In the End

In the beginning, I didn't know how to begin. I know less how to end, but I know that it's time. I've finished even my vacation stories, everything I'd stored . . .

When I started blogging, I was trying to organize my thoughts for Miss-I-to-be (thoughts about how to love and miss someone I'd never met chief among them), to make sense of our experiences as a family-in-waiting, to update friends without repeating endlessly "still no referral" and either sobbing or sighing depending on the day, and to think through becoming a multiracial, multinational family, blessed and burdened by the joys and losses brought through and by adoption.

Of the last, we will never stop thinking, and thinking, and thinking. But as far as writing here . . . in some ways, because this has always been a mommy blog even as it's been an "issues blog," what I've had to say and what I've been willing to say have limited one another.

Above all, I've tried to protect my daughter's privacy (what will these blogged-babies think someday? Will it be so common to live whole lives on line that they won't find it strange that we've written about their first parents, or their poop? I hope not . . . But just this week Newsweek and a blog-hating blog ask similar questions) and respect my son's need to control which anecdotes I share (especially now that he's reading). I hope I've done that. I hope I've anticipated their needs while I've tried to meet mine which became ultimately and unexpectedly, to commune.

Thanks for sharing our journey to becoming the conspicuous, complicated, crazy family that we've become. Thank you for being part of who we've become, for giving me so much to think about, in your comments and on your blogs (which I'll continue to read).

And who knows? Maybe someday we'll be blogging baby #3, "Baby A." as little bun is wont to say.

Hee haw and Merry Christmas,
Abebech

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Dear Miss I.,
I was talking recently with friends about the value of a "plan." Really, they were talking about a plan, and I was smiling knowingly.

I would never have planned for either of my children to have arrived in the way that you have. I couldn't have anticipated the miracles you would be.

I am grateful for each day. You bless me just by being.

Much love,
Momma.