(An excerpt of my current post at Her View From Home)
My beloved children have an annoying habit of overusing the word “Mom.” If you have kids, this interaction probably sounds familiar to you:
Child: Mom?
Mom: Yes, Sweetie?
Child: (silent for a minute) Hey, Mom?
Mom: Yes, what is it?
Child: (more distracted silence) Um, Mom?
Mom: YES! WHAT?!
Child: Oh, um, Mom? . . . Did I have hair when I was born? (or some other equally meaningless question)
Did I mention that I have five children? So this kind of interaction is repeated multiple times a day until I contemplate locking myself in the bathroom for a minute of solitude to regroup. I can’t tell you how many times the thought crosses my mind, “I wish I could just go ten minutes without somebody saying ‘Mom’!” Ten minutes of quiet. Ten minutes of not being constantly needed. Ten minutes to think my own thoughts.
But it’s in that moment that God often blesses me with a perspective adjustment.
- All photos by Rebecca Tredway Photography
I have had ten minutes to myself in the past. I had a lot of ten minutes all in a row. I had five years. Five years of wondering if there would ever be a child that would call me “Mama” or come to me with their problems and questions. Those were the years I cried out to God to ask if I would ever be a mother. I begged him for a child- just one! And after those barren years, God responded with foster children, adopted children, and biological children in an overwhelming answer to the prayers of that difficult season.
I’m not saying that infertility means I don’t suffer from the usual mom frustrations. I do. I am driven to the brink of insanity on a near daily basis by the arguments and special lunch requests and forgotten library books and bathroom accidents and middle of the night wake-up calls. But it is the beauty of the words “Mama”, “Mommy” and “Mom” that seem to snap me out of my irritations and remind me of the great gift I’ve been given when I embrace that change in perspective.
It was not easy to move from being “just” a woman and a wife to being Mama. The international adoption process was long and expensive and scary. The road that lead our foster children to become our forever children was an emotional roller coaster. Even the birth of my biological son was traumatic and didn’t go as we had hoped. But it has been in the difficult moments, the struggles and disappointments that I have learned what it really means to be a mother. It isn’t about loving children just in the times when they are easy to love, but about pursuing children with love even when they are running in the other direction.
In talking with my adopted children about the first mothers in their lives I feel the weight of that word in a new way. I have become their mother, but that wasn’t always the case. I didn’t birth these children or earn these children. I have chosen to love and mother them and they have chosen to love me and embrace me as their mother. Part of loving them is loving their history and honoring the mothers who gave them life, no matter their circumstances or choices. Those women didn’t stop being mothers when they made the adoption plan for their child. In some ways, that was an ultimate act of motherhood— choosing the good of your child even when it breaks your heart. And because of that choice, I am benefiting from the beauty these children bring to my life and our family when they call me Mommy.
. . . To finish reading this post, visit me at Her View From Home. . .