May.

This month weighs heavily on me. It is thick with emotion and the act of processing it has been more than I’ve wanted to undertake for a while. I walk around with the feeling that whatever it is that occupies the space right at the base of your neck where it connects with your chest, whatever it is that regulates rationality, whatever it is that keeps the bobber floating without triggering the flood gate of tears has been scooped out. And that space is just hollow.

With the world around me in bloom, and with longer days, breezy nights, and pop-up rain showers seeming to instantly render all growing things green and lush, this month should be one of renewal. But right now, May is a series of painful days to work through. Mother’s Day is tough for adoptees. Even those adoptees, of whom I squarely classify myself, who have the most ideal of outcomes. For the years before I connected with my birth mother, the holiday was a reminder, simply put, of abandonment. But I had (and most thankfully still have) an amazing mother who deserved to be celebrated without reservation. It felt like cheating her to feel sadness on Mother’s Day. She is a proponent of feeling all the feelings and would have never cheated me by insisting I brush off the sadness, but I felt like I always had to try to dissolve whatever the sadness was feeding on. And now that I know my birth mother, now that I have carried children and lost one before having the chance to meet him or her, I no longer attribute the sadness to feelings of abandonment, rather I feel the sadness for what she lost. Perhaps not lost, but rather, gave. Her selflessness astounds me and I feel the sting of not showing my gratitude enough for that. The conflux of emotions is exhausting.

In addition to being an adoptee on Mother’s Day, I’m now a mother. And, no surprise here, it is the most intense part of my identity. Tears spring to my eyes when I even think the words “I’m a mother.” My daughters have rendered me completely incapable of negating any of the cliches – I’m so proud of the people they are and can’t believe the staggering depth and breadth of meaning they’ve brought to my life. They leave me breathless with wonder, and they gut me with their love, their sweetness, their fierce dedication to me, to Craig, and to one another. My sole purpose is to be the best version of myself every day, in part so they have the mother they both need and deserve. And while I know that each of us is a work-in-progress and that perfection is insanely unrealistic (believe me, I do not strive for perfection), Mother’s Day nonetheless makes me reflect on those parts of me I want to work on.

For example, I happened to read this on Sunday. And I know – I know – the disconnect that can occur in every day communication, let alone the special communication pitfalls that occur between mothers and daughters. And I saw where I was already falling into this pattern, with Emma at least. She was so beautifully bald as a baby and then a whispy toddler/preschooler, and her hair is incredibly meaningful to her. She’s in the process of growing out her bangs and I find myself obsessing over them; making sure they’re pulled back, braided or clipped, away from her face and out of her eyes. In my mind, I’m making sure she literally can see the world, and ensuring the world sees her beautiful face. I’m teaching her about looking presentable and taking care of her body, including the hair on her head, and I AM teaching her those things. But am I also teaching her that she can’t face the world confidently and be beautiful with shaggy bangs? That my obsession over brushing her hair out of her eyes is more important than showing me her cartwheels or running and playing with her sisters or just eating her lunch? That people will think it’s lazy parenting on my part because she needs a trim? I don’t know. It’s analysis-paralysis right now, but it’s the start of a lifetime of motherhood issues that seem to render me helpless on days like Mother’s Day.
And then this holiday – this year – brings me thoughts of motherless children and childrenless mothers, and the hollow feels even deeper. 

I spent hours on Saturday morning sitting on my front porch, ours being one of the houses taking part in a neighborhood yard sale. The girls were at their Omi’s house, Craig was out for a while. The house was mine for a rare morning. We had some good foot traffic to check out the odds and ends I’d strewn across our little lawn, but it was mostly quiet. I sat on a chair that belonged to a lifelong friend, Claudia – whose birthday is today. She was my mom’s friend for decades until, at some point, she also became mine. And what a friend she was. She always made me feel like she and I were in on a secret together and the rest of the world, sadly, was not. Their loss. She was awesomely funny and generous and she made me feel normal because she always seemed to understand the struggle, whatever that struggle happened to be at a given time. Cancer took her in November. It was a long, painful process, and she put up a hell of a fight, but goddamn cancer still won. So Saturday as I listened to the birds, watched the leaves rustle, felt the warmth and humidity settle over me as the day progressed, I cursed the fuck out of that fucking chair. 

