Merry Christmas from Casamurphy!

My husband is protective of his birthmother. She sent us a Christmas card. We do not send Christmas cards. I spent all morning making a single Christmas card. There was a program I used to adore called Sierra Printshop which enabled me to create really nice cards and flyers and stuff. It was seamless and elegant and will not run on any current computer. I have a high falutin’ more sophisticated program but it is a useless tacky embarrassment, as is all the other comparable software available. With clunky software, and printing problems and my stupid assed perfectionism a single greeting card took me an entire morning, giving me lots of time to ponder its ramifications. Does my husband need to foster false assumptions because he made his birthmother vulnerable, seeking her out, unbidden, revealing her secret?


Several days after Leo’s birth, by husband entered the mikvah at the University of Judaism and was welcomed into the covenant. His birthmother had specifically requested that he be adopted by a Catholic family. She attends mass weekly. Does he have the responsibility to protect her from who he has become? He has never mentioned his conversion to his adopted father, out of what I feel is a well placed sense of responsibility. It would be taken personally and no good would come of it. It is different with the birthmother, but I do puzzle if his first responsibility in this case should be to her or to himself.


I should be cleaning but the drop in the bucket on the home organization front has yielded a long lost copy of Diana Wagman’s novel BUMP which I am devouring. The theme of mother love is confronted with great abandon and at great risk, and I chewed this around last night as I sat at the Christmas banquet at Chez Alzheimer’s across from my mother, trying to recall having felt it. I have accepted my mother’s consistent lack of connection to the things of which I am most proud and hold most dear. Now I have been blessed with a husband’s love and approval and acceptance to sustain me. I am at his side on his journey to know his mother and having a mother and being a mother, I know both the complications and richness inevitable to this road. I know and cherish who he has become. And who we have become.