There are children who come stay with us for a night or a long weekend every couple of months. They burst in the door and fall back into old rhythms like no time has passed. They drop their bags, kick off their shoes, and sniff out whatever goodness awaits them in the kitchen. The volume cranks up, and I shift slightly inside myself to meet the burst of energy they bring to our home. It is familiar and foreign in one deep bittersweet breath. These are my former foster children, and I am their mother and not their mother at all. When they came into our lives, we had no idea what we were doing. Much like when our babies were born, my husband and I figured it out as we went. We made big mistakes right alongside big memories, but in the end, we could not be the family they needed us to be. In the days they spend with us now, I can almost see the life we might have built had we found our way through the aftermath of the raging storm that landed them on our front porch.

I spent the first morning of this untouched year on my front porch with a dear friend. We drank coffee and watched the sun rise through the red pines while our kids played inside. We talked through the trials and triumphs of the previous twelve months, some of them distant memories, others much fresher wounds. When our mugs went cold, my middle son brewed a fresh pot and carefully placed the refilled cups back in our hands, then joined us for a while. The entire morning was soft and sweet and comfortable, qualities I value more and more with every passing year. Buried beneath cozy blankets, protected from the January chill, we welcomed 2024 in like the lamb I pray she proves to be.

I’m dreaming tonight of a place I love / even more than I usually do. There are tingling pinpricks of ancient memory that wash over me this time of year. The sounds and scents of Christmas bring these memories to the surface as November winds down and we make that intentional shift toward the close of the calendar. Bing Crosby kicks if off, and once I start down that long road back, it’s pretty hard to turn around. The stringed intro to “The Christmas Song” sends me straight to my grandpa’s living room. I hear the snap of a fireplace that will be used this December by people whose names I don’t know and faces I would never recognize. My aunt’s fingers press keys on a piano that was sold years ago. The golden retriever, now ash and an empty collar, wags its tail beside my grandpa’s chair. This will be the first of many stops this season.

There is a hand-painted frame on our family desk that reads “You’r the Best mom ever.” Inside it sits a heart-shaped hole with a black and white photo of me with my oldest son. He is wrapped in my arms, and we are smiling, both looking as joyful as we were in that time – a time that feels like yesterday and a different life completely. The woman in that photo is young and happy. She plays hide and seek with that little boy, sings songs, and reads him stories. She laughs at everything he does, naughty or nice. She writes journals to him, so he has a picture of those simple, sweet days when he is grown and forgetful. She is the best mom ever. But in that photo, there is another baby growing in her belly, one that will arrive a little too early, turning her life down a different path than the one she thinks waits for them. This path will be expansive and rewarding all the same, but it will come with challenges and loneliness she is not accustomed to. It will bring guilt and resentment that will devour many of the days ahead. She does not know this as she smiles for the camera. She thinks the lightness will continue. She thinks it will multiply as the children multiply.

“Do you remember the blue butterfly?” he asks, his voice slow and sleepy. My youngest child is draped across the small couch positioned at the foot of my bed, trying his best to delay the inevitable slumber. It’s late enough that I should ignore this question and urge him toward rest, but the butterfly…the butterfly is worth these few extra minutes, so I concede. “In Costa Rica?” I reply. “Yea. I fink it was on the last day when we goed back home,” he says, his five-year-old memory surprisingly precise. “Yes, it was. What about that butterfly?” I ask. “I fought we were gonna runned it over wif the car,” he says, eyebrows at attention. “No, silly boy. We weren’t gonna run it over. That was our guardian angel.” I smile. “It’s just a butterfly, Mama,” he giggles. “Maybe. But Mama’s pretty sure it was meant for us.” We typically spend our August awash in the final weeks of Midwestern heat. But this year, instead of baking in the Michigan sun, we spent part of our August in the hot blaze of Central America as we explored the beaches and mountains of Costa Rica. This dream had lived within me forever, but with my 40th birthday around the corner and the weight of five years of foster parenting on my back, I was eager to escape and experience a different way to live out the evaporating summer. Fully adept at the American road trip, I am rarely phased by travel with children. We have ventured near and far with our gang of ruffians, but we had never attempted to buckle these boys onto a plane and out of the country. With the exception of Canada, international travel was not something we’d done with any of our children, let alone all of them at once. I would not be deterred, though, and in early winter when the sun was nowhere to be found, I cracked my dust-covered guide to Costa Rica and started booking beachside huts and lodges tucked deep in the rainforest. Before I knew it, I’d plotted out a 12-day itinerary and reserved the only 4WD rental car I could find that would accommodate all 6 of us. Then, I filed that dream away until the end of July when I pulled it back out and found that my brazen January confidence had left me. I sat on the floor of my closet, packing and repacking the same four carry-ons, wondering what I had done.

I skipped submitting my monthly newspaper column the last time it came around, something I never do. I stared at the empty computer screen and quickly clicked it off because I am in a season of setting things down – things that I love and things that I don’t, things that lift me up and things that leave me empty. One by one, I’ve set these things down, wished them well, and walked away. Some of these things have been small, others have felt monumental: my deep-seated yearning to be loved, friendships long since dead, the responsibility of foster parenting, one very fulfilling job, clean floors, a vision of what my life was supposed to be, the irrational need to wear mascara in public, my giant expectations, and a July newspaper column. It has been a rough couple of months. It has also been a blast. When everything else was set down, what remained were four sweet boys, one steadfast dog, and a newly moustachioed husband, things that I carry, yes, but things which also carry me. It’s been a summer of late nights and wild children, sprinkler bouncy houses and sunburns. We’ve laughed and we’ve cuddled and I’ve cried and I’ve cried – tears of gratitude and many, many tears of guilt and regret for all the time I wasted juggling things that were never meant for me.

On a chilly evening in the early days of the pandemic, my kids and I walked the back ten acres of a friend’s property. We were longing for a familiar face outside of our family of six, so we’d met and strolled at arm’s length to get some fresh air and welcome the blossoming spring. His land consists of horse pastures, hardwoods, and one large clearing dotted with scrub brush at the very back. Taking our time, reveling in the birth of a new season, we meandered the perimeter of the field. As we rounded the backside, a chickadee caught my attention, seemingly beckoning to us in its repetitive dee-dee-dee. Delighted and curious, my oldest son and I followed the little gray bird toward the center of the clearing. It hopped from sapling to bush to thin tree branch, calling us all the while. Cautiously, we stepped around low points with gathered water, both intrigued by the bird’s playful nature. “Chickadees remind me of my grandma,” I told him as we followed along. “Grandpa’s mom. She had a big birdfeeder in the pine tree outside her kitchen window, and all I can remember are the chickadees who came to feast every morning.”

“Mom, you know how to tune a guitar?” “Nope. Not a clue,” I say, turning the little knobby things at the top. “Twaang, twing, twiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing,” go the strings. My son watches me, uncertain. Might I actually be cooler than he thinks? He deliberates. I tighten the knobs further, then hand the instrument over. He strums a few times, raises an eyebrow. I am not cool. Waves of regret douse the living room. I cannot play an instrument. When I was little, I tried to teach myself piano on weekends at my grandma’s. I played violin for a year in 5th grade, switched to trombone in the fall, and quit all together once I hit Junior High. Now, with a 10-year-old staring at me, waiting, I wish I had something to show him.