March is supposed to be about looking forward. College acceptances. Prom dresses. Countdown calendars and caps and gowns.
And your birthday.
Yes, this March, my firstborn is turning eighteen. He was adopted by another family, and I am not the mother he knows, the mother who raised him. The trauma of that is one my soul sings each and every day, and again, anew, in this season of milestones I cannot attend.
He is finishing high school…graduation.
He is being accepted to college…celebrating.
He is stepping into adulthood…
And I am not there.
Not for the celebrations.
Not for the photos.
Not for the casual, everyday moments that add up to a life.
Because he was adopted, and he isn’t mine, and I don’t belong, he doesn’t know me.
But loving a child doesn’t always mean you get to walk beside them.
That truth doesn’t soften with time. It just changes shape. It hurts me in different ways than it did the first day he wasn’t with me.
There is a strange grief in knowing these things are happening without you…not because of the distance you chose, not because of estrangement born of anger, but because of circumstances that once felt necessary and now feel impossibly permanent.
I don’t know what he talks about, or what his friends call him.
I don’t know how his voice sounds. Or his laugh.
I don’t know if he rolls his eyes when adults talk too long, or if he’s serious in that quiet, thoughtful way he had even as a baby.
I imagine him taller.
I imagine confidence, or uncertainty, or both.
I imagine him standing on the edge of something big—because eighteen is always the edge of something big.
Where will he go to college? What will he seek to study? What are his goals as he looks ahead to the future?
And then there is the other emotion. The one I don’t talk about much.
Hope.
It sneaks in when I’m not paying attention.
When I hear about other seniors’ college decisions arriving in inboxes.
When I see senior photos, commitments, and flooding social media.
When someone mentions a birthday cake with too many candles.
I wonder—quietly, carefully—if he will reach out.
Not because he owes me anything.
Not because I am waiting with expectations.
But because hope has a way of asking questions even when we try to silence it.
Will he think of me?
Will he be curious?
Will my name ever cross his mind the way his has never stopped crossing mine?
There is no roadmap for this kind of motherhood.
No script for how to hold pride, as well as absence in the same breath.
No guidebook for loving from afar when “afar” isn’t measured in miles, but in lives lived separately.
I am proud of him.
Even without knowing.
And I am sad.
Even while honoring the life he is living.
Even while believing he is exactly where he is meant to be.
Both things are true.
I have learned that motherhood doesn’t always look like showing up with balloons and cameras.
Sometimes it looks like holding space for someone you cannot see.
Sometimes it looks like celebrating quietly.
Sometimes it looks like waiting without demanding.
Eighteen is a beginning.
For him, certainly.
And maybe—just maybe—for me too.
Not because I expect anything. I can’t wish for that, because it would just hurt too much each day it doesn’t come true.
But because I am finally allowing myself to hope without shame. He’s turning 18.
If you are a mother standing at the edge of a milestone you cannot attend,
if you are loving someone from a distance that no one else can see,
if you are holding pride and grief in the same fragile place…
You are not doing it wrong.
Some love is quiet.
Some love is patient.
Some love waits without asking for permission.
And some love, even now, is still listening.
