Night and Day

Although Katie figures in many of my posts, Evan does not, mostly because the challenges he faces are his stories to tell, not mine. At 26, he has not found his way. He's smart but won't apply himself to anything unless there's a girl involved. If he's got a nickel, he spends a dime. Angry is his standard operating mode.

Have I mentioned how fiercely I love him?

He is my first child, the treasure at the end of a long, hard road. He was an easy infant, a sunny, delightful toddler, a fabulously fun little boy. By 5 or 6 he'd become occasionally difficult. After a traumatic head injury in a car accident when he was 10, he developed epilepsy and serious emotional and behavioral problems. His teenage years were torture for us all.

During the dark years, his weapon of last resort was, "You're not my mother. You're just some woman I live with."

He once threw a battery from a school bus window and broke the windshield of a passing car. I made him pay for the replacement and insisted he deliver both the money and an apology in person. Driving through a bitterly cold Minnesota night to meet the car owner was one of the most painful half hours of my life. "You can't make me do this. You can't make me do anything. You're not my mother."

"I may not be the mother you want but I am the mother you have, and I am the mother responsible for helping you grow up. I can't make you do anything but you will not get back in this car until you apologize and shake this man's hand."

On and on it went. The Explorer was a missile of misery screaming down the freeway. The lights of the suburbs glowed warm and cozy in the distance. They taunted me, those lights. They whispered stories* of happy, unbroken families gathered around dinner tables with sweet smiles on their faces and linen napkins on their laps.

"You're not my mother. You're not Katie's mother, either. You don't have anybody."

It was—it IS—my deepest fear. Then. Now. Always.

As the kids reunite with their birth families, memories haunt me. With Katie, it is the sweet moments I fear will be brushed aside and lost. With Evan, it is the painful ones, the many times he so clearly longed for something—for someone—I could not be. Now he's searching, and I am afraid what he finds will not be what he wants.

Actually, I know it won't because what he wants is someone to take away all his pain, a common hope among adopted kids. It never happens. It can't. Not for any of us.

The day he started the search, Evan said, "I've always hoped my real mother lives in Europe."

Yeah, I'll bet. In a big tower with a moat and everything. But haven't we all wished for a better family? Remember Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess? I spent years hoping my real family—or at least a little monkey—would show up at my bedroom window.** Photographs of my mom pregnant with me dashed those hopes. I was only and exactly who I seemed to be, and so was my family.

That will turn out to be true for Evan, too, in its way. I pray he can come to peace with his truth. And I pray that truth will always and forever include me.


* Even that night, I knew the stories whispered by those lights weren't true. Every family has its moments, even in beautiful houses with warm glowing lights.
**I can't be alone in this. A Little Princess was first published in 1905. 103 years later, eleven different editions of the story are available on Amazon.