Essaouira - The sea watchers by Amine Fassi

When I was a kid I would have never imagined I will become the mother of four children, three of them adopted. But as always, life happens.

Being the mother of so many sometimes catches me by surprise, I think I overestimated my capacity to manage such a large family. The loads of laundry, the constantly messy house, the amount of doctor appointments, the so much money spent from essentials like food to the dispensable like toys.

The last two years haven’t been easy either. The adoption of an older girl -much older than the papers said- threw the family out of balance and we are still trying to find a much needed peace. We have done everything in our power to regain family harmony, from doctors, medications, and we even hired a searcher in Ethiopia to track down the biological relatives of my kids. Some things proved useless, others gave us unsuspected insides on our children’s pasts.

The search, for example, was the best investment of the latest years. Although we couldn’t find the family of our two younger kids, we did find the biological mother of my older girl and it was an information so valuable that it changed our perspective and approach to manage our kid. We finally know from the right source how my daughter was before adoption and what pushed her mother to surrender her, erasing the notion that many of the things that bother my girl were adoption or trauma related. We confirmed her true age, we verified how she lived in Ethiopia, and over all, we now have communication with her birth mom so we can visit her in the future or ask for feedback anytime we need it.

In this particular case of my older daughter, there are two mothers shaping the future of my girl. The mother in Ethiopia is helping the mother in America raise this girl through the distance and the cultural differences, which is no small task.

We’ll see how things go over the years, but in our particular family, there are four mothers, some more present than others.

Happy Mothers’ Day to all!

AliciA