I cannot change the past. What has happend is forever a part of history, our life stories merging with one another through choices, lack of choice, circumstance, fate and love.

I cannot change how I feel. That isn’t to say that how I feel doesn’t change; it does. But all of the pointing out how what I feel is wrong won’t make me magically see the light. My experience, which I cannot change, have shaped those feelings. I feel because I have been.

I cannot change your own reality. For I cannot change your past. I cannot change how you feel; that is up to you to do through your experience, your choices, your lack of choice, your circumstance, your fate and your love. Your passion. How I live my life, how I love my children and how I accept my reality doesn’t change your reality unless you let it. I am not responsible for your choices, your lack of choices, your circumstances, your fate or your love. I can only tell you of my reality.

I cannot predict the future. I don’t know how my children will react to my reality in the years to come. Yet as I just said, I cannot change their reality. As they grow, mature and make their own choices and accept their circumstance in life, they will form their own realities. How that includes or discludes me will be up to them; my reality will be to accept their own. My reality is raising them with the knowledge to make those future choices, whatever they may be.

I cannot stop wanting change. For all of the things that I cannot change, I yearn for it. I beg for it at night. I plead for it in my prayers. I push for it in my words, knowing full well that I cannot force you to believe, feel or change anything about your own reality. Even still, with that knowledge, I want that change. I want my children to live in a world, someday, where they don’t have to be ashamed to say, “My sister was adopted but we’re still siblings even if she does have boogers,” and, “My Mom raised my brother but not me but it’s okay because we’re all kinda kooky, even the awesome parents who raised me.” I want them to be accepted, black and white, parented and placed, water and wuh-ter, as siblings, as friends, as children and as adults. I want the change to help foster that aura of acceptance.

I cannot change the world on my own. But maybe, just maybe, if more people begin to accept others’ realities as different from their own but mutually acceptable, maybe then, just maybe, that change won’t be big and scary. Maybe then, oh please, my family will be allowed to operate in whatever fashion we see best fit.

“I am my mother’s child and I am my mother’s child, I am my father’s child and I am my father’s child, and if that line is a little too much like Gertrude Stein, then I might be a little bit her child too. Most important, now I am Juliet’s mother, and that brings with it a singularity of love and fear that I have never known before, and for that — and she is truly a blend of all four family lines — I thank all of my mothers and fathers, for she is my greatest gift.” - A.M. Homes from her memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter. My book review is here. I can’t recommend it enough.