[Janeytwo]

Sometimes I wake in the dead of night....the house is quiet....and there's nothing between me and my thoughts but an old lumpy pillow and a desire to understand this journey I've been on; a desire to give it it's due and let it be.

A monumental task not lightly taken. How does one learn to accept what's been; to accept it with grace and honor?

Last night my eyes flew open and I remembered a story I read in Junior High about a guy who travels back through time.....back to the primordial ooze. He's told to be careful; that he must stay on the path and not meander; that any misstep could alter the future. But he becomes distracted and steps on a mosquito. Such an insignificant thing or so he thinks. Yet upon his return to the "now" he discovers that everything has changed, everything he knew is gone and has been replaced by something else. He has altered his own life irreparably.



That's how this journey through adoption has felt to me. Every step I take, every communication I offer here, every truth I share echoes back to the "then" and reverberates in the "now". It changes me. It changes my reality; my perceptions of who I was and where I will go next.

Nothing else in my life, no experience has been quite like this; quite this powerful.

It seems I must go back in order to travel forward but I must be careful how and where I step because the lives of others are so intertwined with mine on this path.

Not just the lives of my four beloved children but the lives of strangers here in this reality; people I don't know or barely know or have come to love regardless of their surreal "e-existence".

My footsteps sound in the hearts of those here with me. Yet I am a lone sojourner hoping to mend the "now" by facing the "then".

I pray that my missteps will be few and insignificant.