Pre-Birthday Surprises

In the last few years I’ve been pretty quiet about family and what we are all up to and have kept my blogging to a minimum of posts that generally tend toward the education realm and the racism realm (not yet quite post-racial, Amurrica, are we?) so I know there are a few new readers here and there who aren’t familiar with my real life. And really? This isn’t the time to delve into all that even with what I just read from my friend Danielle who I got to spoon with on a trip last fall because we had to share a bed. (Danielle is amazing and smart and I love her to bits and pieces.)

In the last two years that my daughter, Maddie, has found me online I have gone from sharing the facts about her adoption and our new relationship to stopping from sharing anything because it was this experience I was having that I couldn’t write about because there is no way to experience, digest, and process all the intricacies that come with it. The facts are brief: I had Mallory at 15 and Maddie at 16. Mallory I raised, Maddie I placed for adoption. And then, in all that, there are my sons who came not-so-much-later so my four children are all pretty close in age and there’s only an 8 year span between the eldest and youngest.

This weekend, the love of my life who I continue to call The Cuban even though genetics run contrary to that nickname, surprised me with an early 40th birthday party. It’s early. I have a full week now before I leave my 30s and I’m gonna hang onto that for just a wee bit longer, okay? He and Mallory have been quietly planning it and working behind the scenes to pull it off. Not only did he invite Maddie to fly here from California, he paid for it. This is the kind of man I want to be with. This man is incredible. I have counted my blessings so often in the last 48 hours that I would feel like a braggart if I started listing them here.

Not only that, but he brought my sisters and nieces and nephews all here at my favorite restaurant and had convinced me that we were just going to dinner with his sister and her husband. The man knows how to get me. He even asked me to choose where I wanted to take them for dinner to celebrate their birthdays! Luckily for him, I am a creature of habit when it comes to that and I chose the place without knowing it was full of family and friends waiting to surprise me. You can imagine my shock at walking in and seeing all four of my children there to celebrate with me. With us. Me and The Cuban. Luckily for me, however, I learned that he could never cheat on me. All the secrets he had to keep for the past several months in planning this were making it hard for him to sleep at night and he was so relieved that it finally happened this weekend that he told me so.

“God, I could never step out on you, Kelly. All the hidden emails and text messages and phone calls during this were killing me.”

Seeing Maddie there with all my other kids and everyone else actually took me a moment. I noticed my sister, Tracy, first and I was just going to be gleeful that they were there and I scanned the room for faces of people I love and cherish. There’s a familiarity to that and rightfully so, but Maddie was another surprise altogether that I can’t quite put into full sentences with words and adjectives and stuff. See? I just wrote “stuff”. I can’t do it. It’s too powerful and wonderful all at once.

It’s also complex. Oh, how it’s complex. Originally when I wrote about it I had mixed reactions from friends and readers who were adoptive parents. Many feared that what I was doing would be done to them someday and that birth parents would want a part of a life they helped create but not raise. That stung, but I knew where it was coming from and I had to step back from exploring all that in writing. My participation had to be scaled back to my experiences only as I am having them and I don’t have to explore and explain them to anyone. Well, at least I know that approaching a new decade in age means that I don’t have to apologize. I don’t wince or falter when I talk about my children and say that I have four. I have four of them. If you knew me in the past when I was with three kids, you might be surprised. Even a few friends at the party asked, “Tell me about your other daughter. The details are fuzzy.” or “I didn’t know about her! Wow!”

I’m not at all ashamed. I’m Kelly. I’m a mother of four. I’m about to be 40.

It’s early for my birthday and I don’t really care about turning 40 except that it did all seem to rush in at once with a bone spur in my heel, a wisdom tooth painfully making its announcement of impending breakthrough, and a couple of gray hairs poking through all my wild curls. (Oh, bonus? Curly hair tends to hide them. Thank you, curly hair.) Add to that the fact that The Cuban has a birthday this week, too, a few days before mine and you have a whirlwind right there.

Life is hardly typical for me and I wouldn’t have it any other way. A surprise party with people I love, food I never really got to eat, and a bottomless glass of champagne. Sometimes, I even surprise myself.