Five

Dearest Roo,

Today you are five years old. How did that happen? I swear you just barely learned to walk and now you're reading chapter books and dancing and playing tennis and starting kindergarten in the fall. How did you grow up so fast? You're taller every time I see you, and smarter. You are the most fascinating little person I have ever met. Everything about you is interesting to me. You are my favorite in all the known world. There is a light in your eyes that fills my soul. When you smile, it seems impossible that there's anything other than joy in the world.

Do you have any idea how amazing you are, Roo? Everything about you is a miracle to me. I haven't found the words in any language to properly express how much I love you. It's not something I can explain. It's something that I feel. I didn't know I could love anyone on earth even half as much as I love you.

I was scared when you were born. You were brand-new and tiny and I knew what I wanted for you; I knew what you deserved. I was scared that I didn't have a way of making sure you had everything in the world that you deserved by merit of the love I felt for you. I wanted to be the best mother in the world because you deserved it.

I couldn't do it. I certainly couldn't be the best father in the world. You deserved that, too.

As desperately as I loved you I could never quite shake the feeling that I was raising someone else's child. The moment I first saw you my heart claimed you but some ineffable part of myself wouldn't settle down. A few hours after you were born, when I was recovering in a hospital room and you were burrito-wrapped in your bassinet, I found my gaze moving from your sleeping face to the door. My rational mind expected no visitors but the waiting part of myself kept watching the doorway. I didn't dare use words for what I was anticipating at the time but the truth is I was waiting for your parents to come in.

I took you home and you were mine for nine fragile and beautiful weeks but the entire time, I knew.

I have never fought anything in my life as desperately as I fought to be your mother. I warred with myself for the first seven weeks of your life, searching for some way to change what I felt in my heart. I wanted you so badly! I had already been through so much pain. I had already broken so many times. I couldn't bear the thought of shattering again. I loved you so much! How could I not be your mother?

Then I found your family. I saw their picture on my computer screen and the part of me that waited in my hospital room stopped waiting. It wasn't your dad or your mom that did it, either. Would you believe, darling Roo, that the first member of your family I found was your big sister? I was ready to keep looking at profiles and reading letters but I saw your sister in that photograph ... I looked at her dear, perfect little cherub face and I thought, that's Roo's sister. I knew she was your sister. I knew. I looked at your parents after that but it didn't matter who they were, because if they were your sister's parents they were yours as well.

No matter what else happens in my life, no matter what I believe or disbelieve, no matter what circumstances change, I will never believe anything contrary to this: your sister was meant to be your sister, and you were meant to be hers. I have never known anything to be true as strongly and solidly as I knew that the two of you were meant to be together when I saw that picture, and nothing anyone ever says is going to change that.

I love that you girls are such good friends. I hope you always will be. I hope that you always take good care of each other.

There's more to your story that your parents have told you, or will tell you when you're older, and more that I need to tell you as well, but I'm saving that for you and only you. But today, on your birthday, I want you know two things for sure.

The first is that there's no doubt in my mind you were meant for the family you've got. You belong together. I couldn't have placed you with any family in the universe but theirs. I couldn't have done it! I tried. I met with other families and I wanted them to be right but none of them were and it wasn't until I met your family that I knew why no one else would do.

The second is something that I hope is already a solid and immovable fact in your mind: I love you. How inadequate those words sound! They're overused. They've lost meaning. But in the absence of any others, I'll use them over and over again and hope that repetition will lend them weight. My dear little Roo, I love you. Nothing in the known universe will stop me from loving you. Any good thing I ever accomplish in the world is because of my love for you. Any improvement I make, any happiness I find, any good and worthy thing I do is a manifestation of my love for you. My task as your birth mother is to take the love that I have for you and spread it around.

Never doubt, not for a second, that you are loved. There's no one else in the world for whom I'd break my own heart. Only you.

You were worth it. You always will be.

Happy birthday, darling girl.

Love,

Your birth mother Jill

Visiting Hours

I just want to take a moment to express my stunned semi-disbelief at the fact that Roo will be five years old this summer. Five! You guys, seriously. I swear, she just barely learned to walk. 

I got to see her a few weeks ago, which was fantastic. I mentioned this to one of my friends and she seemed unclear on what happens when I do see Roo, and I got to thinking how many times people misunderstand openness as it pertains to me and my relationship with Roo. So let's clarify at least the visiting part of that, and let's use a lot more words than are necessary because that's what we do here at The Happiest Sad. Well, that and the occasional meme.

