When I last wrote on this blog, I was concerned about how having my stepson come to live with me might affect my plans for maybe homeschooling my own son. I wrote that his step father ignores him, but his mom was awesome. Because, hey, he's her kid, right?
Turns out, not so right. Mom admits to me she doesn't love her first born the same way she loves her 2 year old with hubby. She hates herself for it, but there it is.
I just don't get it. However, I was not a teenage mom. I never considered adoption at any point, let alone when my baby was a few months old (even though that was his screaming, colicky stage). I WANTED my child. I still do. When I see him sitting on the couch in the living room, staring intently at the TV or his DS, I am overcome with a desire to kiss his cute little chubby cheek over and over again until he pushes me away in annoyance.
My stepson has never had that kind of love from his mama. That breaks my heart.
I am a fierce, warrior-mama, I would walk through fire or throw myself in front of a car to save my child. I completely identified with that woman who leapt between her two year old daughter and a cougar a month or so ago. I think being a mom and raising my kids to be strong adults, full of integrity and compassion is the best, the most important and planet-altering thing I'll ever do, no matter where my career in social justice takes me, no matter how I advocate for children as a social worker and maybe a lawyer, no matter what comes after that.
What it comes down to is that I am experiencing a moral dilemma, a conflict between my personal and my professional values. Personally, I think there must be something wrong with a woman who can look at one child and feel love, and then look at the other and feel nothing. Professionally, the principles of self-determination, autonomy, dignity, respect, and human rights, the worth of ALL persons, are being challenged by her lack of feeling toward my husband's son, toward her own flesh and blood.
But if I am to be a good and loving parent to my stepson, I cannot write her off as somehow broken, insufficient as a mother. My stepson deserves better than that. However, he also deserves his mama's love.
But he has mine, now, and I HAD been worried about when that would come.
