Road trippin through adoption

This is the first of a series of blogs about our adoption with guest writer Luna Moreno Drilling

I've said before that Luna was the most perfect child for me. My guardian angels knew. I live each day with 100 percent certainty that Luna was meant to be my daughter. But even if something is meant to be it doesn’t mean it's an easy road. Over the last few years we have tripped, fallen, picked ourselves up (and occasionally fallen right back down) and kept going.

Experiencing motherhood through Luna has been a wonderful and life-changing adventure but why and how she came to be my kid has also been challenging and heartbreaking. I won’t go into those details because that’s Luna’s story to share or not share, but I can tell you a little about how I’ve felt throughout. There are so many times where I thought “this process is not what is best for the child.” Although my child is safe and loved, that's not every story. What about those who never find that and age out of foster care without a place to come home to? I am constantly torn between the reality of our adoption and the joy it's brought to our family with the fact that so many children in the US are removed from parental care with more support given to adoptive or foster parents than to the parents who desperately want to be able to care for their children. Do I want to adopt all the children (yes) or do I want all the children to be safe with their biological families (also yes)? My brain wrestles with these types of contradictions. I am both thankful there was a way for a biracial, single woman with a history of  breast cancer, trauma and grief to become a mom and saddened that there are so many children in foster care. (adoption options for any couples other than white, cis, hetero couples are shrinking across the country. I'll save the commentary on that as well as trans-racial adoption and abortion for another day).  

Through our process (ugh that sounds so cold and clinical- but I don’t have a better word) I have witnessed the otherness that is imposed on foster care children in a foster home but I’ve also seen the counterpoint which is the togetherness and love this child has brought into my life. I have raged with anger over the hurt my child experienced that I can never erase. I have beamed with joy at her building a beautiful life. I have seethed over someone not seeing the bright light in my child and not protecting that light at all costs. I have sat humbled by her resilience and broken by her need to have this resilience at all. I have felt overwhelmed with love as she has been accepted and welcomed. I have felt impatient with a long and difficult process with too many bureaucratic hurdles. (Side note: my daughter standing up for herself saying “you say this is all about considering what is best for me- but I don’t feel like that right now” was both heartbreaking and awe inspiring). I have felt failure when I couldn’t hold all of these feelings at once. I could probably go on forever about all the juxtapositions of this process, all of the parts that are so weird or awful and all the parts that were glorious and joyful. But all of this is being an adoptive parent, specifically a foster to adopt parent.

At the end of the day I’m a mom, to a beautiful, kind, emotional, brilliant, funny kid. The way I came to be a mom has been a journey and although I’ve never been great with road trips, it has offered me a world that I would never have known was possible. I am forever grateful for my child, that she chose me and our family and that I get to watch her life unfold. I live every day in perpetual thanksgiving for her (and frequently remind myself of that when her bedroom looks like a trash truck crashed into a bombed out Bath and Body works store next door to a Sephora).