Birthdays...... a confession

You know how you feel when you are first married, it is sort of like playing house when you are a kid. Well, it was for me. The same thing happened when my first child was born. It was like playing dolls but she was real and she screamed and I could never put her away. In time both things became my normal life and I quickly felt like I was not playing pretend. In some ways birthdays for my adopted sons feel similar. I did not bear them, their birthday does not hold the same emotion for me as it does for my bio kids. For one of my son's we have enough info that I can make up what it may have been like, it bears some similarities to things I know. This is helpful for me, recreating a birth I was not part of. Making it real in my heart. Feeling the feelings of his birth mother and incorporating her love for our son into my own love for him. The other one is a totally made up birthday. It is unlikely that it is the day he was born, it is likely not anywhere close. No one will ever know. There is no significant information or knowledge to create a memory of early life. Suspicions, but even those bear no similarity to anything in my box of experience. This makes it harder to relate. But, it is the day we have chosen to celebrate his life. That is real. As real as the fact that he was born. Real as the love his birth mother must have had for him. Real as the love I certainly have for him. But when it comes around it just is not the same.............. Something I must fight to overcome in my own heart and mind. Something I must never let on to him or any of the other children. Something, I pray will be loosed to the winds of time by next year. I want to feel like it is real. For me, for him.