First of all, let's clarify the word "visit." I'm not sure when or where I settled on that word to describe spending time with Roo. The word "visit" conjures up images from my childhood of spending time with my maternal grandparents. "We're going to visit Grandma and Grandpa DeWitt," my mom would say, and there was always this element of formality where you had to sit in a chair and make polite conversation and you weren't allowed to ask why everything in the curio cabinet smelled like an improbable cross between dust and aspergillis. Those visits certainly weren't much fun. The only good thing was that my grandfather - eleven years older and three times more patient than his wife - would eventually take pity on Little Jill and give her one of those miniature ice cream cups with the wooden spoon that fitted into the lid.

I am thirty years old but when I see those little ice cream cups I swear I can still feel my grandmother's disappointment looming over me like a rogue weather system. Bless her heart.

I digress.

What I really do, I think, is hang out with Roo and her family, but it sounds weird to say you're hanging out with a four-year-old, because if I'm honest she and I probably have different taste in movies and the last deep conversation we had was about gummy bears. So let's go with the word "visit" and pretend we grew up with the kind of grandmother who baked cookies and showed love. Bless her heart.*

Visits with Roo and her family are my favorite and they are awesome. There is no formality to them. It's just time spent with my friends. I use the word "visit" to describe any time I spend with Roo's family. I have been to dance recitals, we have all gone out for breakfast (and often lunch, and once dinner), and we have spent many happy hours at parks and playgrounds. The latter is where we hang out the most because it's the most fun for the kids

Roo always says hello to me. She says, "Hi, Jill!" and she smiles and it is awesome. Her big sister says hi to me, too, and I usually get a smile from their baby brother. M and I will talk and catch up for a bit until Roo insists that I play with her. "Jill, I want you to come play with me," she has said, and how do I say no to that? I can't. At that point I basically just let her boss me around for an hour or two. I have gotten so, so much sand in my shoes. You wouldn't believe it.

She has a very good if imagination when it comes to play, but she also has favorite things. Every playground we have been on has been a pirate ship. Roo seems to like the idea of a pirate ship. Once we made sand angels - maybe that's an Arizona thing, but it's like a snow angel only you're in the sand - and Roo's big sister said, "Hurry, get on the pirate ship, you're getting covered in water!"

Roo was feeling stubborn. She did not want to stop making sand angels. "I'll be fine," she told her sister. "I'm a mermaid." She's a problem solver, isn't she?

We are very often mermaids, or pirates, or mermaid pirates or pirate princesses. A few weeks ago when we were pirate princesses we used our rainbow power to subdue a particularly mean eel.

Roo likes to swing and climb and I have held her little shoes many, many times so she could climb better with bare feet. I always tell her how proud I am of her and I try to compliment her on that sort of thing more than on her general adorableness. When she climbed high even though she was scared, I told her she was very brave and that I was proud.

She knows that I love her but she is still a little kid, so when it’s time to leave she gives me a cheerful, “Bye, Jill!” and runs off, and I usually have to stop her for a hug. I always ask first if I can get a hug and if I can give a kiss. She always obliges. I tell her I love her and she will usually reciprocate.

I dearly love her siblings as well and so I will give them hugs and tell them I love them, too, because it's true and because I don’t think any child can ever hear enough that they are loved. After my last visit – a few hours at a park, I told Roo and her sister that I had fun and that I always have fun with them. “We have fun with you, too,” Roo's sister said. So many warm fuzzies, you guys.

You might have noticed that at no point do I attempt to parent Roo or offer parenting advice to her parents. This is where a lot of people get confused. I think there's this misconception that openness is a shared custody agreement. So I want to be very clear: P and M are Roo's parents, one trillion percent. That's what I wanted for her. I'm just a friend of the family who happens to have birthed one of the family's kids for them. P and M are doing an awesome job at the whole parenting thing. It's not my place to interfere.

I have been asked, along the custody line of thinking, if I get Roo all to myself at visits. I don't. There have never been any just-Roo-and-Jill visits and I'm totally okay with that. I love her whole family so, so much. I would be sad if I didn't get to see and spend time with them too.

I end up seeing Roo and her family every couple of months or so. This works out well for all of us. M and I text pretty frequently and keep up with each other on social media. We've worked together on adoption-related events in the valley so I see her often, which I love.

