…it’s a cold and a broken hallelujah.
Tonight, when I laid in bed,
attempting to soothe my sobbing four-year-old, while listening to my nine-year-old
and one-year-old simultaneously throw fits of their own, Leonard Cohen’s
heartbreaking song, “Hallelujah,” started to play over my phone. I am not sure
why, but this song has always struck a deep chord with me. Maybe because I
truly believe Love is beautiful. Love is the highest high you can ever
experience. It takes you to other worlds. You see colors brighter, feel
emotions deeper, and experience a soul deep euphoria that you did not know existed.
And in a second, love is dark. It is cold. It shatters your previously elated
soul to a thousand pieces. The excruciating pain it brings will suck the air
right out of your lungs. It is one experience to mourn a love that is ended.
Most people can understand that pain. However, the pain I regularly feel is
different altogether. It is like hugging a favorite, shattered vase to your
chest. As it cuts deeper into your skin, you hold it tighter and tighter, not
ready to come to grips with the fact that it will never be as it was originally
intended…
My children regularly astonish me. All
five of them are bright and incredible people that bring light and laughter
into my life. Four of them have experienced pain, change, uncertainty, and
chaos that most adults would struggle to bear. They are among the strongest
people that I know. And yet, they are children. As I live through the cacophony
of screams that can occur at any given transition, or wade through the various
insecurities and fears that I am just supposed to know how to deal with, as their mother, my mind continually
screams, “It isn’t supposed to be like
this! This is not what having a family is supposed to feel like.” When my
teenagers become sullen and silent, and I am scrambling, trying to figure out
if it is just regular teen angst, or if I need to get my Mommy Battle Sword out
and fight against their past and their pains and their heartache, my heart
cries, “You are supposed to be able to
tell! You are supposed to know them so well that you can tell in an instant if
the issues are deeper issues of the heart or just regular irritation. You
should know! You are their MOTHER!”
And therein lies the rub. With my
daughters, I am Mom- and I am the Only Mom. I do know them like my own soul.
While it is no less fatiguing, I can usually tell when my girls are screaming
out of hunger, tiredness, or irritation versus when they cling to me and cry
out due to fear and insecurity and the world not aligning the way they expect
it to. I know them. I know their experiences. I know their struggles. This
next sentence is going to be very hard for
me to write; it is hard for me to admit and even harder for me to accept: I am not the Only Mother of my boys. I
love them dearly- more than I love life. I am crazy about them. However, there
is an enormous portion of their lives that I will never know. There is a portion of their lives that I am slightly
glad that I don’t know, because I honestly don’t think I could handle even imagining the pain that they have been
through in their precious, precious lives. This is the pain that adoption
brings. My boys have been broken. Their lives were shattered through no fault
of their own. They have been piecing it back together with the help of their
other Mothers, who loved them through the hardest and darkest moments of their
lives. My eyes brim with the love that I have for these women, who loved our
babies before I even knew they were mine. My boys’ foster mothers are all
angels in my eyes. They loved my boys, our boys, fiercely. They healed them in
the darkest places. I was not there for it. I was not there for so much of
their lives. Can you even fathom? The hearts of my heart, the souls of my soul,
I have been with them only a small fraction of their lives. It is my greatest
heartache, for I love these boys as if they were my own. I am desperate for
early memories of them. I relish every single story of their early days that
they share. I horde them in my heart, slowly piecing together the puzzle of who
they are and how they came to be. I hear of Mother. The Mother. Their Mother.
Their Father. Their Family. And my heart is shattered. Not because I am
reminded that they are not from my body, though what a delight it would have
been to have cherished them from their very first breath. To know them as I
know my own soul. (I know one day, prayerfully, this will occur, with time.) My
heart is broken for them to know the loss of family. Not just the loss of one
family member, as most people know in time, through death. They lost all of
their family in one fell swoop.
My heart is broken for their
mother. The Mother. I cannot fathom not having these boys in my life. Their big
personalities. Their enormous hearts and great generosity. Their need for love
and consistency- a need that I hungrily, and tiredly, fill. To have that ripped
away? Her loss. My “gain”. Both heart shattering. My heart is crushed that my
presence is needed, because all I want is for my boys to be whole. My breath is
stolen when I think of the heartache she must feel daily, not having these
precious faces to wake up to. My soul is torn when I think of the ache and pain
that MY children had to face before they made their way to me, because they made their way to me. It is
the most painful and beautiful of paradoxes. Words can’t truly express. I feel
my words are falling horrifically short. In fact, there are not words for this
deeply broken hallelujah. Hallelujah, they are my sons. Hallelujah, they are
safe. Hallelujah, they will not know that pain again. However, no matter how I
spin it, this is not victory. This is not how their lives were supposed to be.
As I am writing, I am staring at my
13-year old’s face, with tears in my eyes. He is patiently waiting for me to
finish writing, so we can hang out. He looks like his Father, yet he has the
same interests as my husband. When he talks, I sometimes hear his mother’s
voice, but he is so much like me. He and I are best friends. He is a mama’s boy
through and through. I am not his Only Mother. But God redeems. Hallelujah.
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