The Only Downside of Being an Adoptive Mom

I would recommend adoption a hundred times over again. Even through all the beaucratic hassles, it's so well worth it. But the one downside of being an adoptive mom, at least to one who was adopted as an older child is that you spend many nights trying to explain to them how much you really love them.

It always starts the same way. She will tell me she is upset about something. Maybe it's about how we won't buy her an iPad or we made her buy off the dollar menu at a restaurant. But she's not really upset about these things. She's upset and she needs to find a reason to justify her feelings, so she pretends it is something else. She will get big tears that do not match the issue at hand.

As we talk, I eventually uncover the truth. She's upset she is adopted, she is afraid we don't love her, she hates being different from her friends.

We then will talk. I'll show her all the people she loves who she is not biologically related to. I will remind her of foster kids we all loved. I will tell her what family means to me and remind her of her Aunt Amber or her Uncle Jeff, neither whom share mine or Kevin's blood, but are as much a part of our family as if they had. I will show her as many ways as I can, that blood may be thicker than water, but love is thicker than both.

One of these will strike a chord, and she will smile. She will tell me how lucky she is, or that I'm the best mom in the world, or a number of different ways that tells me, she gets it. But I know, in a few months, I will get a doe eyed child with tears brimming ready to spill, and she will tell me she is upset about something that is not the real issue.

We will pull over to the side of the road, or crawl up in her top bunk, or cuddle on the couch, and have that conversation again. Each time the words are different, but each time it ends with a smile and her seeming to understand.

So yeah, that's the downside of being an adoptive mom. You have to prove your love over and over and over again. I wouldn't change it for the world, but I guess in a way, it's a reminder to stop and listen and talk and love.