The other question I want to answer is whether visits are emotionally difficult for me. They are not. When I first placed I was worried that visits would be like placing Roo all over again - I'd get a few hours with her and then have to let her go. But visits have always been good for me, from the very first one. They allow me to see the good that came from the choice I made to place. I get to see firsthand that Roo is happy and loved and has an awesome life. I get to know her and be part of her life. I do cry when I drive home from a visit, but they're happy tears because I feel like I don't deserve the blessing of this amazing open adoption and yet I have them anyway.

Let's be honest - I do a lot of stupid things. I struggle to be a kind and compassionate person and I'm more narcissistic than anyone has a right to be in their thirties. If life were about fairness I would never see or hear from Roo again. Every single day I thank God for these blessings I don't deserve. I thank Him for letting me have her for a little while, and I thank Him for letting P and M have her forever. I am so glad she's theirs.

Every time I see Roo with her family, I remember why I chose adoption, and why if I had to do things over, I would choose it again without hesitation. As badly as it hurt at first, it doesn't hurt anymore. And Roo's happiness is worth it.

*My grandmother loved me in her own way. She was just stubborn and set in her ways and didn't care much for my father, and I am like a short girl clone of my dad so I probably never stood a chance. She was a good mother to my mother and that's what matters at the end of the day, right?

Bless her heart.

Four Years, and Five Years

I neglected to celebrate my blog's birthday at the end of August. I did have cake, but I didn't blog. I never blog anymore, you guys. I'm sorry.

But one day I won't neglect to commemorate is today, the 9th of September. This is going to be as unfocused as all get out, but I have things to say. Today marks four years since I placed Roo for adoption. It also marks five years since my dad died. I remember thinking, back in 2009, that it was a good idea to place Roo on the anniversary of my dad's death, because that way I would have one day a year to feel sad and I could be happy the rest of the time.

Worst idea EVER.

I find myself experiencing a sort of mutant weather system of feelings this time of year because I'm thinking of two different life experiences and processing the emotions that each of them brought, and sometimes the hot and cold fronts collide and there are violent storms. Last Monday I felt every feeling I have ever had all at once. I ended up slumped on the floor in my closet, sobbing to the point of hyperventilation. I had to go shoe shopping to make it okay.

I'm sure I've mentioned this before but it bears repeating. When I grieve placement, it's nothing to do with the real Roo, the world's awesomest four-year-old. My grief is for my baby, my tiny newborn. I miss being a mother, and I miss being her mother in particular. The fact that I have a milestone birthday coming up and that I am still very, very single only compounds that pain. I want children. I wanted Roo. I want more just like her. Letting her go was the hardest thing I have ever done. Losing my dad was awful, but placement in the moment was a million times worse.

But it's okay now. It is absolutely okay. 

I was going back through my archive and reading what I wrote on previous September 9ths. I had this to say in 2010:

“A year later, I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. Yes, it hurt. It hurt for a while. But time has dulled the pain, and continues to do so. Roo's happiness is worth every tear. If me being sad for a while is the price of her being happy forever, I'm glad to have paid it.”

I stand by the words of Past Jill. She was pretty insightful. I miss her sometimes. I haven't had a single insight lately. Well, that's not entirely true. But my last insight was inspired by a YouTube video; it wasn't much to brag about. (Also, the video was the one about what sound a fox makes.)

I miss being a mother when I stop to think about it. But every single day, I miss having a father. My dad was a pretty awesome guy. My mother is fond of saying that he was the most fascinating person she had ever met. She's not wrong. I had a great dad. He's been gone for five years and I still can't make it okay.

Tonight I went to the planetarium at Mesa Community College and watched the coolest video of the universe, as generated by computers, set to the music of Pink Floyd. It was absolutely amazing, and I wanted to cry because my father would have loved it. When I was a kid he would take me outside after dark, set up his telescope and teach me about the stars. He pointed out planets and constellations, and the occasional airplane, along with the thought that he liked airplanes because it was nice to be going somewhere.

He has been gone for five years and I still miss him so much it hurts. I have made so much progress with adoption in four years; the pain is hardly worth mentioning because it is so fleeting and faint. It's a good place to be in. I wish I could get there with my grief for my dad.

