Today is Her Birthday. I’m Gonna Have a Meltdown

By: Elizabeth Redhead Kriston

Today’s my first daughters sixteenth birthday. I am verklempt.

I was never one to wish that my girls remain one age forever. I have enjoyed watching them grow and evolve from little bundles of joy who only sleep and eat and whine and fuss to big bundles of joy who only sleep and eat and whine and fuss. It has been truly rewarding.

Each age and stage has its good and bad parts. My least favorite parts were the potty training and the eye roll-door slamming-sassy stage that seems to be lasting a decade. My favorites were the snuggle bug, learning to talk and doing chores stages.  If your kids can’t scrub a toilet and make you a plate of spaghetti, what’s the point of it all?

When I first came to the realization and then acceptance of my infertility, I was scared because I so desperately wanted to be a mother. I was angry because I so desperately wanted to be a mother. I was sad because I so desperately wanted to be a mother.

My dreams came true one Fall day when our adoption case worker phoned me in the middle of the day when I was home ill to announce that I was to be a mother. From the first moment I laid eyes on her photograph, my heart melted and I was deeply in love. I vowed to that pixelated photo on my computer screen that I would be the best mother.

I promised her all kinds of crazy things like I would never get mad at her. I promised I would never yell. I promised that I would be there for every moment and every milestone. Eventually, reality settled-in, and I realized those things were unrealistic promises.

The day I met her for the first time I felt elated but scared. Would she like me? Would I love her, for real? We rode up the old musty court house elevator a few floors and were lead into a drab and dusty conference/interrogation room where I was handed my daughter. We sat for an hour on the stained carpeted floor wondering what goo the felons who had inhabited this room left behind. We gazed at her, held her, talked to her and fell in love with her while we protected her delicate baby flesh from the horrors on that floor.

Walking out of that building without my daughter was the hardest thing I had ever done. Any doubts I had about how much I could love a child I did not give birth to vanished. She was my daughter, as if she had been born to me. I just needed to wait one more week before I could take her home forever.

Over the years, even though I broke many of my promises, I feel I have done my best to raise her to be a strong, independent thinker who is kind and resilient. I raised her to be self-sufficient and savvy. I raised her with lots of love, lots of life experiences and lots of really good food.

Today I am filed with emotion not because she is getting older, but because I must fulfill one of my many early promises. Today I will hand her a beautiful handmade and engraved box that contains her history. It contains the love of not just her dad and me, but of her birth parents. Within that box she will find letters from the four people who love her the most that were written when she was just a newborn baby and promised to her for her Sweet Sixteen.

I worry that she too will be overcome with emotion. Even though I wrote one of those letters, I do not know what it contains. I am certain it is bursting with the love and joy and adoration I have always felt when I look at her. I am certain that she will cherish the contents of that special box. I know she will have many questions answered even if she did not realize she had those questions.

I am so blessed to have my girls and my husband. We have been on quite a journey the last fifteen years and nine months together. I have had many verklempt moments over the years and I look forward to many more over the next eighty or more years.