Being a Mom is about giving the world a wonderful person. Being a Mom is about loving beyond limits; it’s about giving of yourself completely and utterly, no compromise, conditions or complaints. Being a Mom is about loving a little person so much that you’d give up your last breath for them, it’s about holding a life in your hands, and hoping to God that you shape them right so that their lives after you are as easy as they can be. It’s about knowing that you have to let go of them one day and let them make their own way and their own mistakes. It’s about preparing for them to come back to you for advice and comfort. It’s loving them so much that all you want is for them to be happy, whether they make decisions you agree with or not.
Having children, your own biological children, adopted children, or your partner’s children, is hard. It’s accepting that they will not be with you forever, that they will go out into the world and get hurt, be messed around, be betrayed, be heartbroken. But it’s also about celebrating their successes, about sharing in their triumph’s and happiness. It’s about supporting their ideas and goals and doing your utmost to get them there, even if it means holding back and letting them run and fall and get back up and try again. It’s about steeling yourself and being there when all of this happens, and loving them even more because they have felt pain, felt glory, felt disappointment, felt love.
Being a Mom is doing your utmost not to build a box around your kids to protect them from the world. It’s being strong enough to let go, little bit by little bit, yet loving more and more as they grow and change and become their own people. It’s loving them more as they move slowly away from your life, into their own. It’s being proud of them for being independent, proud that they can be their own people and make their own choices.
Being a Mom isn’t about nappies and teeth and first steps. It’s not only about having experienced all these things, the first tooth, the first step, the first day of school, the first bicycle. It’s about accepting them as they are when you get them, and doing the best with what you have. Not everyone is made for nappies, and puke and sleepless nights. Not everyone is made for babies.
I’m a Mom, from the top of my head to the tip of my toes and back again. I didn’t give birth to them, I didn’t have too many sleepless nights with them, I didn’t get to see their first step or hear their first word, but I love them. I love them with all my heart and soul and would die inside if anything happened to them. I do not feel like less of a mother because they don’t share my blood or weren’t inside me for 9 months, I don’t feel like I could love my own biological baby more than them. I don’t feel a need to have a child of my own because they fulfil me, they complete me. Brandon and Angeliqa are mine, they love me, they respect me, they hold me on a pedestal, just like any child would their own mother. They have brought such joy and peace to my life and they are as much mine as I am theirs. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
