{by Erika Wagner-Martin}

For so, so long it felt like we would never get here.

We smiled show smiles through home visit after home visit by social worker after social worker.
We steeled ourselves as we bundled them up for trips to the visitation center far too far away.
We held our breath, our hearts the frontline cavalry from the back row of the courtroom
anytime we attended a hearing.

I have knocked on wood — and by wood, I mean anything comprised of matter — thousands of times,
gasping for air as I’ve constricted and believed and constricted and believed our dream
of being a forever family with these precious, precious girls.

The beginning of this process is full of fear for people like me.
You’ll never get a newborn, they tell you. You want two together?
They will be damaged and you will spend a lifetime trying to save them
and love alone cannot save anyone, they say.

{By Tanis from Attack of the Redneck Mommy}

My child recently had to write an essay about the hardest thing he ever had to do. For him, it seems to be trying to keep his damn room clean. It’s mission impossible for a twelve year old sloth I tell you.

But this essay inspired a conversation between us that I have long since been thinking about. He asked me what the hardest thing I ever had to do was.

I didn’t know how to answer him.

What does hard really mean? Gestating and giving birth to three rabid badgers who tore my insides out was hard.

Coming home with a disabled baby no one expected or prepared for was hard.

Trying to explain to people why my beautiful son never smiled was hard.

Spending endless nights, months on end, staring at a boy in a crib in a hospital and wondering if my family would ever be whole and under one roof together was hard. Dealing with one doctor after another in a never ending series of medical emergencies was hard.

Missing field trips and precious moments with my older two children because I had to be with their younger sibling was hard.

Driving alone, in the middle of the night, with a dying child in the back seat of my car was hard.

Looking into my husband’s eyes when he arrived at the hospital and having to find the words to tell him I failed him and our son, was hard. Phoning our family to tell them our boy had died, was hard.

Walking out of the emergency room with nothing but a plastic bag of a dead boy’s belongings was hard.

Mustering up the courage to walk into my childrens rooms, sit them down as their father stood behind me weeping, to tell them their brother died in the middle of the night and they would never have another opportunity to hug him was hard.

Seeing the mound of dirt heaped upon where my boy’s body lie and having to walk away from that boy for the last time, was hard.

Hard doesn’t seem adequate enough.

{Originally published on Baby On Bored}

Let me just start by saying if you have an ultrasound picture of your baby stuck on your refrigerator with a magnet, you’re not someone I want to be friends with. And if you have someone else’s baby’s ultrasound picture up there, well, that’s just a cry for help. I’m never sure what I’m supposed to say when confronted with this. “Wow, that’s one sexy fetus?” I got pictures from my ultrasound too but I didn’t wallpaper the house with them. Isn’t it bad enough that we have to see a million pictures of your baby after it’s born? Now we have to see what it kinda sorta looks like before it even comes out?

I knew early on in my pregnancy I wasn’t like other pregnant women. When my husband and I went for my ultrasound, (yes, he came with me: there was like a 95% percent chance he was the dad we figured he should tag along), the first thing the nurse asked me was if I’d brought a video tape. A video tape? I must’ve looked confused because she explained to me “most people want to take home a souvenir of this magic event.” I nodded and said “Yeah, I definitely won’t need that. I’m barely on board with the whole pregnancy thing as it is.” To which the nurse replied that she was reporting me to social services. Okay, she didn’t say it out loud but I could see it in her stare.

Clearly there are many many people who do opt for the ultrasound video. If you are one of them, just know – I don’t want to see it. Oh, and that goes double for your skydiving video. About the only way I’d ever be interested in watching footage of your big jump …is if you don’t make it. It’s like the world is chock full of people with no clue of their capacity to be irritating. And pregnancy just magnifies it.

Pregnant women seem to take one of two paths when they get knocked up, although — being annoying– they’d probably refer to it as a “journey.”

First there’s the woman who loooooves being pregnant. You know her. She’s so excited to join the Cult of Mommy that she’s taking pregnancy yoga before the before the stick turns blue. Anyone who revels this much in being pregnant is suspect in my book…

{Originally published on Lucky Thirteen and Counting}

I used to have a daughter. I don’t have her any more. This is something that is not easy to talk about nor easy to write about, even almost two years later. But today, in the spirit of February, the month of love, I think this is an appropriate day to share some of my feelings.

