It’s in the eyes. The
eyes stare at you and get into your soul.
You will see them all day long.
Those eyes will make you fall in love.
Those eyes will make you want more.
Those eyes will make you want to heal them.
We were lucky enough to get a baby picture of Sasha that was
taken when she entered the orphanage.
She was being held up by an orphanage worker; swaddled in a stained
white blanket. The picture used to make
me sad but now when I look at that picture, I see the same beautiful girl who
kisses me every morning before she gets on the bus for school. I see her brightness. There is no more need or want. There is only happiness. I was organizing our pictures the other day
and I pulled this one out. Sasha and I
scanned it and edited out the stains and the flash reflection in the background
but we left her eyes alone. We laughed
at how little hair she had and how she looked like a burrito.
Eliana’s birthmother ‘s beauty struck me from the first
moment we met her. I was completely
comfortable looking into R’s eyes and sharing my feelings, my love for her and
her baby. R put her soul out there and
we embraced it. We loved R and we needed
R and her baby from the moment we met her.
We needed her just as much as she needed us. After we brought Eliana home, I spent hours
looking into her eyes and promising her the world. She knew her mommy and she held my gaze.
What’s amazing now is that Sasha and Eliana have the exact
same color eyes. They are both
greenish-bluish-greyish-brownish-hazelish.
They are ever-changing depending on the weather, their mood or their
clothes. Their eyes are not my
eyes. Their eyes are my love, my
healing, my ‘more’.
Now that I’m on the other side of infertility, I realize
that when I looked into Sasha’s eyes in that picture and Eliana’s birthmother’s
eyes in person, I was looking into a mirror. I needed to be a mom. They needed me to be a mom. Together we healed each other.
