No no no....thank YOU

Everyone expects a card or something made of macaroni on Mother's Day. What few expect is to have their heart broken.

The night before Mother's Day I had a date night with Gregg. When we came home, everyone was in bed and konked out and I was giddy with freedom and my unfettered access to DVRd programming beyond Wild Kratts. At 11pm I came downstairs, flushed with freedom and the joy that comes from watching TV without a single person asking "why", "what" or "can I have". Then I came downstairs and found the kids' very early cards for me. Though they stood between me and the sleeping pill I had been dying to take for weeks — finally banishing insomnia — I decided to go ahead and read them in advance of my actual day of celebration.

Madelena had drawn a variation on a spider and a birthday cake, two very popular themes in her portfolio now. Thankfully, these were not multimedia pieces; those have often left permanent stains or wounds after handling. Shawn Joaquin, the simpler artist, had created something on the back of a piece of paper recycled from work with the specter of the "Visa" logo shining through. I was ready for a battle scene with some hearts, maybe a picture of all of us in the middle of tall buildings or sunshine or grass. But instead I found a sentiment that immediately brought me to tears: "Thank you for adopting me."

Unless you are an adoptive family, perhaps the reason for the heartbreak is puzzling. After all, how often do our children thank us for doing anything? Do we not deal with entitlement struggles all the time, from their expectation that you will of course buy those stomp light shoes at an exorbitant price to yes, you will replace them in four months when they outgrow them?

As an adoptive mother, however, I deal with constant ignorance that calls into question my benefits from adoption; people often saying how lucky my child is to have been adopted by me, how nice it is that I can care for "someone else's child", how lucky they are to have a home with me instead of whatever their fate might have otherwise been. But the luck is mine, the gift is mine, and the gratefulness to the heavens, gods, energy, universal spirit or whatever brought these children into my life...is all mine. And never do I want my son to think that he needs to be any more grateful to have been adopted by me than another biological child might be grateful that his parents hooked up after a night out at a tiki bar. Never do I want him to think that he needs to thank me for becoming his mother. Thank me for washing his socks, for teaching him how to ride a scooter, for helping him to become a man that a woman can love. But never thank me for adopting him...that pleasure is all mine.

As I look at my beautiful, dark-skinned children I see MY children. I don't see someone I took in, someone I chose to help. I see the children who, as I have often said, were born from my heart if not my body. And like nearly every other mother on Mother's Day, I know that underneath the expectation that we be lauded for our year-round efforts is our very own gratefulness to the very beings that made us mothers. However they came to be in our arms.