This is a surprisingly difficult topic to write about! That’s probably because, before we become parents, we see life so differently on so many levels, that it’s hard to remember what we thought of anything before our kids came along.

Before I adopted my children, I obviously had friends and interests and dreams (adoption being one of them). But remembering what I thought before my daughter and son washed my life in living color is like looking at an old black and white movie. We know life wasn’t really monochromatic in those days, it just seems that way in retrospect. Whatever I thought I understood about raising kids, on an intellectual level, really doesn’t compare to the reality.

But then that is true for all parents, isn’t it? We don’t know how our children will become part of us, how it will never feel quite right when they aren’t with us, how their bruises and heartbreaks will hurt worse than our own do. I know I didn’t realize that the surgeries my daughter needed, which seemed totally fine on an intellectual level when she was just our “referral,” would scare me like nothing had every scared me before when it came to the reality. That’s because the moment they placed my tiny 10-month-old girl in my arms, I was her mother, and there is simply no way to know what that feels like until you are there.