pickles and ice cream vs. chopsticks and pleasant goat

this weird thing is pleasant goat:
(he/she is all the rage in china)

there are obscure times i'll catch a glimpse of this weird goat on t.v. in the background of a world gymnastics competition, or in documentaries about girls in china, and it's the closest i can come to feeling my baby kick in the womb. 

while you excitedly talk about your weird cravings and post pictures of your pregnancy concoctions, i crave an email telling us we are at the next step in the process, and pictures of the fedex envelope holding our latest government approval. 

while you reach down and rub the belly that holds safe your child within, reminding yourself your dear one is so near, i eat dinner at a local authentic asian restaurant and listen with a longing in my heart to the background conversations in mandarin, wondering what her voice would sound like. i clumsily hold the chopsticks in my hand, and envision my children laughing at me when we are spending our first week as a family together, in china, while i try to eat all our meals with these two sticks. 

we all come into motherhood different ways: some conceive right away, seemingly on their honeymoon! others struggle for years, and finally see the sweet little pink plus sign they've prayed for, while some find themselves at a last resort of ivf, still others find themselves adopting in addition to their biologicals, or adopting because they cannot have biologicals, and then some, like me, have always known their children will look nothing like them, and choose to adopt to begin their family growth. no matter how we become mommies, the journey is filled with this incredible softening of the heart, tears that flow like a faucet during commercials, movies where a child is kidnapped, and reading stories in the news of ebola orphans, aids orphans, social orphans and orphans of poverty.  each of our journey is filled with thousands of thoughts a day, where we imagine what it will be like when we hold our child for the first time, and we already dread the first time they will be sick, we fear the possibility of bullying for our child, and we all fear for them, at the environment of the world we will be raising them in. we want no harm to befall them, no judgement to be pointed to them, we desperately want to protect them from the mistakes we've made, and build them up in the areas we were torn down.

we all want better for our children. people who think the best of us say with smiling eyes and sincerity they believe our child will be just like us. i want to shout "NO! NO!" i want so much more for her, for my lucy-girl than what i am. i want more strength for my little luke than i have. i don't want them to be just like me i want them to rise above me. i want their lives to be filled with beauty and wonder, i want their spirit to soar, i want strength be so mighty within them it seeps out of their veins. i want their eyes to always see as His do, and not to be as easily tarnished by the tragedies of the world and circumstance. 

we are all mommies, and though we all become mommies in different ways, our desperate love for our children is the same. i just don't have the weird cravings. and you don't have to worry about prefecting your chop-stick usage. :)