Adoptive Mothers Letter

I came across this letter on one of my daily searches on adoption information. I love poems and stories. This letter really touched my heart and of course brought tears to my eyes. What a wonderful description of the somewhat unique emotional, and pychological skills required to parent adoptive children. I know it will be a challenge to incorporate the birth family and birth relationships into our family. The situation will tell the tale and we will relay on our faith as to the right way to do this when the time comes. I have come across some beautiflul stories of how apdoptive families have celebrated and recognized birth families. I will talk about these in another blog. I don't know who wrote this letter but I am grateful for finding it.

Adoptive Mothers
Being an adoptiove mother is not for every woman. She must possess not only the natural mother instrinct but an understanding and appreciation of the situation that brought a child into her amrs making her a mother. The adoptive family comes to be by choices made, choices made by the first parents and by the adoptive parents. The bond the adoptive mother has with her child grows over time, just like the child grew within his first mother's womb.
Day by day, touch by touch, with each tear, kiss and memory made they become a family. Adoptive mothers have that special knack to let love grow.
Adoptive mothers know that they are a mender of wounds, not just of the physical skinned knees with a band-aid and a kiss, but of the heart as well. They give love, acceptance, and permission to ask and talk to their child about the day they were born and of their first family.
Adoptive motehrs are embracers, not only of the child with many hugs and kisses, but of the child's heritage and history. They embrace the facts of their child's past with strength for themselves and their child. They are not only memory makers planning family vacations, activities and birthday parties, but are also memory keepers.
They are a tier of shoelaces and hearts. They weave lives together into a tapestry of a new family, with many different brightly colored threards showcasing their individualities and family orgins. Together they create one unit attached to each other.
Adoptive mothers are experts at finding lost objects, but understand and validate the profound deep loss left by adoption. They allow the tears to fall and grief to be felt, allowing the mounrning of the family that is no longer there. They are secure in knowing that they are not a replacement, but a finisher of a race for someone who, for whatever reason, could not run any longer.
This role is not for the weak spirit, or the easily wounded. Loving a child not born to her but calling him her own, as this is what she does, it is her calling....She is a MOTHER.