MY Mama!

Shortly after we got home with Hannah, I wrote this post about how my heart was longing to be known to Hannah as her Mama.  I wrote that on April 1, 2015.  Just shy of two months later I wrote this post rejoicing in the fact that I had indeed become Mama to Hannah!  I felt so much relief in this, it was a huge check mark on my so called checklist of attachment and bonding.  I'd become Mama and it felt great.  I never doubted it.  I never questioned it.

Then it changed again this month and I realized it had been missing all this time, but I didn't know it.  I'm so glad God kept this nugget hidden from my heart, so I could just enjoy being Mama and not spend all my time seeking and trying to create something Hannah wasn't ready to stake a claim on just yet.

In the last few weeks I realized that while I was Mama, I think I was simply Mama because that's what she saw get a response from me and she realized that is what the other children call me.  I became Mama on a surface level, but I didn't realize it was merely surface level.  I thought it carried all the implications of the word, but truth be told, that was foolish of me to think that way.  Of course it couldn't carry all the implications of the word--not that early on in my relationship with Hannah.  There is so much to unpack in that little word...mama.  She didn't know what it meant and while I know the word fully to my biological children, I didn't know it fully to the extent of being Hannah's mama.  Of course, I was oblivious to all of this.  And I liked it that way.  God knows those tender areas of our hearts and He protects them.  It was perhaps easier to bond and attach to one another thinking that she fully understood what she was saying when she called me Mama.  She didn't.  And neither did I.

But all of that changed in the last couple of weeks.  I'm not just Mama anymore.  Nope.  I am MY Mama.  Hannah's Mama.  Hers.  She lays claim to me everywhere we go and grabs hold of any appendage she can grab and proudly declares, "MY Mama!" 

Waiting in line at the grocery store, she grabbed my arm and declared, "MY Mama!"

It is starting to make sense.  I see the wheels turning and I see that this was missing all the time, but I was too blind to see it.  I am HER Mama now.  She's beginning to see what that means, what that means to her, and what that looks like.  I am hers.  Forever.  It makes my heart fizz up to the top and tears spark in the corners of my eyes.  These past ten months I've been solely in charge of teaching her what Mama means.  I feel so inadequate so often and I fail and mess up daily, but I hope as I muddle through, as I seek forgiveness for my own mistakes, and we live out real life together she is getting an idea of what HER Mama looks like.  I will likely never know the depth of what she understands or what she sees.  My only hope is that what she sees is a Mama who is completely inadequate to rightly love others, but I love God and out of my love for God I am able to piece together a bit of what love should look like poured out through a sinner. 

I don't need things wrapped up and under the tree this year.  The work God has done in and through this process of bringing Hannah home, of teaching her about home, showing her family, being Mama...it is really all enough.  I will rejoice this Christmas as I watch the magic in the eyes of all four of my children--four children who know me as Mama.  Their Mama.