I have always liked the idea of space travel in theory but in practice it scares me. Too many things can go wrong, and there is precious little keeping you alive. When my family was in Washington, D.C. for my sister's wedding, we went to the National Air and Space museum and saw the tin cans they used to use to send astronauts into space. I could not believe how small they were, or how thin. A million things could have gone wrong and the men inside would have died pretty horrible deaths.

"I could never go up into space," I told my dad.

"Really?" he said. "I'd go in a second. I want off this planet. We're all trapped here, you know." (Only my father would feel trapped on a planet the size of ours.)

He's not trapped here anymore.

There are a lot of things I don't understand about the afterlife, but personally I like to believe that my dad has seen planets and stars and galaxies and that they are every bit as amazing as he used to imagine.

Today was a good day, it really and truly was. I am blessed to have a lot of people in my life who love me and who say nice things to me when I need a boost. I had an entirely adequate day at work (good as it gets with the government). I had the very best time at dinner with Roo and her family - they are my favorite people ever - and I felt so purely happy! And the planetarium was amazing, and I was there with friends. It was a lovely day, better than I expected and certainly better than I deserve.

There was just this moment when I got home a little before 10:00. I hadn't been home all day, and my apartment was dark and empty. I was reminded of the day my dad died, when my mom and I went home to a dark, empty house. I went to the kitchen (tonight, not 5 years ago) because I thought eating my feelings* might help, but mostly I wanted a cookie and there were no cookies, so I cried instead.

And then I went on with my night, and here I am. I have survived another September 9th, and I only cried once. My sister-in-law said on Facebook that instead of just being sad today I should use the day to celebrate the choice I made for Roo and the awesome person that my dad was. I like her idea much better than the crying that has been my tradition. Every September 9th that passes is a reminder that I am so much stronger than the things life throws at me. I'm not broken. I'm not bitter.

I'm better.






*Eating my feelings is number 148 on my list of faults. I don't recommend listing your faults. You will not be a happier person. You will, however, have a humorous anecdote to share when making small talk. So it's up to you.

Birthday Wish

I don't remember the last time I blogged twice in three days, but this is a special occasion. Today is my birthday!

I hate my birthday. Well, no, hate isn't the right word. Mostly because I like cake, but also because I like cake. Dean Koontz said that where there's cake, there's hope, and there's always cake.

But as I may have mentioned last year (I'd give you the link but I don't feel like finding it) I tend to have disappointing birthdays, and sad birthdays, and so I have learned to have absolutely zero expectations. My birthday is just another day. Shorter of breath, one day closer to death, right? As long as I get my cake, I'm okay.

This year, there is only one thing I wanted for my birthday. I wanted if for my last birthday too but I was more patient then. I wasn't sure it would happen this year, even though I wanted it to very badly. It was completely out of my control, and all I could do was pray. Then I heard that it was going to happen ... and then maybe it wasn't, and I got a little angry at God and frustrated with the general unfairness of life. It wasn't something selfish I wanted. It wasn't for me. For the first time since placement, I wanted something for someone else more than I wanted anything for myself. I wasn't asking for a miracle. Well, maybe I was. But only a small miracle.

About a week ago, I had hope again, and I prayed quite desperately for several days, telling God in no uncertain terms what I wanted to happen and for whom. Just this one thing, and I wouldn't even care what happened for at least the rest of the year. I just needed this one little miracle, and I could handle everything else.

Last week, I got my birthday wish. I got my miracle, by which I mean that P and M got theirs. My little Roo is a big sister! I don't even have words for how happy and excited and grateful I am. It doesn't matter to me how my birthday goes anymore. If I start to feel sad, all I have to do is look at the picture I have of Roo holding a chubby-cheeked new baby (with a little help) and the world is an awesome place again.

In Which Jill Writes About What She's Not Going to Write About

I spent quite a lot of time on a post about September 9th, 2009 - the day I placed Roo. It felt like what I ought to write about because today marks three years since then. I've written before about placement itself but I've never written properly about the day before placement. So I started to write, and I cried a fair bit, and even though everything I wrote was true and relevant, it didn't feel right.

I did a presentation the other night with P and M. We spoke to the women and teenage girls in a local LDS congregation. I've done these presentations with Roo's parents twice before and I love it. I love talking about adoption with pretty much anyone, but I think it's more meaningful when my audience gets both sides of Roo's story instead of just mine. When we reached the point in the story where I was supposed to be talking about my feelings during placement and what it was like, I had an odd moment. One part of my brain was bringing up the words I wanted to use to describe placement, but another part of my brain was nonplussed. (I have been trying for ages to properly work that word into a blog post, and there it is.) I thought, am I remembering this right? What did I feel that night?

