The "Indescribable Gift" of being a Mother

We just had a terrific Mother's Day weekend. Ben got really brave and took five women to dinner on Friday night. It was his mother, my mother, Lauren, Chloe and myself. Hannah had her recital Friday so she was unable to come. He treated us to a wonderful meal at Olive Garden. It was nice having his mother and my mother together. They are two of the most wonderful women I know. Both are loving women with high morals and deep rooted integrity. We are so blessed to be able to call them our Mothers and the children's grandmothers.

Mother's day always make me reflect on the miracle of becoming a mother myself. I remember China like it was yesterday. With those nine other families, all of our hearts were pounding, I was already crying before I even stepped foot inside that building where our Chloe was waiting.

I remember approaching the building, the doors were opened. All you could hear were babies crying. It sounded like 50 babies, but it was really only ten. I remember spotting Chloe the minute I saw those ten girls. Her hair stuck straight up all over. I knew it was her. She was being held by an orphanage worker. I remember hearing other family's names being called out and Ben and I waiting, I think we were last or next to last, that part is kind of a blur.

Some of these next words in quotes are not mine, they are from a book (The Lost Daughter's of China~Karin Evans). I kept this book close at hand during our adoption process but it describes perfectly the moment...

"We shot out of our chairs, hearts pounding. As if walking to a church altar, we approached the front of the room. We faced the door, and in a blur of motion, two women rushed toward us and gently thrust a baby into our arms."

"Suddenly we were looking into our daughter's tiny face...."

Chloe was dressed in a yellow onesie. She had on several layers I discovered after getting her back to the room. (I couldn't wait to get her clothes off so I could look her over, see if those Mongolian spots that everyone had told me about were "real," give her a bath and get some Johnson's baby lotion on her! Also, couldn't wait to get a pink bow in that spiked hair.) I had for some miraculous reason brought along some toys, a little rattle that I gave her that would stop her crying only for brief spells.

Another quote...

"I gazed at her in wonder and disbelief. More names were called in the next few minutes and ten more babies were carried in and put in waiting arms, until the small room rang with laughing and crying and the high hum of profound emotional release."

"It was like some otherwordly mass birth....Here we all were, a bunch of Chinese babies and a band of parents from half a world away and all our lives changed at once. That morning these children had been orphans waking up in a high rise in south China, and soon we were about to carry them aboard a tour bus heading out of town. One minute we didn't have a baby and the next we did. The same, I realize, can be said of any woman in labor, by any father in the delivery room~and no wonder the moment of birth is so awesome."

"Those of us who stood in that orphanage waiting room didn't have quite the same physical buildup, the expanding womb, birth pains. Instead we carried around a load of anxieties for a couple of years and met our new babies with butterflies in our stomachs....We were standing on shaky legs...We were breathless~as if we'd been plunged into a cold ocean or hauled up into thin air. We were scared to death. We were floating on some unfamiliar joyful current."

"It was an event so much bigger than we were that we could barely stay in our senses....Just as the story of eggs and semen and gestation hardly gets at the miracle of birth, an account of babies being handed to new parents in an orphanage waiting room does not capture the essence of the adoption experience, either. Something unfathomable is at work~quite impossible to describe...."

One last quote...

"In a split second, our lives flowed together like the rivulets of water crisscrossing my daughter's native landscape. What had drawn us to this moment in China now seemed as perfectly timed and inevitable as the ebb and flow of the tides, as if we, too, had been pulled to this place by some invisible force of the earth-moon system. The universe shifted. And not just for us, but for all the other parents with us in that room that day and for all the others in different orphanages and hotel rooms at different times in provinces all over China. In that moment, the lost daughters of China were transformed into miracles."

by day three we had these smiles...

Chloe is 2nd from the right in the Gold, coming OFF the famous Red Couch

It's hard to believe it will be five years this October that I became a "Mama". I can't really remember my life before her. I'm so grateful to God for her. After thinking I might not ever become a mother to have her is just icing on this cake I call my life. What a gift!

"Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift!" 2 Corinthians 9:15