Thinking about Mother's Day.

Among the many changes that happen in your life adding children through adoption is Mothers Day.  With Foster Care you have the unique situation of getting a case history with your child.  You get to read or watch the poor choices the birth mother and father made that helped your child come to you.

Technically, I am not supposed to know who my kids parents are.  By the time our kids came to us they were in foster homes and were placed in our home as a foster adoptive placement.  Our state has an adoptive reunion registry set up for kids like ours.  We have the option of registering our kids privately and if their birth parents ever want to find them they can register and when the system sees a match after the child is 18, they will contact them and let them know where there birth parents are.

Because I believe the system is crazy broken and in all our years working with social workers we have only had one good one,I took a different route.  We did put our kids in the registry,but we have a back up plan. The records we are suppose to have all the parents names, date of births, etc blacked out.  But when you are talking about an over worked underpaid social worker he/she usually misses at least 1 area that should have been blacked out.

Sometimes, I simply took the tragic details of my kids situation and put in their last name on a google search and up popped the parents names. I regularly gather information on my kids birth parents.  I have an online file of current mug shots, latest addresses and sometimes photos I have been able to gather from face*book. 

I did all of this because I am their Mother. I spend everyday documenting their lives by taking pictures, blogging,putting in the new things their learning, and making scrapbooks so they have the history of themselves.  Because of my past and not knowing where I came from I knew they will have questions about their past. Logistically, we are talking about parents that "lost" their kids because of their actions.  Some of the parents are already older than me and have lived a lifetime with addictions that rule their lives.  If my kids couldn't count on them to raise them, I can't really count on them being around in 15 years.  I don't know if they will be able to kick the addiction, get jobs, be out of jail or even honestly be alive.

At first I will be honest and say I was very angry with all these parents.  I couldn't see how you can make choices like that.  There are still days where the injustice of their choices and the battles of grief I know my kids have ahead of them makes me angry. 
But as I have seen the parents faces compassion begins to grow. Some case history gives me details of what their lives were like growing up which was also not a pretty picture. 

Mother's Day is different for me now.  The day doesn't pass with out me thinking of the other 3 woman that gave my kids life.I grieve for them knowing what they are missing out on.  I pray that one day they are able to get their together.  I pray that someone can come in to their lives and help them with their issues.  I realized that it was vital for me to love the parents of my kids if I was going to be able to completely love all of who my kids are (dna included). I have to have worked through my angry with them so that I can be their for my kids as they struggle with their grief and anger over their birth parents choices.

For now I will spend Mother's day playing with my kids, kissing them and praying for their birth mother's where ever they may be. I will also be preparing my heart to one day be sharing this special day with her if my kids choose to do so.

Mothers Day is different in our house, but I look into my kids eyes and would rather have them than anyone else.  i would rather share Mother's day with someone else, just so they can have a Mom to actually celebrate on Mother's day.This week Josh learned how to spell Mom just for me on Mother's day,I am the one who gets these little gifts along the way. For this I am thankful!