Dear 19 subscribers

To all you kind 19 of you and you know who you are - I am continuing the blog about the messy, uneven, pock marked and un-curbed road that comprises becoming a parent, when your own easy biology won't do it for you. I need for me, not you, dear 19 subscribers, to spell out what actually happens when you are put in a clear and easy position, due to the many large checks you write, to take a baby home and hopefully adopt this child.

You become their parent long before they become your child. If you can live with this inequity, you can too become a parent due to an ad placed in a Las Vegas Pennysaver. It does happen, just like bad back seat sex... which also results in a cute but drooling and gassy baby that may or may not be raised by its biological parents....

After 33 years and thousands of dollars invested in birth control, I realize that I will never get back those hundreds of hours reading Spanish language versions of Self Magazine in Planned Parenthood offices.  I protected myself assiduously against what never occurred.

And yet, oddly,  I am a mother.  It still stuns me to think about it.  She is there, napping on my sweatshirt. My daughter who is gaining a pound a week and as much as that makes me feel like a foie gras farmer, it is something I am proud of. I am the proud renter (rent to own, in this case) of a 2 month old girl who legally belongs to an anonymous random legal guardian pro litem in Ohio, who just called me to chat about for about ten minutes regarding her baby in my care. The chat went well. It only cost us $350 dollars. And it inspired me to want to have similarly pricey conversations where I got to send a bill.

In about 6 or 8 months the adoption will be finalized. And she will be as much ours as if she came out of us.  I'm going to blog backwards now, wherein I cover every harrowing hairpin turn from that fateful day on January 9th where a bio mom in Akron picked me to be her babymama. And she became my babymama.

And we are still babymamma-ing. Back and forth, with advice, love, baby pictures, tragedy, poverty, struggle, polite questions, boring weather talk, LOL, bad news and sadness. I try not to transmit my guilt at taking her baby and she tries not to make me feel her pain. She is careful to call the baby what she named her at birth and I am careful to never call the baby what I named her, after birth.  Via text, of course. 

Next blog- death and birth. In that order.