The drive home from the Crisis Pregnancy Center is almost a half-hour. So it gives me lots of time to think.

This past week, I was thinking a lot about Melody, Sweet Pea’s birth mother.

Probably because Sweet Pea’s birthday is just around the corner and I have never met Melody.

I have never even talked to her on the phone.

I’m actually not sure what you would call Sweet Pea’s adoption. I definitely know it is not an “open adoption”, but is it “closed”?

I would be more than willing to meet Melody one day and we send updates to Melody via the agency every three months.

In fact, I hope and pray to meet Melody one day.

Sweet Pea’s adoption was so different than her sisters and yet, there are so many ways their adoptions were similar.

But, I never met Melody and I spent nearly seven weeks with Little Bug’s birth mother prior to her birth.

While those weeks with Tracy were some of the most stressful seven weeks of my life, I would not trade them for the world.

I learned a lot about Tracy’s personality in those weeks.

I learned she has a beautiful smile, a wonderful sense of humor and…a spit-fire personality – just like her birth daughter.

I know virtually nothing about Melody’s personality.

What I am going to say next might stir some judgments against me in the adoption community, but what I have decided to share here is simply my experiences and the effects it has had on me. Be nice if you choose to comment, please.

My bond with Little Bug was not instant. Don’t get me wrong. I loved that baby the instant I laid eyes on her. But…she wasn’t mine. I couldn’t fully be her mother the first time I saw her. Her mother was Tracy. I just hoped to be given the privilege and honor to become her mother through the self-less, sacrificial act of Tracy who would relinquish her rights as Little Bug’s mother and place them on me.

Eighty-one hours after her birth, I officially became Little Bug’s mother when Tracy signed her TPR.

And then, I was a mother.

And as much as I had longed and waited and desired to play that role, after the initial honeymoon of it all, I felt so discombobulated with my life!

I went from infertility treatments to motherhood in a matter of two months!!

I was trying to figure this baby out (Thank you Babywise, who came and saved the day when Little Bug was around 3 months old.) and transition my mind from infertility treatments to parenthood and it just took me some time to really feel like I was Little Bug’s mother and she wasn’t going anywhere.

I think I was somewhat in shock over the miracle that had brought me this precious baby and my mind needed some time to catch up with my heart.

My bond to Sweet Pea was literally instant.

One look was all it took and she had my complete heart.

The difference??

For one, I was already a mother. I knew how to be a mother and it was easy to open my heart to another daughter to love. And I knew I wouldn’t feel lost because I planned to do Babywise with Sweet Pea from the first day I brought her home. There was a plan in place and that gave me confidence in parenting that I didn’t have with Little Bug.

But what made the most difference was this: The first time I laid eyes on Sweet Pea, she was totally and completely mine.

TPR was not looming in the background haunting me saying, Is this your baby, or not?

TPR had already been signed; hours before I met Sweet Pea Melody had officially signed the TPR and placed the responsibility of parenting Sweet Pea on me.

The fact that I could love my baby wholly and completely from the first moment I laid eyes on her is one of the most precious gifts God has granted me on my adoption journey.

But at the same time, I wanted to meet this woman! And given the choice of meeting and knowing Sweet Pea’s birth mother before her birth or seeing Sweet Pea for the first time knowing she was already mine, I would choose to know Melody.

I love the gift God gave me, but “forgetting” the fact she did not come from my womb and “forgetting” Melody is not healthy for anyone – and yet, it is easy to do because I wouldn’t even recognize Melody on the street if I saw her!

So while I thank God for both of my adoption journeys and the lessons I learned and the lives that were forever molded together in very unique ways, I do pray for the opportunity to meet Melody one day.

I want to speak with her and tell her the story of how God lead us together through not one but two lawyers. I want her to see the miracle in her placement of Sweet Pea.

If she wishes, I want her to be able to see the baby she carried in her womb for 9 months.

I want her to see how happy she is and how she is the smiliest baby on the planet.

God brought Tracy back into our lives for six weeks at the beginning of 2011 and I was able to take some pictures of Little Bug with her birth mother. I want that for Sweet Pea, too.

I just have to trust that if God knows Sweet Pea will need to one day see pictures of her with her birth mother, God will make it happen.

- Elaine