In that order. I won’t look back right now, but I think I write virtually the same post at this time every year. Maybe you haven’t read this blog for long, or maybe you haven’t remembered enough for me to be embarrassed for the repetition. Or maybe, with things in life, like birth and death and adoption, it’s ok to repeat oneself.
May is a big month for me. A month of no particular significance in my life until after I was 40 years old– but a big, huge month for me now. On Sunday, my daughter, born in 2001, will be 11 years old. I am already thinking a lot about that age and what it means– to her and to me and to us. I am thinking about her and what I’d like to write about her and what I want to wish for her in the coming year.
Her birth and her adoption were obviously two different events– and I was there for one and not the other. It is still unfolding year by year and I am still learning –as is she– what these facts mean to her– and what they mean to me. In some ways the facts of her beginnings and then the facts of the family she got– have given her an interesting and broad perspective. I know she loves the family she got and we so love her. This year it was also more open and visible than in the past, that this part of her story– adoption– is a hard thing to carry with her. I don’t think I’ve written them– but there were two different nights this year when I came home to find my daughter laying on the bed, crying and crying, openly and brokenheartedly– with my partner laying next to her, just tender and listening as she cried about her birth mother never having chosen to meet her.
Nine years ago today just three days before my daughter’s second birthday, my father, who was quite ill but not expected to die, died very suddenly and unexpectedly. I was already grieving about him, because he was so ill. But he when he died I had not said goodbye and I wasn’t ready to say goodbye. But I did. I had to. So we have a yahrzeit today and a birthday later this week. I am full of so many feelings and I am at work and doing my regular things and at home a candle is burning and I do very much, miss my father.