People ask me all the time what my relationship with Kaleb’s biological mom was like.
I usually just tell them the truth: it was really good.
A couple of weeks ago, the kids were talking about how they came out of my belly, and Kaleb started asking questions. It wasn’t some deep or sad moment. He was just curious.
He asked who his mom was, so I told him her name.
Then he asked why he didn’t stay with her.
I told him, “She was really sick, and she wasn’t completely sure she could take care of you. So I asked her if I could have you, and she let me.”
And that was pretty much it.
Then this week I found this letter.
I wrote it to his mom on October 31, 2019. He had only been living with us for a few months. In foster care, once a child has been in care for 15 of the previous 22 months, the state is generally required to file for termination of parental rights. So at that point, we were nowhere near knowing how his story would end.
Back then, his name was still Kane. I loved him already, but I had absolutely no idea that I would eventually adopt him or that one day he would become Kaleb.
At the time, his mom had made the decision to go into inpatient drug treatment.
And apparently I wrote her this.
Reading it seven years later, one part made me question myself:
“As long as I am around Kane will always know you as the mom who walked in the cold and rain to be with him, not the mom who is in a hard place.”
And another:
“I will show him your picture in his baby book and tell him ‘mama.’”
Have I kept this promise?
It reminded me of a conversation we had in the car that seemed ordinary at the time.
Just me telling my son the truth: yes, he was loved. He didn’t become mine because nobody else loved him.
Here we were seven years later, he asked.
And I got to keep that promise.
I think this letter also answers the question people have asked me all these years about how I could have such a good relationship with his mom.
Kaleb has always represented a whole person to me.
Not just my child.
He had a name before the one I gave him. He had a mother before me. He had a history that started before he ever entered my house.
And loving him meant loving all of him.
Supporting his mom was never separate from loving Kane. It was one of the ways I loved him completely.
When I wrote this letter, I loved that little boy desperately. And I desperately wanted his mom to get healthy.
Those things weren’t opposites, even though her getting healthy could have meant that he left me.
That may be one of the hardest things foster care ever taught me:
Sometimes loving someone completely means loving them enough to want what is best for them, even when where they may end up doesn’t line up with what you want.
That Halloween, I wrote that I would probably load “your baby and my baby” into the car together.
And here they are.
My baby and her baby.
I just didn’t know yet that one day they would both be mine.
I don’t know what foster mom might need to hear this today, or what biological mom might need the encouragement.
But a hard chapter does not have to become someone’s entire story.
And loving a child well sometimes looks like refusing to let it become their mother’s entire story either.
Leave a Reply