“You’ll learn to let go of everything you thought you knew about parenting, of your preconceived idea of family, of ‘healthy.’ You will be forced from selfishness to selflessness. You will stop thinking of adoption as finding the right child for you and learn to become the right parent for a child. It will be difficult. It will be ugly at times. It will leave you a sobbing heap in the closet. It will stretch you and twist you until you don’t recognize yourself anymore.
But it will be glorious, and you will look at yourself in the mirror a decade from now and be so proud of the parent and family you have become.”
This is excerpt from a letter that one woman wrote to her younger self, before she became an adoptive mom to five children, including four children with complex heart disease.