It seemed like such a small thing at the time – in the act of cleaning out things after Claudia died, my mom realized we had the perfect space on our porch for two of her outdoor chairs. And we do. These chairs have brought us out to our porch more in the last month than perhaps in the prior five years combined. We’ve made it our space, with flower boxes planted together, and cool drinks on these pretty Spring evenings. We watched the most amazing thunderstorm in these chairs – Craig and Emma curled up in one, Claire and me nestled in the other as the sky cracked and boomed all around us. The chairs have done this. And while I do smile when I think about Claire casually mentioning that she’s going to sit in Claudia’s chair, and while I can see Emma’s eyes slowly closing as she rests in one of the chairs at dusk, and while I love how the chairs lean back to the point where Molly will lay across my chest and rest her head on my shoulder for a sweet snuggle, I hate the fucking chairs. I’d trade them and the porch and the house and anything else I could find to change what is. Losing Claudia is still so surreal and her birthday another reminder of the mother, grandmother and friend gone.

As I was flipping through photos over the weekend I paused on one of Emma just after she’d turned one. She was wearing a bathing suit Claudia bought for her the summer before, right after Emma was born. I snorted with laughter when I paused on this photo, because I had the vivid recollection of packing up to leave my parents’ house just as the sun was starting to set – Emma was in the car and I was walking around to get in myself. A car did a quick turn into the driveway and Claudia leaned over her husband, who was driving, and threw this bathing suit out the window at me. “I saw this in the store and couldn’t leave it there! Here!” I caught the size 18-month pink bathing suit, looked over at my sleeping 3-month-old and just had time to shout my thanks as the car pulled away. But Emma wore the hell out of that suit the next summer and it was perfect.  Of course it was. Claudia was the mom of three boys (and not yet a grandma) who couldn’t pass up the chance to buy a baby girl bathing suit. She’s been robbed of picking up countless bathing suits for her three granddaughters now. It hurts to know what they’re missing.

  
When someone who’s lived a good life dies, the pain is real but we might eventually see a way to find comfort in our memories. On the other hand, when a life is taken so quickly, so unexpectedly, so tragically before it’s had a chance to really begin, that’s nearly unbearable. And five years after losing Hudson, it still feels this way. 

I often think about how she was barely even mine to lose. A toddler classmate of Emma’s for just a few months who, at 17-months-old, seemed like such a big kid at the time. Already an advocate – I have a clear memory of another classmate taking a little ball away from Emma in one of our first days at our new day care, and Hudson shrieking in protest, grabbing the ball right back from the offender and handing it gently to Emma. Already an ambassador – she would stop her play, walk over and signal for Craig to pick her up when he would arrive in the classroom, and she would smile with such delight when he did. On the last day I saw her, that Friday before Mother’s Day, I recall vividly the look of determination on her face as she held her mom’s hand securely and pulled her down the hallway to the front doors, seemingly ready to get her weekend started. She was a force, and the next week she was gone.

I sat on the couch tonight and Emma climbed onto my lap. Another parent commented this afternoon about how tall she’s gotten, and it’s true. She’s lanky and has lost nearly all traces of baby- and toddler-hood. She asked me last week how old Hudson is now, and I could tell she struggled to understand that Hudson would be six, but really never will be six. Emma knows the pictures of a Hudson the same age as Molly. I think back to the day Hudson died, when I kept my Blackberry clutched so close to me all day for any word of a miracle. To the email late that night that started “Oh, Katie, I’m so sorry to tell you this…” because I seemed to be the last to know. I remember Craig thinking it impossible, and wanting so desperately to agree with him. 

What I’ll never understand is how life manages to march on in the wake of tragedy. And I think about how, at any given moment on any given day, countless people are thinking about how that can possibly happen too. Despite the friendship that has formed and the years that have passed, our last visit with Hudson’s parents and siblings was hard. She is so glaringly absent. I see snippets of her in symbols – the dandelions in our yard, the lillies I got for Mother’s Day, the turtle shirts my daughters wear –  but I’m in a phase now where seeing the symbols is making me weary. The unfairness of this loss seems fresh again, like a raw scrape that burns in the cool air, but which needs that air to ultimately heal. 

  
Tomorrow I’ll put my weariness aside and meet friends in front of our day care and celebrate the little time we had with Hudson by blowing bubbles in her honor. It’s a special ritual, one I have no doubt my girls will carry with them always.  And we will smile and laugh and hug, because in spite of the doom and gloom and heaviness, life is amazingly good. To be loved, to be in love, to be healthy and happy… Those are all the antidote to the doom and gloom and heaviness. Being able to so strongly and acutely feel the painful side of life brings the sweetest counterbalance on the other side of it. And ultimately, that is one good thing.