“With her hair in a ponytail and her face stained with tears, she pet his hair while he gasped for air. She put a cross in his hand when she knew he was never coming back. She kissed him on the cheek and uttered ‘goodbye.’ She sat with him for an hour after he stopped breathing, making sure he was not alone.”
‘She sat next to her dying father, her best friend, and grabbed his hand. She whispered in his ear it was ‘ok to go.’ She would be alright. He could stop being in pain.’
‘I crashed the party my 16 year-old-daughter was at. I rolled up on it to hear, ‘drink, drink, drink.’ I had visions of my sweet girl suspended in the air, held up by football players as she gulped cheap beer.’
“I raced to the front porch, paralyzed. Do I swing open the door and just run in? Do I call the cops? As I stood with my hand up in the knocking position, the door opened.”
‘Do I need to separate you two?,’ the flight attendant asked. Wait. WHAT? I looked up from my magazine, confused. My kid sniffled. ‘Nothing gets better at 30,000 feet,’ she continued.’
“My first thought was, ‘Does your ATTITUDE, Janet?’ This was all because my 16-year-old daughter had to leave her boyfriend behind to see her sister graduate from COLLEGE. I thought she would ballet leap onto the plane. I was wrong, friends. I was so wrong.”
‘I’ve never had real parents before. I’ve waited my entire life to be treated the way y’all treat me.’ Couple adopts 18-year-old who was ‘abandoned by his birth mother with no name’
“‘So you are the people that want teenagers… are you crazy?’ I said, ‘Something like that.’ She replied, ‘Well, I got a phone call in your driveway for a 16-year-old male who needs a home by tonight.’ I told her, ‘Bring him home.’ My husband looked at me like I was crazy. But he agreed. ‘She’s right, bring him home.’”
‘The rumor mill was going full swing. I was a 14-year-old girl anxious to yell my lungs out and spend as much time with the football players as possible.’
“I’m sure somewhere in my teenage heart I was thinking… game on. Then things went from bad to worse . I promptly did what any teenage girl would do… burst into inconsolable sobs by my locker in the hallway of our high school.”
‘I thought, ‘How is THIS nothing to worry about?’ The walls were closing in. Everything turned black and I couldn’t move my body. ‘It’s common for college students to be under a lot of stress.’
“I decided to request one specific blood test; one that was much harder to receive than it should have been. I had to basically force my doctor to test me. One week later, I was finally given the answer I had been longing so badly for.”
‘When kids are small, they throw tantrums. We put them in timeout, spank them, teach them not to show their emotions. Then they turn into teenagers, and we expect them to feel safe talking to us.’
“Don’t whine. Don’t complain. Your feelings are wrong. Be quiet. Eventually they stop expressing their emotions to us because for so long they needed to deal with it alone. Alone in their room, their chair, their corner.”
‘If I could find a mom I could have a relationship with like you have with her birth mom, I’d do it.’ Jason and I looked at each other. ‘Well don’t count us out!’ Her face lit up.’
“You might think this is our happy ending, but it’s not the end yet. In that moment, I knew we would be parents again, to her baby boy.”
‘Meet William. She’s had him since Friday night. She is absolutely exhausted, ready to quit the class and give William back. Maybe even throw him back.’
“She came into my room last night around 3 a.m. She was crying real tears while feeding him his bottle. She was begging me to help her because she just wanted to get some sleep. Yeah, no.”
‘Ladies, find your person. Not the cutest diaper bag. Not the sleekest car or the fanciest preschool. Not the car seat that is also a stroller that is also a high chair.’
“Find the person that will come hold your baby when all you need is a shower. Find the person who your teenager can call when they have a problem they’re not yet ready to discuss with you. Find the person who is ready to drop everything for queso and margaritas after a hard day, no questions asked.”
