Babies and Key Fobs or You Are What You Love

Twice this week I've been privy to the message that "you are what you love, not what loves you back". And I'm thinking about: babies on their way to this world, ones I will raise and ones that I will only hear about, pray for, and love whether I mother them or never meet them. Then there are much lesser things, things like choosing a key fob that represents me when it all gets shrunk down to a little key chain-sized tchotchke.

So, what DO I love and what might it make me. In two parts...

PART I - The Serious Part: This adoption waiting pool business, waiting for that call, that birth mom to pick you selection, that eventual helpless, new human that comes to live with you and needs constant care - it's a mystery and it's a process fraught with emotion and preparation and daring to hope but carefulness not to hope too much.

Even if they don't choose us, it's okay because there is someone else chosen who wants just as much as we want - and for longer even! - and isn't that just as good or even better? I've come to think so, yes. Everyone should win at this, my competitive spirit is absent in this. Good. It's not selfish-good, but it's universal-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things-good which in this case is a child's life.

Choose us or choose another, I will still love and that's this message of being what you love - doesn't matter when that baby joins us - because one will join our family someday - and until then we will, I will, hear about all these moms pregnant, unable to parent, in the most tenuous, not ideal situations, mostly desperate but still wanting to make a plan for this child to have a good life even so. And every time I hear their stories when they call to tell us "there's this birth mother who..." about 4th, 5th, 6th babies, moms overwhelmed, moms abandoned, moms who haven't had a chance to get their degree, do their life yet, find their true meaning... Women undone and needing the biggest kind of help - I just let them into my heart a little bit and I love them, whether or not they pick us.

There is nothing in my life that can compare to this, come close to that kind of wrenching reckoning. Because for every time I don't get a baby, I have everything else - love, stability, a degree, a purpose, success, options... In other words: I don't need to be loved back - by every birth mother choosing adoptive parents, by every little baby born to become someone else's child - to be something that I want to be now. I have something, I am something. And soon I'll get to be a mother. When it's right. I'm so happy to wait for right!

PART II- The Vapid Part: I recently shopped online looking to purchase a keychain for my new Lexus car key. So I started out looking for Lexus key fobs - bor-ring - then I thought, well what about something that represents what I like? So, let me tell you, this practice really boils down all that one likes in life, one's symbols so to speak, the things that you wouldn't mind representing you in some way. For me it was enlightening, sort of, to figure it out and realize the "things I like"(but don't necessarily want for gifts for birthdays, Christmas, etc...).

Herewith, ideas/concepts that represent what I like/me-in-a-nutshell figured out whilst shopping for a key fob:

• Mexican art
• Paris in the 20s
• Christina Rossetti/Emily Dickinson/Sylvia Plath/Anne Sexton or any other brilliant and tragic poetess (no key chains available for that one)
• Frida Kahlo
• Mermaids - just mermaids in general
• Sagrado Corazón
• Wonder Woman
• Music - but not music notes or pictures of instruments 

I ended up buying an inexpensive, custom made leather fob with my initial stamped into it. I love it. What's it mean? Probably nothing, but maybe ideas like simple, stylish, classic, unique and hopefully made to withstand years of purposeful use. Yes, that's good, I can work with that.