I love this child. I wanted this child. I made a sacrifice for this child and I still believe I did the right thing. BUT, there are days and times, that cause me to reflect on that decision. I don’t want to tell you I question it, or that I hope I did the right thing. Because honestly, deep in my heart, I KNOW that I made the right decision. But knowing this doesn’t make it easy, or the grief any less, or the loss go away.

When The Ex and I separated Embree was four years old. The Nanny started dating The Ex three weeks later, and I fired her. My kids lost two very important people in a matter of 21 days. Embree took it the hardest. She cried as hard, if not harder, than I did. It was devastating to watch. She loved her nanny. The Nanny started working for me full-time when Embree was one. She was her primary caregiver. When Embree cried, she wanted The Nanny, not me. That loss was substantial to my child. I was not above admitting that.

When The Nanny moved in with The Ex, Embree joined them. She moved in full-time. I couldn’t deny her who and want she wanted. She visited me when they went out. However, it wasn’t me she was visiting, it was the siblings. When I scheduled one-on-one time with her, she wanted the other kids to join us.

We continued life this way for one year. We lived in Utah so I knew what Embree was doing, and I still played a small role in her life. But, when we moved to California everything changed. The Ex and The Nanny were married and having a family of their own. My life was here in California with Brandon and the kids. When Embree came to visit she cried for her “mommy”. It was painful to hear, to see, and to feel. Embree and I both knew she belonged with her dad and her “new mommy”.

I talked to her about what this would entail. Brandon and I wouldn’t be her family any more. Her siblings would still be her brothers and sisters, but I would not be her mom, and Brandon wouldn’t be her stepfather. She understood the best a six-year-old mind could understand. She was thoughtful for a moment and said with confidence, “Yes, I want that.”

{Originally published on Is There Any Mommy Out There?}

I’ve been obsessed with time lately and how it passes. What a trickster time is, the way he seems to hand me moment after moment of joy and love and life in slow, lazy procession until I pause to look back and I’m cut down by how far I’ve traveled. All the tiny incidents add up to the whole year that my oldest children were three and my youngest was one and my last baby was thought of and conceived. I want to yell at him for the subterfuge, but he’s handing me new moments so fast that I can’t take the time, I’ll miss something important. I’m dropping the present and it’s shattering on the floor, gem by gem as I gaze backwards. I refocus on the moment in my hands and it all slows down again, to that disconcerting, tricky lull.

I tell time I know his game, I’m onto him, but it’s inevitable that I’ll forget until I look back once more. It makes me mad. I wish he’d leave me alone, stop stealing my moments and let me have them for mine. Maybe I’ll keep them in a carved wooden box on my dresser, magpie-like, the way I kept little bits of life in high school, a note, a charm, a worn braided bracelet.

I want to keep the way Quinn walks, steady but unsteady, on his toes, his fat little belly proceeding him. I want to keep the way Garrett laughs, mouth wide open, head back, his round baby face lit from within. I want to keep the way Saige runs to me at preschool pickup, the way it feels when she wraps her little body around my middle and wraps her arms around my neck. I want to keep this baby’s first tiny kicks, barely felt today, miniature popcorn popping inside my uterus.

Determined to stop his constant theft of my moments, I set a trap for time. I know if I turn and pounce quickly enough I can catch the decrepit old man. I wait for a slow, easy moment, a little lull in time’s flow and I spin faster than the earth, outside of time, grasping with both hands.

Then I falter in disbelief, caught off guard that I actually hold him in my hands and that the arm I hold is strong and young. He is timeless, handsome and confident with twinkling eyes and a devilish smile. “You got me,” he raises his hands in mock surrender. “There’s not much time. When should we go?” He leans forward, feverishly eager, “what should we change?”

Go? Change? I don’t really understand, not yet, I want a glimpse, that’s all, to steal some moments back and save them forever to visit at will. But I have this chance and time is staring at me, waiting. I don’t want to blow it. “What if I’d taken the other job out of law school?” I blurt at him quickly. “Would I have loved it? Maybe stayed an attorney? Maybe I’d have a big career now?”

