pictures, a piece of me will hurt every day missing someone and loving someone who I don't know. In her face, I see his face and that makes it impossible to not love him, even if he is a stranger -- which is a word that doesn't seem to fit, considering I am raising his child. Things are always a little messier, a little more intricate than those outside of the adoption seem to understand.

Adoption is so deeply rooted in love, and so deeply rooted in loss, and so deeply rooted in general in the sense that many hearts and lives are entwined together far beyond choice. I will admire Carmen's birth parents and live to make them proud of me, something that has become to feel as natural as breathing.

"She's so lucky to have you," people will continue to say. When I look into her face, my heart swells knowing just how many people love her, how many lives she's touched, how many hearts have special places carved out just for her very being to sit. For all of that love, she is lucky -- but how lucky I am to be her mother? Nothing can compare.

carmen fable

I'm a little (okay, a lot) late posting this to the blog. We've been busier than I think we've ever been before, but for good reason. For the best reason.

Our beautiful daughter Carmen Fable joined our family eight days ago.

Last week I received a call from a friend urging me to speak with her friend who worked in adoption law. I did, unsure of what to expect and realizing how much work (and time and effort) we'd already put into the agency route. However, as I listened to my friend's friend speak, something tinged in my heart and I knew. I just knew. We submitted our application and family portfolio and received a call the next day letting us know that we'd been chosen by a brave, beautiful birth mama to parent -- and that our little girl had come five weeks early. Carmen weighed in under five pounds but was healthy and happy and, after a short NICU stay, we got to bring her home on Thursday evening.

When we began the adoption process, everyone warned us that it could take months -- years, even -- but instead we had under a week from start to finish.

I've been rehearsing perfect announcement posts over and over in my head, trying to do justice to the level of joy and hope and peace that Carmen has breathed back into our family. Of course, there's life with a four year old and a preemie and a husband with no time off of work and I'm learning that perfection has to slide by the wayside. Sort of like laundry. And washing dishes. You know, priorities.

I couldn't wait any longer to give sweet Carmen her blog debut. Slowly but surely we'll figure out a new normal and a new dynamic, but bear with me as we all revel in this new, tiny (so tiny!) human who has swooped in and completed our family, healing our hearts and bringing with her more love than I ever imagined possible. Seeing Ethan get to actually be a big brother is magical in itself and me? I am so filled with peace and love and joy. And lots of espresso, too.

somewhere over the rainbow: announcing our adoption journey

Yesterday, I took to social media to announce the secret that's been swirling around our little family. It's hard to keep your mouth shut when, for the first time in so long, your heart feels like it's about to burst -- in a good way.

When we lost Wylie in May of 2014, I begged my doctor to tie my tubes. I was finished. There was no part of pregnancy I wanted back. We decided not to tie my tubes. It was an emotional plea that didn't lend itself kindly to the fact we wanted another child, eventually. We made the momentous decision to try to conceive again in November of 2014. My body likely wasn't healed yet, and neither were our emotions, but I was numb to much else other than I wanted to fast forward through the next nine months and start breathing again once my baby was in my arms, alive and with a heart that beat so perfectly and strong. Both Ethan and Wylie were "first try babies" as I jokingly referred to them as in the days when pregnancy wasn't comparable to a knife fight. All I had to do, of course, was sneeze and find myself pregnant a couple of weeks later when I would smugly watch the second pink line pop up on the test. However, that didn't happen this time. As each month passed, I grew more convinced that something was wrong. I can tell you with great certainty that "are you going to try again?" hurts when you've lost a baby and then being asked once you're grappling with infertility, well, it's like acid being poured onto your wound. We began to seek treatment from a reproductive endocrinologist who performed every test in the book on myself and my husband. Though it could be perceived as good news, the reports that nothing was wrong with either of us felt more like bad news. We started seeking assistance from fertility drugs -- pills and shots and suppositories and supplements -- that began to make me feel like a swollen basketcase who was either doubled over in abdominal pain or crashing into bed over the sheer hopelessness of my life. With each negative test at the end of the month, I found myself questioning my ability to keep going on. And, yet, there was the disgust I carried at the mere thought of being pregnant again. I didn't want to be pregnant again and, yet, I wanted it with every fiber of my being.

When the infertility drugs failed, we were left with a lot of thinking to do. At this point, it had been a year of unsuccessfully trying to conceive with nothing whatsoever wrong with me. I was tired. I was tired of being bloated, achy, swollen, sore and miserable. I was tired of canceling plans with Ethan and his friends to rush to a doctor's appointment. I was tired of wanting to punch someone in the face when they said they were excited for me to be trying to conceive again -- as if anything is exciting about pregnancy. I didn't want to be pregnant. But I wanted my baby.

My husband and I decided immediately we were done. We wanted to adopt. We had always spoken of adoption in the past, but as a fairytale-type of wish, want, dream that didn't feel appropriate discussing just yet. The timing, however, was now. And the timing was very right. I wanted no part of invasive, painful tests. I wanted no part of forcing my body to do something that I didn't entirely want it to do (and, yet, wanted it to do more than anything). We spoke the word "adoption" and suddenly the rain cloud over our house floated away and the sun came out and I was smiling and meaning it. Adoption. We spoke the word and we already so very much loved the baby who we didn't even know yet.

We've selected a local agency to work with and we've begun dreaming again. This adoption journey is going to be a long one. It isn't going to be easy, by any means, but it's going to be worth it. There's a prize at the end of the journey now, a light at the end of the tunnel, a feeling of peace after learning to survive with uneasiness forever cramped into my stomach.

I wanted to document this journey here, too. We are eager for this adventure to unfold and to meet the baby who is the missing piece that completes our family.

We love him or her so much already.