Nanny, the day I met you, I did not feel like you were going to become “like a mother to me,” I felt you already were. I immediately felt with you the “I am home” connection that I had longed to feel for my birthmother. I wanted her welcome to feel like yours, but no matter what angle I tried, it did not. What a joy it was to go into a second reunion, hoping not to fail it like I had my last, and to find not just connection with my birth father, but with you, the mother I’d been missing too.

When I grieved for days lost as a child at Camelot, images of being your little helper, as we ran the pick-your-own patch, us knee deep in strawberries, tugged at the roots of the strawberry patch my grandmother Minnie and I maintained in my youth. To have the patch with you would have meant no days plucking with her. Ah there is where it gets prickly. While birth parents in reunion struggle to digest the loss associated with learning details about the childhood they were not part of, many adoptees in reunion grieve for our alternate universes, the places and people that could have been our destiny. While many would never trade a day of the life we’ve lived with our adoptive family, we still grieve for the loss of the other life that almost became ours. Though we know we could never have both, the rub is sometimes, neither the one you know nor the one you imagine knowing ever feels enough.

Images of you teaching me your special knack for style swirl in my what’s ifs. I can imagine the growing pain talks we might have shared on the porch, and that version dances with memories of time on the beach with my mother, “C’est La Vie” she would tell me, or sometimes “this too shall pass.” I’ve decided to let both coexist. You two peas in a pod, walk arm-in-arm in my fantasies. So many years missed with you and Pop live and thrive in my mind’s eye, like an alternate universe, somehow just as alive, spinning in some adoptee galaxy of imagined realities.

Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.” I feel all the parts you’ve played like you’ve been there all my life, and I thank you for never making me feel otherwise. It is not missed that without your acceptance, patience, guidance, and wisdom shared, as you so gracefully handled so many situations and emotions around our reunion, we may not have enjoyed such a wonderful ride.

You have directed this beautiful second act of my life, and now it’s time to take a bow – you are so loved, appreciated, and adored for all the parts you have played. You are the sun that beams on this family tree, the elements that nurture it, and the roots that anchor us all together. Happy Mother’s Day.