my favorite day
Mother's Day is my favorite holiday. Probably because if there's any label or identity I will wholeheartedly and gratefully celebrate, it's being Angel's mama. And the beautiful thing is that Mother's Day also happens to land during May which is National Foster Care Awareness Month.
I will never forget the moment we met Angel, five and half years ago. It started with a phone call asking us, as certified foster parents, if we could parent a six day old boy. We walked into the hospital and we met the tiniest human with the most soulful, wise brown eyes I'd ever seen and he changed our whole world.
We didn’t start as an adoption story but rather a foster one and together we walked a path, hand in hand, that would challenge every single thing we thought we knew about ourselves and the world.
I never felt sure about motherhood until we chose this path of foster adoption. And then there was nothing that could slow me down. From the moment we started our journey with foster care I felt a sense of urgency I had never felt before. I knew there was a child out there who needed a home. We knew nothing else, not the age or what they looked like or their disposition, but just that they needed a home. (According to the Children's Law Center, there are nearly 437,000 children in foster care in the United States.)
Our son was born two weeks early. We signed our foster parent paperwork two weeks late. And we met there in the middle. Nothing guaranteed. 35+ court hearings and years of unknowing. But loving you, our beautiful boy, has been the ultimate honor of our life. Fostering and adopting are really just words. You were forever imprinted on my heart the moment my green eyes saw your big brown ones.
