![\"\"](\"http:\/\/katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/wires.jpg\" "\\"wires\\"")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
We stayed in town for the holidays and on the Monday after New Years I took Josie skiing in the morning while Paul and Little K had some errand-running guy time. Josie and I had a good morning. Paul and Little K had fun too. Everyone was happy, except for Little K, who gets mad when I\u2019m gone and clings to his dad on my return.<\/p>\n
After dinner that night Paul left to play tennis. Little K was standing on a chair near the counter. He\u2019s in that phase. You know, the one where he pushes the furniture around and climbs up on the chair or the table to open drawers and get out sharp knives or topple greasy bowls of fresh warm, but thankfully not hot, chicken stock. Anyway, he\u2019s standing on the chair as he always does and he somehow manages to fall off and land on his face. It\u2019s not pretty and as quickly as I can, I pick him up, hold him close, and tell him that I am here<\/em> and that everything will be alright<\/em> while he screams his head off. He\u2019s yelling Mama! Mama! Mama!<\/em> and twisting around, reaching out his arms, as if he\u2019s trying to find someone else.<\/p>\n I\u2019d met his birthmother a week earlier. Before that, I had very little information about his birth family and I imagined a faceless, bodiless, life of neglect and loneliness. I knew he must have missed people and places from that time, but it was easy for me to gloss over the past with the promise of the future.<\/p>\n Little K seemed so happy with us from the beginning. He started calling me Mama right away.<\/p>\n So right after his fall, he\u2019s sobbing and stretching out his hands as if he\u2019s looking for someone else, I suspect his dad, but for the first time another thought occurs to me. His birthmother is now, for me, a living, breathing person who, at times, had been a loving parent. He could be looking for her. He could have been looking for her all along.<\/p>\n Maybe in the early days he wasn\u2019t saying Mama<\/em> to me to get my attention or state a fact. Maybe he was really saying Mama?<\/em> as in, where is she?<\/em> What happened to my Mama? Where are you Mama?<\/em><\/p>\n I knew, even in the thick of his crying, that all I could do was keep rocking and holding and repeating that I am here<\/em> and that everything will be alright<\/em> and hope eventually he believes me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We stayed in town for the holidays and on the Monday after New Years I took Josie skiing in the morning while Paul and Little K had some errand-running guy time. Josie and I had a good morning. Paul and Little K had fun too. Everyone was happy, except for Little K, who gets mad […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,24,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adoption","category-little-k","category-parenting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1332"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1335,"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1332\/revisions\/1335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}