The Very Big Thing

Well, actually he's Quite Small, but Hugely Enormous in impact on our lives.

We're adopting a little boy.  He's two.  We met him last week, and he came home to live with us yesterday.

While I know we're actually the same people we were before, I don't feel the same.  Up to a week or so ago, I felt flawed and broken, set apart from other women.  Incomplete.  I felt defined by the number of years we'd been trying to have a family, the surgeries I'd had, the injections, the examinations, the embryos who'd perished, the so-early-they-barely-count pregnancies I'd lost.

Sometime last week, in between saying thank you for a bogie he'd passed me, laughing at Daddy being commanded to sit and play building block towers, changing a poopy nappy and exclaiming appropriately at Peppa Pig, someone hit the reset button.  Suddenly, almost overnight, I didn't feel like a woman missing something, but I woman who'd unexpectedly, undeservedly, been handed something Extra.

I still find it hard to shake off the number of years thing.  As of my birthday next April, it will have been ten years.  Count them.  TEN YEARS.

But that's only a number.  He's a whole little boy.

And that's a Very Big Thing.

(The above post is very much my own feelings and perceptions, and not meant as comment on ANYONE else!  Sadness - and happiness! - is always personal.)