I’m having mixed feelings about Regina starting kindergarten this week. Part of me wants to cry out that I haven’t had enough time with her– I should get an extra eight months! (Someone did once ask me Meg’s age when she was two and a half years old, and I responded “a year and a half” because that’s how long she’d been with me!)
If Regina were a summer birthday I would definitely hold off on school, but she’s almost six. (And she has been wearing her sister’s outgrown uniforms since April.)
I do sometimes feel a bit jealous about not having experienced life with the girls during their first twelve months (Meg) or eight months (Regina). This past summer I remembered how the first time my son Patrick kicked in the womb was when the Blue Angels (the Navy airshow pilots) flew overhead. Then I started feeling disappointed that I didn’t know whether Meg and Regina had been active or calm babies in utero, had they cried a lot as newborns, did they interact a lot as four-month-olds?
My sister’s third daughter is four months now, and it’s such a cute age. I can’t help wondering if my girls maintained eye contact like my niece does, or babbled as if in conversation.
I’ve even heard some people say they wouldn’t want to adopt a child they couldn’t have “from the beginning”, meaning from birth or before.
I can sincerely say that the love I have for the girls is no less than that I have for my son who was born to me. It is a bit different. Nursing was a big part of my relationship with my son. I could make choices about his care from his earliest hours. Newborn wrinkly skin and tiny toes are precious.
In other ways, I was able to be even more present to the girls when they arrived. (I was not recovering from a bedrest pregnancy, emergency surgery and post-op infection, for starters.) I remember more about their early days with us. Also, we did try to take time to just “cocoon” as a new family in the way we had with our son.
But I did miss those early moments, and I will probably always mourn that loss, albeit very mildly. It’s okay to miss them, but I need to let go of that desire to know every single moment of my beloved children’s lives. In reality we don’t control all of our children’s experiences even when we are there. Two siblings raised in the same household can have very different experiences. Sometimes I think of it as a play with the same script but different tones of voice and different sets.
When I fell in love, I wanted to know and be known utterly. I even remember feeling a bit jealous of my mother-in-law because she has memories of my husband that I don’t! I accept that I will never completely understand my husband’s experience of childhood (or life in general), nor will he understand mine.
It’s okay for me to wish that I had been there for my girls when they were infants. But I have to let go of the idea that I can ever understand their experiences fully—their experience as babies, as moving to a new country, as minorities in this country, as people with different genetic makeups and temperaments.
For me, some of this letting go was acknowledged by forgoing the middle name we had planned to give our daughter. We gave her the first name I’d always wanted to give a girl, but we kept her Korean name as her middle name without trying to add in the middle name that we’d picked. For me, that was a way of acknowledging that she had had other people in her life who were responsible for her, who cared for her, who named her. Different choices about names feel right to different families.
The letting go involved in having a child start school is reminding of the larger letting go–letting go of the wish to be all things for my kids, letting go of the desire to forget that they were every anywhere else but here with me.
Please see these related blogs:
Do You Love Them Both the Same?
Naming, Claiming, and Letting Go
Happy Mother’s Day, Foster Mothers