Kathleen arrived early to help with the last-minute details for the barbecue. She handed me a card, and I just said, "What's this?"
Turns out "this" brought me to tears.
It was a card that said Happy Adoption Day, and a gift card to Coldstone Creamery. Kathleen smiled again, and said, "The ice cream sundaes are on me!" (Last year, on the first anniversary, Mark and I decided to celebrate every Adoption Day with a trip to Disneyland and sundaes for dinner.)
I immediately welled up and hugged her. And then I smacked myself for forgetting. (Bad mom!!!)
I kicked myself mentally all day long, until finally, I stopped. I realized maybe it wasn't such a big deal after all -- maybe it was actually a really healthy thing that I forgot. I don't think in terms of when we legally became a family anymore; I just think of us as a family.
See, the thing is, sometimes I actually forget Mark is adopted. I never think of him as my "adopted" son, and he never thinks of me as his "adoptive" mother. We're just Mom and Mark.
We talk about adoption occasionally, but not nearly as much as we did that first year. In fact, I think we talked about it so much that year, he's had his fill.
Which is not to say we ignore it, either. He talks about his birth parents sometimes, when something reminds him of them. But he calls them by their first names and with each passing year, the distance grows a little farther and he talks about them a little less.
I bring them up if he hasn't in a while, especially on days like Mother's or Father's Day, when he's sure to be thinking of them. I tell him how grateful I am they gave birth to such a wonderful little boy, and how lucky I am to raise him. I tell him I'm glad he's had so many people throughout his life who love him.
I asked Mark how he felt about our second Adoption Day, and he just shrugged. The he immediately asked, "When do we get our sundaes?"
"Soon," I promised. I tried a different tact, asking, "Have you been thinking about the adoption? I bet that was kinda scary for you, being adopted into a whole new family."
He just shrugged again, and said simply, "Nope." Then he asked if he could go back to playing with his cousins.
I know he does think about it, even if he won't admit it, and I'm glad. I don't pretend he doesn't have a before...a history, a lifetime, heck, even another family, before he had me. I had all of those things, too, if in a completely different way. But nobody ever tried to quash my history pre-Mark, or pretend like it never happened, and thankfully, they've never tried to ignore his either.
Last year's celebration was a huge sigh of relief, commemorating a day that took two long years to happen. It was joyful because the previous two years were so fraught with emotion. It was bittersweet, because while it was the beginning of one family, it was also the end of another. But mostly it was loving, because wherever we looked, wherever we turned, we were surrounded by love, by friends, by family hugging and congratulating us.
So it was fitting that we spent this same day, two years later, celebrating with many of those same people. We were celebrating someone else, my cousin Kathleen (it was her birthday), but that didn't matter, because we were still surrounded by love and family.
And really, at the end of the day, that's what matters most. Not where you started from or how you came to be loved, but simply that you are loved.
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