Arrival

The beauty and breaking of motherhood

Today I screamed at my kids. The window broke in my aged Ford Explorer because my three-year-old played with it, my kids had asked one thousand times for snacks even though we’d already eaten the equivalent of a 7-11 end-cap in junk food, which of course I feel guilty about. So I yelled at them, STOP! They stopped and then we all cried.

Actually - “cried” is too gentle. I sobbed until my throat hurt.

I’m not really mad because my kids are, wonder of wonders, kids. They’ll break stuff, they’ll eat too much junk food, they’ll talk loudly about poop in the middle of a conference call. What makes me sob until I can sob no more is the feeling that every time I fail, I don’t deserve them; I haven’t arrived as a mother and I never will.

As an adoptive mom I’m keenly aware of how hard my husband and I worked to have kids. It feels like there’s not a bureaucratic form we haven’t filled out or a lawyer’s office we haven’t paid our life savings to. I worked really hard for the title of “mom”; I …