this is my life. ? ! * )

i'm not sure how to punctuate that statement. today we had breakfast with our birth mom's dad and stepmom. i have no idea how she feels about it because she doesn't write back to my letters and she skipped out of every meeting social services set up for us to ever meet. this is very hard. it's hard to predict how someone you've never met might feel when the only thing you know about them is the back of their head in court.
needless to say, all day long i've been mulling our meeting over time and time again in my head. sometimes i think: this is my life. other times i think: this is my life? and then again: this is my life! or: this is my life* literally any of those endings will do with how my feelings are today.
karyssa couldn't come because until today we didn't know exactly how much contact they had with her. we found out today-it's not much. which is sad, but on the other hand that clears the whole how-will-she-react-to-seeing-them-again fears. she's going to think we're eating breakfast with another mentor couple probably.
it was tough. it was amazing. it was eye opening. it was affirming. it made me question all kinds of things i hadn't questioned before. it was a blessing. it made my heart ache. it warmed my heart. it made me feel confident. it shook my confidence. it was all kinds of things. but mostly it was 2 hours giving to a man something that no one else on the planet could give him. the gift of meeting his first and only grandson. we didn't have to do it. we could have left it at pictures and emails. we could have told them too little too late. but we didn't.
we met them for breakfast and got there first. i sat asher, intentionally, between me and an empty seat at the table. after a few loooong minutes of waiting with my teeth clenched and my heart getting heavier with every passing minute thinking "are they really not going to show up for a meeting they requested with their grandson!?" they came. smiling, late and lost. they came. abuelo (his new bloggie name) laid eyes on asher and i picked him up out of his highchair and handed him over. abuelo's hands were clammy. he was so excited. and so nervous because they were late. later step-abuela admitted that they had gotten into it because he was trusting that she knew where she was going. he held on to asher until the food came. he ate quickly, the whole time playing with asher, then he picked him back up from the highchair. i am not sure he took his eyes off of him the whole time. if it's possible for a man to have a pregnancy glow, abuelo did. we finished breakfast after an hour and a half but it wasn't for 41 more minutes before he was ready to hand asher back over to part ways. at one point i asked him "so, what do you think?" and through tears in his eyes and his wife translating he said "this makes me so happy to get to meet him. you have made me very happy and i really appreciate you doing this." *ugh* rock in my heart! and i realize this isn't about me and how i feel. it's about the kids and their connection to where they come from. this man is where they come from. don't get me wrong-they are still MY babies (paul would say OUR babies) but regardless of how much they are mine, they come from his blood. asher does this thing where he does the left handed smack, as we call it. on everything. the tub, the table, the floor, his exersaucer. all the time the left handed smack. what was the first thing abuelo did when he put asher down to eat? he reached over and smacked the table. not AFTER asher did it-BEFORE asher did it. asher smiled real big as if to say "finally! someone who speaks my language!" and smacked back. in all the months he's done the smack not once did i think to smack back. not once! what is wrong with me? when we met for our ice breaker he couldn't keep his hands off of that little wirey toy with the beads? you know-they're in every waiting room that anticipates children. it's got all these wires that go in every direction and it's got beads on each wire....couldn't stop touching it. guess who else can NOT leave those things alone? karyssa! i told him today that i had noticed that. although i'm not sure it was translated exactly. i think it was translated as "karyssa likes those wire and bead toys." i don't think it was explained to him that i had noticed how much he was like karyssa. which leads me to my next epiphany. *sigh* i need to learn conversational spanish. shameful that it has taken me this long to come to this conclusion but i realize as long as i don't abuelo will always be an outsider for our meetings. and for the sake of our kids and his relationship to them, i don't want that. not sure how i'm going to hurdle that desire but i'm putting it out there in the cosmos as a hold-me-to-this kind of thing.
anyway. today was a big exhausting day. all in all i feel like paul and i have gotten thrown into an arranged marriage where we got to meet and fall in love with the groom and THEN met all of his family.
i'm not sure why god gave this life to me...but this is my life!