Mother's Day

"Teri,
With Mother's Day approaching, I wanted to reach out and let you know I was thinking about you and also to share this article about waiting.  I remember how difficult it was for me when I was waiting.  Please know that you are not alone.
Peace and Love,
Stefani"

This is what I found in my inbox yesterday, from our social worker, Stefani.  It was so touching to me.  (see earlier post "The Weight of the Wait" to read the article that she was referring to here.  What struck me as I read her email and then re-read this article was the fact that until that moment, I hadn't thought about Mother's Day in terms of myself.  It sort of crept up on me, actually, and in thinking about it, I thought about my mother, and my mother in law, and how much I love and appreciate them.  I thought of it as their day, not mine.  I hadn't even realized, until that moment, that maybe I should feel sad.  And then, I wondered, why don't I feel sad?  This should be my first mother's day as a mother, and yet I'm not.  We're still sitting here waiting, and sometimes, grieving a little bit.  Yes, there are moments where I feel the weight of the wait, and it's a painful feeling.  There are moments where I feel like my arms ache from the weight of the emptiness in them.  But, those are moments and they're fleeting.  Some moments are pretty darn hard.  But you know what?  This doesn't feel too real.  It's sort of like something we constantly talk about and plan for, and yet it's never going to happen.  It feels that surreal.  That's frustrating, more than sad.  More than not, we're just excited and the wait hasn't become too overwhelming just yet.
We went to another seminar last night.  This one was on the developmental understanding of children who have been adopted.  We liked the speaker a lot... someone we've heard speak on other topics before, but we like her more personally than we like her as a speaker.  She's quiet, not too dynamic, and has great stories... oh, how she loves to tell her stories.  She's someone that could probably talk for hours in tangents.  But, she didn't address the topic at hand too well.  It was a bit disorganized and not too thorough, but that's ok.  We know where to find the information as we need it.  She talked a lot about loss in adoption... both for the adoptive family as well as the adoptee.  She talked about appropriate adoption language.  She talked about the art of keeping information about the child's adoption private but not secretive so that the child is the first to hear the details that are his/her story.  She talked about how to navigate that part of our journey and our story with others who are going to be curious and ask well meaning but potentially painful or intrusive questions.  She told many stories about her own daughter by adoption.  Anyway, while we were there, we were talking to another prospective parent who's been waiting now for a couple of months.  I asked her how she's doing with her wait, and she just shrugged and said "We're doing fine.  I mean, we're not crazy yet.  I don't know how I'm supposed to feel".  I think that's what we're feeling, too.  How ARE we suppoed to feel?  Am I supposed to feel sad on this upcoming Mother's Day because I would have been a mother had my baby lived?  Am I supposed to feel sad because the adoption hasn't happened yet?  Am I supposed to be going out of my mind with frustration and anxiety because the adoption hasn't happened yet and we don't have that little baby to love?  Sometimes, those types of feelings hit us hard and out of the blue, so should I expect that?  I think I'm just going to not worry to much about how I'm supposed to feel, and just feel whatever I feel whenever I feel it, knowing it's ok.  We will be ok.