Still Not in the Motherhood

Dear God,

It's Mother's Day, again. I'm feeling left out again. See, it's another Mother's Day and I'm still not in the motherhood.

I acknowledge that you have presented me with lots of obstacles which have, so far, kept me from reaching my dream of motherhood. These obstacles have come like a series of waves, one right after the other, each one bigger than the next, crashing in front of me on the beach. They've prevented me from getting into the water and I'm beginning to think that I am going to have to turn around and walk away from the shoreline because I am not going to be able to ever get past them into the ocean.

The latest obstacle I am dealing with: my chronic health problems. So far, these problems have robbed me of my energy and strength, the ability to be able to do what I want to do, whenever I want to do it. As much as I do not want to admit it, some days I barely have enough energy and strength to take care of just myself. I have yet to discover how to recover my health through self-help and self-management of my symptoms; my medical providers, while sympathetic, do not have a medical or pharmaceutical cure for what ails me and alternative medicine has provided no relief.

I know, logically, I can not be a mother to someone else if I can not take care of myself. Emotionally, it is just frustrating ,sad, painful.

As for the other obstacles I have dealt with, I already made peace with not being able to have biological children in exchange for being alive and here today. It's not something I wanted to give up, but I didn't want to die at 22 either. It was the one thing that caused me the most pain when I signed the Consent for Treatment form on January 13, 1988 and began treatment for leukemia at UCLA Medical Center.

My husband and I already made peace in 2005 with adoption as our family building option. I personally don't need to go through all the machinations of fertility treatments to *maybe* get pregnant and *maybe* give birth to a child, because I know those are BIG, EXPEN$IVE maybes. I want to be a mother, we want to be parents, and I know that at the end of the adoption process I *will* be a mother. We are even open to adopting a child from the foster care system, an older child, a child with medical problems like diabetes. We would consider adopting a sibling set, two brothers or two sisters---we only have one extra bedroom to give. We don't have to have an infant, we don't have to have a child who is Caucasian, we don't have to have a child who is "perfect" (although all God's children are perfect, no matter what).

You've presented me with some hard choices and some intense challenges; I've faced them head on and, for the most part, succeed. I hope that all of these challenges don't precluded me from joining the motherhood. At this point, I acknowledge that I can't see motherhood happening for me without some of your help. Do I get to ask for more assistance or have I used up my allotment for this lifetime? I don't want to seem ungrateful, but I was hoping that surviving cancer meant that some of my hopes and dreams were important enough to come to fruition.

So today is Mother's Day, again, and I am still hoping, again, that I can be a part of the motherhood too.