Tuesday's In Other Words

"I thought about the whole notion of "reproduction," and what it really means to replicate yourself. Is it merely about the passing on of eyes and chins and hair color? Or is it, rather, the replication of the heart? Do we leave a bigger mark by passing on our genes, or our thoughts?"
~ Shannon Woodward, author of
Inconceivable: Finding Peace
in the Midst of Infertility ~

I have this book. I cried most of the time I spent reading it. So many women and couples struggle with infertility.

It is true that I always wanted to be a mother. I always wanted to experience pregnancy. To feel the butterfly flutters in my womb when the baby first begins to move. To experience birth either through the baby coming through the birth canal in a vaginal birth or through a C-section. Yet, to me, being a mother is not necessarily about a biological child. To me, being a mother is to do the things differently than my mother did. Yet it is also to discover what my mother did right. It is to discover the universal truth that children are who they are and will do what they do and I will become my mother.

I always said I would be different. I would never say, "because I said so." I would not hit my child. I would cry with them and express joy with them. And yet I have no children. The reality is that biological children could carry Bob's disease. My illness.

We are open to adoption. Not just open. We want to adopt. It is burned within us. There is a child...there are children out there who belong in our family. Who will one day be brought into the fold of our family so we can care for them. So we can love them. We can show them that there is love. There is something bigger than them out there. That is the mark we leave. That is what we know. We will have children even if they never come from inside me. They will be ours because we were given the privilege and responsibility to love and raise them as our own.