“I wanted to be able to tell my daughter that she threw her head back when she laughed. How she dipped her fries in mayonnaise, but mostly how much she loved her. How she begged me to make sure my daughter always knew.”
‘Who should wear the mommy bracelet?,’ the nurse asked our birth mom. ‘Jessica. She’s her mommy.’ She placed the bracelet around my wrist, and handed me my daughter.’
‘Just miles away, my 3 oldest children were living their nightmare. They spent that year bouncing between 4 homes until our paths crossed.’
“I thought I would have more time before becoming an actual parent. My crew was uprooted yet again. We waited another two years for our case to have some progression.”
‘People assume they have us figured out. The un-ringed left hand, tattoos, a Mama with diverse children, no doubt living off the government.’
“If they only knew.”
‘I was 11-years-old when I woke up in a haze from surgery. My doctor said, ‘You can always make love, but you will never have children.’
“There was never any indication of the ticking time-bomb hiding in my body. My parents whispered words of encouragement into my ears, even though I had one foot on Earth and one in Heaven.”
‘The phone rings. You recognize the number. Each time it calls you feel a mixture of excitement and fear. Being a foster parent is strange.’
“You never shake the desire to want to help them all. Stepping into this world shows you things you only had heard about in the news. The victims of those new stories suddenly begin sleeping in your home.”
‘We are a blended family of 10. We have 8 kids: his, ours, and everyone else’s. Not bad for the woman who couldn’t have children!’
“Within a few weeks, without ever dating him, John asked me to marry him. I told him ‘yes,’ but he had to understand I was diagnosed at age 19 with cervical and uterine cancer and informed by my doctors I would never be able to give him children.”
‘To The Makers of Blue Bell Ice Cream: We have a suggestion for a new name for your chocolate and vanilla flavor’
“I challenged the kids to come up with a different name that could capture the intent of Blue Bell ice cream but would reflect the remarkable progress our country has made.”
‘I don’t love you ‘like you’re my own.” A letter to my daughters on the day of your adoption
“You were dropped off at our home, dropped into our family.”
I was reminded recently that I am ‘just the foster parent.’
“Let me share with you ‘just’ what I really am.”
‘Are you OK with this?’: Mom’s tearful goodbye to her foster son
“He was only supposed to be mine for four months. But then things changed.”