I found that I sort of couldn't remember. I mean, I've read some of my own blog, so obviously I remember in the sense that the story is acutely familiar and of course I lived it, too. But as I was talking (the part of my brain that makes me talk always works three times faster than the part of my brain that actually considers whether I should be saying what I'm saying) I kept stopping mid-sentence and changing direction and finally I blurted out what is probably the least helpful thing I have ever said when describing placement -

"I don't know. It was just - it was a while ago. I've changed so much since then. It sort of feels like it happened to someone else."

A minute later, when my rational brain had caught up, I silently prayed that no one in the audience took that to mean I'd suffered a dissociative episode. But the thing is, what I said was true. I am quite the opposite of the depressed, juvenile, selfish woman who placed her child for adoption and then sat in her mother's Toyota screaming and crying. While I am immensely proud of the choice I made for Roo, I'm not proud of who I was when I made it. I was a wreck of a woman, and I find it nearly impossible to identify with her, even for the sake of my story.

I tried to slip back inside that skin to talk about how much placement hurt, but it made me feel petulant and selfish and it was uncomfortable. Writing about the day of placement, the last day I was a mother, didn't feel right because it was full of such wistful sadness and I don't like to dwell in those places anymore. One of the rather obvious things I have learned about happiness since I started studying it this year is that if you want to be happy, you shouldn't spend a lot of time thinking about sad things.

So, I'm sorry to say, I don't think any of you will ever be reading the paragraphs I labored over earlier. If Roo wants to read them when she's older she will but I don't want to go there with anyone else.

I was just going to write, like, a paragraph about why I'm not writing about placement day today, and look what happened. Words everywhere like some kind of explosion and I'm not even done yet.

I also thought that I should write something about the day my dad died, because today marks four years, but I spent hours on something that still didn't feel right. I wasn't sure why. I edited the heck out of it and re-wrote it three times and I liked what I wrote but it still didn't feel like what I ought to say today. I think I've figured it out.

When I was a kid I took gymnastics classes in the summer and I learned two important things. The first is that I have no aptitude for gymnastics. The second is that there's a pathetic sort of safety in looking back. If you're doing a handspring or a walkover or a flip, it's easier to go backwards because you can see where you're going. If you go forward, you have what is known as a blind landing - your feet face the direction you're headed before your eyes do. I mastered the back walkover, but the front walkover scared the daylights out of me. I didn't know where my feet were going to land and my fear kept me from putting them in the right place. Every. Single. Time.

But in life, as in gymnastics, if you can only go backward, you're not going to get very far. You have to learn to risk a blind landing every now and then if you want to get anywhere worth going. It's like the end of the last Indiana Jones movie. Remember this scene?

Indy had to save his dad (spoiler alert: he succeeded), and that meant taking a step forward, off a cliff. It would have been easier and safer to turn around at that point, but he didn't. (It would have made for a terrible ending if he had. The elder Henry Jones would have died and Indy would have looked like the worst sort of coward, especially considering everything else he faced in the movie, and the two movies before it.) He had to move forward. He couldn't go back.

Neither can I.

There are things I am going to remember for the rest of my life, and when the mood strikes me I will write about them and I may or may not put them on my blog. But I'm drawing myself a line there. The past is a foreign country. You can visit from time to time, but you can't live there.

More and more I find myself taking leaps of faith. Well, not leaps, exactly (which is lucky, since we've established that acrobatics are not my forte), but steps, let's call them steps, into the unknown. I can't see the path ahead of me but I know that it's there. I know that God is there. And even though it would be easier to look back, I'm going to keep moving forward, blind landings and all. I don't know where this path ends, but I can't wait to get there. It's going to be awesome.

Enough

(Not to be confused with the other post I wrote that was also called "Enough." I should probably invest in a thesaurus.)

Way back at the end of January, I got my W-2 in the mail. I said to myself, "Self, this year I am going to do my taxes in February." And then all of a sudden it was April. I got my taxes done with two days to spare. The point is, sometimes I mean well, and then time gets away from me. I was going to blog once a week in April, and all of a sudden, it's the 20th. But that's neither here nor there.

