the beat goes on

peaknuckle has grown so much since my last post. she's so beautiful. with every new day or development comes the excitement of "i got to see this first!" with a twinge of "she's missing this!" i look at this beautiful baby and my heart dances and aches all at once. i'm honored that i get to be the person that gets to see her day in and day out and even through the night. we have little dates where she just looks at me and even though the lights are off and it's just the light of the moon from her bedroom window i can see she's looking up at me admiring ME. and even though i close my eyes and half way fall asleep, when i open them again, she's looking right at me. when we make eye contact she smiles, through her bottles, even at 2am. she seems to have no concept of time in that regard. all she knows is, she feels a pang of hunger, she cries, i come and feed her. sometimes on weekends daddy comes in, but for the majority, it's a date with me that she gets. she kicks her feet in the morning and her arms go straight as boards when i walk in the room. it's me she longs for. it's me she misses when i leave the room. it's me. i'm her mom. she knows nothing else. i want to hug her birth mom and say "it's alright. she's doing great." and at the same time i just want her to know someday she's going to know to miss you. she's going to want to know who you are and where she comes from. please take care of yourself. even though today she doesn't need you, she will someday. she will because we will want that for her. we will want her to want for you, and that's ok. she's not "chosing sides" or "picking teams." it takes a village, so they say. and it does. and that's ok that you can't be her entire village. but please! don't fall off the planet just yet. *sigh* it's strange this foster-birth-family relationship. it's sort of an arranged marriage. they don't know when they call you how long you are being asked to check in for duty. but we say yes (almost) every single time. but then the day comes when you realize you've forgotten what life was like before this tiny person came in. and then you realize, you can't imagine what it i will be like if this tiny person ever isn't in your daily life. i try not to think of that day. i try to imagine adoption day, or her graduation day, or the day that it finally clicks what adoption is. the other day karyssa was throwing a FIT because i asked her to clean her room and she said she was "so tired." and it hit me, i have just asked her to clean a space bigger than what her entire family lived in. she has a room. of her own! and it's a big room. and she has no idea what her fate would have been had she not been found by social services. had the nurses at the doctors office not realized her growth charts had taken a backwards turn and she had lost 4 pounds when she was between 10 and 13 months old. and if her birth mom hadn't made a snide remark to the nurses that they'd called the wrong county, giving them jurisdiction to call OUR county. where we were waiting! waiting for her! my mind spins thinking of the teeny tiny what-if's that happened as our lives flowed parallel and in opposite directions at once. as i trained for my third half marathon and ran right past the house that she would come home from the hospital in. as i ran down the creek, past her uncles house that would be on all the paperwork i would get for her 13 months after that half marathon. as my heart ached for a baby, as her mother's ached for her youth. i don't blame her mother. how could i hate the mother of my children? how could i hate this person who has given me everything doctors couldn't, and then gave me a brother to go along with karyssa. i don't know that i could ever find a cold place for her in my heart since i look in my babies faces and wonder what life was like before them. and then i realize i get that all over again. a third time. i get to wonder what life was like, in a good way, before this baby came home to us. and i hope and i pray she goes no where. although that's how it looks today, monday's coming and the tides could change. but for today, i will look in her adoring eyes and be thankful for the young lost birth mom who has given me one of the 3 greatest gifts life will give me. and i will hope someday i will not need a passenger van.