One of my 7th graders once asked me if there was a word for feeling happy and sad at the same time. I introduced bittersweet to his vocabulary and topped it off with a sentence frame. “_____is bittersweet because (reason it’s happy) and (reason it’s sad). ” He was describing the finale of The Voice. For myself on Mother’s Day no single or sentence frame is going to cut it.

Today is my first time celebrating Mother’s Day in 20 years. I lost my mom at 16. I can’t remember what we did for her last Mother’s Day. Thinking of her having a last Mother’s Day when she was only 10 years older than I am now is much too acidic. The sweet takes over when I realize that I can see my mom in Maeve’. The next stranger who comments that I “must have a dark husband” because I “don’t look like her mother” I can tell that she looks like her grandmother. Especially when my mom was into perms in the 80s/ 90s.

Adoption itself is bittersweet as one person’s greatest joy coincides with another’s greatest pain. I think of wine list where the sweetness is rated, sweet, semi sweet, semi dry and dry and allowed to be displayed on a spectrum without being forced into any single category. My own adoption story would be placed between the sweet and semi sweet titles. Maeve’s birth mother is amazing and sent me the following text this morning.

I run out of words again here.

I want to share our experience because it is the sweet in an often very sour world. Not being able to label the emotions is what keeps me from writing more. I don’t know if I lack the vocabulary or if no string of words could ever do this justice. Maybe relating to a wine menu is the best I’ve got. Maybe I go back to my own sentence frame.

Mother’s Day is bittersweet because the joy of having Maeve is unmatched to any level of grief but the undertones of loss (both my own mother and from Maeve’s birthmother) still exist.

So I raise a glass of semi dry and wish you all less bitter and more sweet.

Happy Mother’s Day.