Becoming a Family

I've written before about the process of becoming a foster parent.  There were so many thoughts, so many fears, just the months leading up to receiving our license provided enough material to keep this blog going.  So here's another from back then: I worried that becoming foster parents would ruin our family.  I would lay in bed at night and think about this beautiful, amazing, increasingly rare thing we had.  Chris and I did it all in the "traditional" order: we got married, we had a baby a few weeks after our second anniversary, we waited 18 months and then we made another one.  I gave birth to two healthy, beautiful boys, and the four of us were a family.  Chris earned the money, I stayed home with the kids, we all had the same last name and the same skin color and the same love of buttered popcorn and movies on the couch.  When the time to enroll the boys in school came around, we just showed up with a birth certificate and immunization record, filled out some papers, and it was done.  We got to skip over the lengthy sections detailing custody agreements.  We got to travel when we wanted, to make all the decisions affecting our kids.  We made a family from our own DNA, and I thought being in that exclusive club held us together.

We got the call, we brought home a baby, and it was different.  When I held him, when I gave him his bottle (no breastfeeding, which was a bummer), I didn't search his features to find the ones that matched mine.  Between the pediatrician and the caseworker, we made arrangements and implemented their decisions.  We tried to be considerate of the strangers who visited with him each week, the people who bore the titles of Mom and Dad.  We had to get a court order to take him out of state to visit my sister.  And then, one day, he began talking.  His first word was "Dada", and he said it while he was in my husband's arms.  A month later, he called me "Mama".  And I was confused at first, because he called the other woman Mama too.  I thought there could be only one, but he showed me how silly and narrow that was.  At church, we began meeting with other families, and we talked about being a family to others.  The doors of my heart opened to the people coming through the doors of my house.  Michael was just the beginning, as we reached out to his sisters and the relatives taking care of them, the other Second Moms.  And, despite not having a title, a roll-off-the-tongue name to describe how we fit together, I knew we were becoming a family.  My preteen neighbor started coming over, and bringing her friends, and we would stop by her house and spend time with her parents, and another branch was added to our tree.  We got another call, a little girl this time, and she quickly joined the other kids in calling me Mom, and she loves to tell people that she has two Moms, two Dads, two Grandmas and one Nana, and a Grandpa.  And she began to use a word we hadn't taught her to describe our boys; she called them her brothers.

All these people, they taught me that family isn't about looking alike and living in one house together.  Family describes the people we love, the ones who live in our homes and the ones who find a place in our hearts.  Family is who we show up for, it's who we take care of, it pulls us together.  When Michael's First Mom contacted us, when she came back to the land of the living, it was the easiest thing to share a meal with her, to talk to her, to let him sit on her lap.  Of course we want to see her, to help her, to clear off a chair for her to join us.  Because she's family.