My 23 year old daughter and I spent the afternoon talking. Now pregnant and expecting her first child, a step-mother already to a four year old, and married for only a year, she’s starting to think about her past and how it will affect her parenting.

Knowing her birth mother has some serious mental health issues, and not having a clue as to her father’s identity, she was feeling kind of blue, maybe wary would be a better word, as she’s recently been asked so many medical history questions that she does not know the answers to at all.

She knows that she was a severe failure-to-thrive child, for her first decade of life she hardly reached 40 pounds, as a teen she started to catch up in her physical development, and she knows also that she’d been labeled developmentally delayed. I’d considered holding her back in first grade, I did not do so as I didn’t want her to feel like a failure, but looking back now, I believe that I did her a disservice, she’d have done better if she’d been held back. I know that now.

She’s going to be a good mother; I have no doubts about that. She looks like a twelve year old. She’s pictured here with my 11 year old son, also failure to thrive, developmentally delayed and affected by CP. I did hold him back and I’m glad I did so. He’s benefited from the retention.

My daughter, barely 4’11”, will give birth in July, and she was telling me how she felt no need, no desire to seek out her birth mom, satisfied enough from what she’s been told by me and from an older sister. She doesn’t remember life before she joined our family 17 years ago; her two older sisters and a brother were also adopted by me.

She went through the nearly predictable estrangement that most, if not all, of my children seem to go through as they establish their independence. The dance of detachment from mama, rejecting me before I reject them, which I wasn’t going to do, yet it’s their greatest fear.

Today she tsked tsked over two teenagers of mine who are approaching that age where they think that getting their own apartment will make them adults. As if, I’ve often sniffed.

She’d snorted at them both, “Have at it y’all, you’ll be back in mama’s lap, needing her, wanting to be with her…because you know she’ll always be here for you.”

They so didn’t get her point.