{Originally published on theRunaMuck.)

I seriously feel like I just had my lights knocked out, and I’ve woken seeing red and dusting off my rear end.

It’s sangria time, people. Are you raising your cups?

My husband and I can’t stop saying: we only have this one life.

I’ll say it again - we only have this ONE and it’s riding like a breath on the wind, already in disintegration. So what are we doing here?

If God doesn’t shine through this spot of air He’s given me, may my computer fly to the moon, let the world wide web scramble to a fuzz, and may we meet outside weeping at each other’s necks for what we’ve been missing.

Luke 12:48 (The Message)

47-48“The servant who knows what his master wants and ignores it, or insolently does whatever he pleases, will be thoroughly thrashed. But if he does a poor job through ignorance, he’ll get off with a slap on the hand. Great gifts mean great responsibilities; greater gifts, greater responsibilities!

I have been given much. That is my confession today.

{Originally published on Sarcastic Mom}

Several nights ago I was sitting in the dark of Braden’s room; he was cradled in my arms, breathing quietly. As we slowly swayed back and forth in the rocking chair together, lullabies playing peacefully on the CD player, my mind jumped back and forth. It climbed mountains torturously, then lept off of the summits and plummeted into the valleys below. My face was slack, but my thoughts rumbled and tumbled below the surface while I felt the warm, soft life in my embrace cuddle deeper into sleep.

Suddenly, I burst out crying. Crying for the tiny life that I wasn’t able to hold onto in this way. I sobbed – quietly, so as not to disturb Braden – for a few long moments. Then I placed him in his crib and left the room. As suddenly as it had come upon me, the weeping was gone.

It’s been like that for weeks now. Since the miscarriage.

The extreme dichotomy of my feelings and thoughts lately has been a confusion at times, to me. At others, it has made no less than perfect sense. See what I mean?

I was pregnant one day. Then, suddenly, I wasn’t.

Riding the roller coasters at this Carnival From Hell that no woman wants to go to, but that is packed full of people, nonetheless, has been strange.

Some days, hearing about how many others have gone through this, multiple times, even, is a great comfort. I am actually incredibly buoyed by the scores of other women who feel somewhat betrayed by their bodies, or maybe even by God. By women who have experienced this same thing and are floating alongside me in this sea of uncertainty.

It means that I am not really standing out in the middle of a barren wasteland, alone, while a relentless wind tears and rips at my exposure-ravaged limbs, muffling my cries and carrying them silently away into the vast nothingness surrounding me, where they will mean nothing and no one will ever respond to them.

{Originally published on Is There Any Mommy Out There?}

We have started to talk about it recently and it inspires in me a dark, deep-down fear. Your brother looks at the picture on this blog and chirps brightly, with grave knowledge, “That Darrett. That’s Darrett in Momma’s tummy.”

“And Saige,” you chitter, “and Saige in your tummy.”

Garrett nods gravely. You do every thing together. It is all you know. You are far too innocent and unsullied by our boring world to look at each other’s skin and question that it was not always so. That the bond does not stretch back to that quiet water-filled place. Unlike those we meet every day, the jaded masses who know in a glance that you didn’t sip from the same uterine cup.

“No babies,” I correct again, “not Saige. Saige grew in her tummy mommy’s belly, in Haiti.” I wish to just say yes, to keep it simple for you for a short time, while you are simple, but I’ll never lie to you about this for my own comfort. Not even once…

{Originally Published on Production, Not Reproduction}

I haven’t said anything about my daughter’s first (birth) dad in awhile. Truthfully, I’ve not known how to comfortably approach it here. I am sorting through conflicting thoughts and feelings about him. It is hard to know what is appropriate to share.

After a chance meeting at a pizza place with an adoption agency social worker, he did go into the office to meet with her before Firefly was born. It was…less than positive. He had already made clear that he felt no obligation toward Beth (our daughter’s first mom), and as of now he apparently feels no obligation toward his daughter either. Nobody has heard from him since.

