on becoming angel’s mama
I was never sure if I was meant to be a mother.
I cried in a lot of hotel rooms when my best friend and I would travel for work.
“I don’t know if I’m ready,” I’d say, tears running down my face. “I don’t know if I want to.”
She’d hug me and say, “Then don’t.”
For years, motherhood felt like something I was supposed to want in a certain way. I tried to picture myself inside the version I saw reflected back to me everywhere else, but no matter how hard I tried, it never fully landed in my body.
And then one day, another possibility appeared. The possibility of fostering and maybe, just maybe, someday adopting. And I knew why I couldn’t see it before. It wasn’t our way.
So after months of training in LA and a phone call where we had thirty minutes to decide whether we were a yes or a no. If we were ready to take the biggest trust call of our lives, off the Grand Canyon with no net.
And then there was a different kind of not sure. The kind where you’re sitting in a hardbacked chair for eight hours holding a crystal so tight your palm aches, praying with everything you have that you’ll know whether he is staying or leaving. Almost forty court hearings wondering if he’d be there the next day.
Two kinds of uncertainty. Same woman. Completely different stakes.
So somewhere between crying in hotel rooms, white knuckling in courtrooms and speaking prayers over you every night while you slept, I became a mother.
Not the way I expected. Not on a timeline I would have chosen. Through a phone call and a six day old baby with dark brown hair and big brown eyes in a hospital bassinet.
(There you are.)
I have learned things in this role I could not have learned any other way. That love is not cautious. That presence is the whole practice. That a sticky hand in yours on the side of a creek is enough. More than enough.
To every mother who took an unexpected road to get here, the long one, the painful one, I see you. To the ones still there, I extend my hand.
To Angel, you are beyond my wildest dreams. You are everything and more. There’s nothing I cherish more than being your mama.
