Our nursery is done and it is beautiful! I put the finishing touches on it today and it just pulled it all together. It really turned out better than I could ever have imagined! I took a few photographs of my new additions and I’ll put the new images on the web too. It’s officially ready for a sweet little baby. I get to show it off on Wednesday to a bunch of ladies from the neighborhood association. How perfect…
~Kimberly
SELFLESS adj : showing unselfish concern for the welfare of others
(in my opinion also a definition of motherhood)
I have the utmost respect for birthmothers. To choose adoption takes a kind of selflessness that is mature and honest. I know so many people who have kids and yet still think of themselves, what’s best for them, what they want before they consider their children. I think there’s a stereotype about birth moms that they’re selfish, but to look at your life, to feel a child inside and say this baby deserves a family, a mom and a dad, etc. and to choose adoption is the furthest thing from selfish. I recently spoke to a birthmom who told me that she wasn’t ready to be a mom and the birthfather was not involved. She loves her baby, but felt that the baby deserved a mom who was ready, excited, prepared. She said “you probably think that sounds stupid” but I didn’t. I told her I agreed. That every child deserves parents who know who they are, who are mature, and selfless. Parents who will take responsibility, put their child’s needs before their own. That is after all, parenthood. I thinks it’s great that she chose a mom who wouldn’t pass her kid off on others, dump them off at daycare, or whine about her kid holding her back. I told her that a mom should be maternal, that you can’t fake instincts, and that I respected her decision. She told me if she’d met me 6 months earlier she would hae picked me! This unselfish woman made a painful choice but now her baby has a mom and a dad, whose life is about family first. Even though she couldn’t parent her child she is truly a mother.
Here are a few portraits that I took of my neice a week ago. They are okay but i definately need practice. We’ll see what happens over the summer. I just got my first referal so that’s freaking exciting. I just need to practice studio type portraits as I haven’t ever done any of those!
I’ve been playing with some photos that I took of my neice and sister. I’m hoping to start some serious portfolio building soon but right now i feel like this adoption has sucked the life, passion, and joy right out of me. Damn this stress, what happened to the happy girl that I used to be? I just want this adoption to be over so that I can get back to being myself. I can still see/feel myself in there somewhere, I still hear myself smiling and laughing and being funny but I just have this big cloud haning over my head. I remember when we first started adoption and it was going to be this happy positive thing, bittersweet and beautiful, happy and quick. Now it’s so negative, ruined by what happened to us, ruined by the wait and the frustration. How can we get back to that first place? Can we? Is that the key to living, to having a sucessful adoption. Can birthmoms smell the stink of burnt out aps from a mile away? How do we get back there? How do I get back to happiness?
Why isn’t there a book on how to survive the adoption wait? No book on how to deal with the frustration, anxiety, and depression that involve waiting for some other woman to get pregnant and pick your letter out of a stack of 200? I’ll tell you why…because no woman in her right mind would ever want to relive this time. No one can tell you how to survive this…my guess is that the blissful existence that is motherhood washes away the sting of the long wait. I wish so desperately that I could help other women like myself. Women who are just everyday regular ordinary girls who can’t have babies. Women like myself who’ve checked off all the stupid “do this while you wait” lists, who don’t need the classes, whose nursery’s sit ready and empty. For so many of us we don’t need to read books, take classes or take “one last vacation”…these are the things that women we’re seeking should have done. We’re already ready and yet we wait. I wish I could help women like this but I don’t even know how to help myself.
This useless blathering on that I do helps a little but some days my frustration is like a tidal wave, coming in and obliterating everything else in my life. I can keep myself busy, I know how to do that…but the problem is that I just don’t care anymore. There’s not enough of me left to make it worth my while to get out of bed. Me is gone…me is bogged down with stress, feeling rejected, me has nothing left to give and doesn’t think it’s worth giving anyhow. I am just so frustrated. And I can hear all judgers now, well obviously you have some issues NO SHIT. I’m waiting on something that may never come. I can even hear my best friends saying that in theirs heads when they look at me….”you need to work out your issues before you have kids” the funny thing is I probably have far less issues than I seem to think I do. See I can’t even help myself.
When I was a teenager my best friend made this incredible banana pudding with Nilla waffers to cheer me up one night. I don’t even like banana flavored things and at the time I was heartbroken about some guy…but we ate banana pudding (which I loved)talked and laughed and the next day the guy called…I had a new boyfriend.
The moral of this silly girly story? This Banana Pudding is Magical…you heard me…magic. This banana pudding voodoo has earned us many a boyfriend, some marriage proposals, even pregnancies. Among my circle of friends we take this pudding very seriously…because you get what you wish for and sometimes what we think we want isn’t as great as we think it is. Even so I’ve decided to have a pudding party! I’ll keep you posted.
Each August 19th, the Zuni’s perform a rain dance. It’s a complex and vibrant dance, filled with sound, color, and an absolute belief that it will bring rain. The Zuni’s have probably been doing this dance since the dawn of time and since they have survived that long I’m going to assume it’s working.
I’ve decided that every May 21st should be the day that we waiting adoptive moms do a Baby Rain Dance… dress needn’t be anything more than sweat pants and a tank top, my only adornment a “good luck” bracelet given to me by my mother. My dance, backwards of course because in an adoption you almost never feel like you’re moving forward. Fast steps because an adoptive mom must always be on her toes. And some sort of move that will undoubtedly throw my back out in an attempt to show the gods how flexible I am. My “baby dance” will end in one final glorious whoop as I throw my hands up to the heavens and declare that I am ready for motherhood. Perhaps the powers that be will see my little dance and a rain of babies will fall from the sky with pink and blue parachutes, landing in the arms of waiting mothers like me, filling empty cribs….or maybe it will just rain.
I think that I’ve stopped believing that anything good can happen to me. We have a potential bm situation. It’s kind of a friend of a friend of a friend situation. I started out very excited, was thrilled that at least we were having some “action” on with our networking. But that familiar pessimism crept in and now I’m sitting here on the couch sure that this birthmom isn’t going to pick up, that she’ll change her mind when she’ll get there…preparing myself for a heartbreak that isn’t made any better by being “prepared.” Who is this person who is sitting here? Really I haven’t talked to this woman yet, for all I know right now she could be totally loving me and two weeks from now when she cranks out her kid it could be mine.
That’s the hardest part of adoption…not the wait because life is busy and there’s always something to do/organize/fix. It’s BELIEVING that adoption can work, believing that even though you can’t create life you can be great parents, believing that there are women out there who go through with it, who are honest, who think that you are good enough to for their child. I try so hard to believe that everything will work out, but when it comes right down to it, it’s the belief in myself that I need to work on.
It’s been a month since or unmatching. Time has flown by but Techie and I have both grown frustrated with the system.
It’s so hard for the two of us to look at other people who have kids and don’t love them, or have kids and just don’t good a job of raising them. We’ve had someone tell us recently that we aren’t ready for kids, and that kids are the end of our lives.
We’ve watched cold people who resent their children masquerade as good parents all the while reminding us that we are still outsiders when it comes to parenting. The thing is that even though we don’t have children yet we are parents on the inside.
For Techie & I having children is just the start of our lives. While some prefer to spend their nights out with friends or having drinks, we’d just prefer to stay at home with our kids playing board games or watching TV together.
I’d gladly trade a night on the town for a cheesy Disney movie with my kids. I know that Techie feels the same way. So I shout this out to the universe “CAN WE GET ON WITH IT ALREADY?”