I've been thinking about something lately. Actually, I've been thinking about a lot of things lately, because I am an adult human being and that's how I function. But I have been thinking about blogging and Roo and what I feel like I still need to say here (don't worry, there's plenty). One thing keeps coming up for me, and the visit I had today cemented it for me.

This is probably going to come out all wrong. Words have been failing me a lot lately, and it's not a comfortable thing for me. It seems to happen most often with things that are important. I wonder if it's a product of happiness. When I was super depressed I could find the words I needed pretty quickly. Now that I am mentally healthy, I stutter.

I digress.

I was thinking a few weeks ago about how I am definitely not where I thought I would be in life if I'd had to predict my future in years past. I'm not where I thought I'd be as a teenager picturing her late twenties, and I'm not where I thought I'd be 2 ½ years post-placement. I always pictured a husband and children. After placement, I thought I'd at least have the husband.

It used to bother me a lot more that I'm still single. I'm okay with it now. I've been working on being okay with the no-children part as well. And that brings me to my point today.

I spent a long time feeling like God owed me a baby to make up for placing Roo (I know it sounds stupid, but it's true). I felt like there was going to be this emotional hole in me that only a child of my own could properly fill. I thought that some part of me would always hate having placed Roo until I had children of my own to parent. I thought that I would be lacking because I had a baby but I'm not her mother.

What I have come to realize is that none of those things are true. They might have been true of the Jill who placed a child for adoption 2 ½ years ago, but they're not true of me now. 

I left my visit today feeling almost crushed by the weight of my gratitude to my Father in Heaven for Roo and her awesome family. It was such a lovely visit, and Roo is the most marvelous little person. She is sweet and feisty, clever and talkative and entirely too smart for her own good. And she reminds me so forcefully of both of her parents that I have a hard time seeing myself in her at all and I absolutely love that. 

I prayed as I drove, trying to find the words to thank Heavenly Father for this amazing little girl I love so much and for her family. I felt unequal to the task. How can I ever find the right words? All I could think was, I certainly don't deserve any of them but I want to become the kind of person who does. I want to be a better person because they love me. How blessed am I to have people in my life who love me and make me a better person?

As I drove home, I realized something that's been itching at my brain for months now. There are no guarantees in life. I may never have a child of my own. I don't know what God has in store for me. But - and here's the kicker - if I never do have children, if I become the crazy old single lady that all the neighborhood kids are afraid of, it won't matter to me, not one bit.

Because I am Roo's birth mother, and that's enough for me. Roo is enough. If she's all I ever get, then I am still more blessed than I have any right to be.
How can I believe the Lord owes me something when He gave me so much more than I deserve? He gave me Roo, and even though I am not her real mother, I get to love her with a mother's love. I get to love her forever.

If she's it for me, I have nothing to complain about and I never will. If she's all I ever get, she's more than enough, and she always will be.

Lucky

I've been on sort of a ranting kick lately. I'm sorry about that.

It's easy to fall into the trap of ranting about things because when it comes to adoption, there's never a shortage of misunderstandings, improper terminology, and wrong ideas. I sometimes feel the burden of educating people, correcting their misconceptions, giving them right ideas.

But I don't like ranting all the time, and I can't imagine that anyone likes to read it all the time. I certainly don't want Roo to think, when she's older, that I'm the sort of person who spends most of her time on a soapbox. I'm really not. I'm fairly even-keeled as far as temperament goes (no, really!).

I feel the need to step back today, to cut through the clever (to me) turns of phrase and the whining. Because that's not how I feel today, or even most days. What I feel is grateful - so very, very grateful!

I am acutely aware that my adoption situation is what many people would consider a best-case scenario. Adoption was 100% my choice; I wasn't lied to or coerced or forced in any way. I have a great relationship with P and M. I get e-mail and pictures and videos and visits. I get to see firsthand how clever and happy and absolutely darling my little Roo is, and how she is thriving. I have my blog as an outlet, and my support group as a collective shoulder to lean on. I've been able to process my grief for the most part.

There are a lot of birth parents out there who aren't as lucky. I don't know how they do it.

I'm grateful that I don't know. I'm grateful that things have worked out the way they have. I'm grateful for what a wonderful life Roo and her family have, for how happy they all are and how much they love each other. I'm grateful for the gift of adoption. Although I have days where I miss Roo a lot, I try not to take my situation for granted. I try not to let a single day pass without reminding myself that I have an awful lot to be thankful for.

I am a lucky girl.