Mama's Gotta Eat

Millie's birth mother and I have recently been commiserating over how much Kanye West's song "Only One" makes us both cry. I suspect she cries because it's written from the perspective of Kanye's mother, who won't be there for every  moment with his daughter, so he's picturing her telling him to tell his daughter about her. We tell Millie about her every day, and the part about God sending him two angels instead of one? That's how I feel about her birth mother and Millie. For me, I cry because this little baby is my whole world, she's my only child, and I waited and prayed for her for so long. And I cry because, open adoption or not, there is a big "what if" in our lives. What if she's our only one? What if God has given us just this one opportunity to be parents? I've mentioned before that I am an only child. I remember being asked if I had siblings as a child, and when I said no, the response was always, always, ALWAYS a...

For two years before our daughter Amelia was born and we adopted her, I scoured Pinterest and the internet for articles about parenthood. I wanted the cold hard truth, the whole story, as told by other women who were just as excited and terrified of becoming mothers as I was. I gravitated towards the buzzfeed generation's style of writing; seeing things written out as a concise list gives me an inexplicable sense of organized excitement. "20 Things No One Tells You About Motherhood" "35 Dads Who Have Totally Nailed This Parenting Thing" "42 People Who Might Be Parents or Might Be Stock Photos" "19 Reasons to Have a Kid for the Tax Deduction" "How Infertility Changed Me- a Story By a Slice of Pizza". Most of those article names are things I made up but in my two year stretch of trying to conceive obsession, I honestly would've clicked on every single link. But out of all those articles and lists that I actually read, I don...