My husband and I have never spoken with him. We’ve never even seen a picture of him. We know his name and his age and some sketchy medical history. My amateur sleuthing hasn’t turned up any online presence for him, so I can’t peek at his life through Myspace or Facebook. He is a complete mystery to me. Yet he is one-half of my daughter’s genetic heritage.

This is uncharted territory for our family. Our son’s first dad, Ray, has been around from the beginning. It’s easy to include him in what we say to Puppy: “Kelly and Ray made you, they took care of you, they decided we would be parents to you. You have his smile, his hair, his eyes.” Ray underscores it all through his continued presence in Puppy’s life. I feel like Firefly’s story thus far has a glaringly missing player. What do I say about a man who chooses to ignore her? What do I say about a man about whom I know next to nothing?

One day before Firefly’s birth I sat down with Beth and laid how we had approached our relationship with Puppy’s first parents. Our priority has always been maintaining healthy relationships for Puppy. So our separate relationships with Kelly and Ray are our business and their relationship with each other is their business–we don’t take sides when there is friction between them and Puppy doesn’t get put in the middle of anything. I told Beth that we knew Firefly’s dad hadn’t done right by her. That we didn’t want her to think that us wanting a relationship with him meant we condoned that or didn’t care about it. Yet none of that changed the fact that Firefly still deserved to know him. The only thing we would expect from her would be to not to stand in the way if he ever started up a relationship with us.

It’s not that cut and dried, of course. It’s not like we can truly separate everyone into their own corners of our life. Beth is the one who is becoming our friend, who vulnerably opened up her life to us–and who received us likewise. She’s shown her commitment to this budding open adoption in myriad ways. Her opinions matter to us, including her opinions on Firefly’s dad…

{Originally published by ConverseMomma on Ordinary Art.}

When I was having the first of three miscarriages, sitting on the couch stuffing ice cream in my mouth, and sobbing at all the EPT commercials on television, a bloody maxi pad tucked between my legs, I got a phone call from someone close to me. She was pregnant, young, scared, and about to have an abortion. She wanted me to console her. She wanted me to wrap my arms around her and rock away the regret. I remember wanting to slap her. Instead, I spoke calmly through clenched teeth. I told her it was going to be okay, assured her that I loved her, even as I felt the soft spots of my heart, that once she had claimed, hardening against the impact. It was not fair of her, of me, of circumstance. But, this is how it was.

Two miscarriages, an oncologist office, and a handful of “experts” later, they told me I would never be a mother, not in the traditional sense that I had always imagined when I was young and reckless with the way I used my body. Instead, I pinned my hopes to adoption, on an 18 year-old girl. She wore a tiny bikini the weekend that we met, and swam beside me in the hotel pool. She just knew she could never have an abortion, not with all those couples eager and waiting. She wanted, instead, to give a gift. I thought about her capacity for bravery, and all I could do was hug her, go back to my hotel room, and cry.

When my son was born, and the nurses called me Mommy, the woman who carried him for nine months and pushed him out into this world, lay weary in her bed beside us. The beginnings of her loss were already creeping across the hospital room. I just could not see it. I did not think her choice was anything but noble, me being on the receiving end of it. We celebrated with popsicles sticks that left our fingers sticky and blue, and I tried not to see the way her mother had to hold her up, her unsure legs too shaky for the long walk to the parking lot, unassisted. In the months that went by, her grief only grew. It became something large and imposing, threatening the fragile bonds that we had established all those months that she had been convinced the choice would be an easy one, but turned out never to be. My son is a gift she gave me, but at what cost to herself? That is the question left unanswered between us.

I did not want to acknowledge the loss. I just wanted the simple celebration that I thought should be my right as a new mother. For a long time, I was so thankful for my son’s birthmother’s decision that every time I heard the word abortion I considered it a slight against the blonde-haired child that I held in my arms, and sang lullabies to against the backdrop of silence, in the nursery with the walls I had painted in blue. I felt abortion was a kick straight to the empty damaged uterus that I carried inside my body. How could a woman be selfish enough to have an abortion when adoption was an alternative, when couples waited years to fill their homes with the pitter patter of little feet, when my son was alive and growing strong because of his birthmother’s choice?