Tag Archives: Matt

>Kids, In No Particular Order, Part 6

27 Thursday May 2010

Posted by in Family and Relationships, Kids

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>Kids. Are you tired of hearing about my kids yet? Don’t worry. This is the final child. Last, but definitely not least. My son.

From the time I was a teenager and thought about having children, I thought about having a son. Someone that I could throw a football with. Someone who would happily toss around a softball. Someone I could teach to play basketball. Someone who would play in the dirt with me. Someone who would want to go camping, hiking, fishing with. I hate fishing, but I wanted a son to fish with. I knew that I would be the perfect mother for a son. My older sister. She wanted girls. She was a girly girl. Couldn’t wait to dress someone up in bows. Couldn’t wait to play dolls with her daughter. She wanted girls! I longed for boys. As you know from reading about the others, God blessed me with girls. And I love my girls beyond your ability to believe the one person could love another. I have beautiful, kind, caring, warm daughters.

When Matt came into my life, he filled a spot in my heart that had been empty for a very long time. He fulfilled something that had been missing. He completed my family. Even though I did not give birth to him, he is in every way MY son! I love him as only a mother can love a child. There is no difference between my connection with him and my connection between my daughters. We are a fully, completely united family. It does not matter to me that I can’t tell you the intricacies of the pregancy. Of what havoc he wreaked on my body. Of the process of hearing him take his first breath. None of that matters to me. HE IS MY SON! He is my daughters’ brother. They are his sisters. He is protective of us. We are protective of him.

Matt comes from a difficult place. He spent his early, cognitive years with a mother who was not quite all there. She did the best she could under the circumstances. She was different. She was mentally ill, and nobody knew it. All Matt knew was that she was weird. When I first met Matt we had an instant connection. He loved me. He felt comfortable with me. He wished I were his mother. I was at his house one day because his dad was fixing the brakes on my car (this was before Mark and I were together) and I was just lounging in the garage while Mark worked on my car. Matt and his buddies were hanging around and playing. They asked who “that woman” was. He said, “That’s my mom.” They said, “Well, I thought Mrs. Herron was your mom.” He said, “She’s my stepmom.” I was floored. Even before there was ever a possibility of Mark and I being together, Matt had it in his head that I was his mom. I was what he wanted. I was what he needed. Because of his mother’s mental illness, he did not get the physical contact he needed. That emotional touch that children crave in their lives. Whenever he saw me he would hug me. He would lean on me. He never seemed to want to leave me. Before I was his mother, I gave him emotional comfort that he could not get anywhere else. I was a mother to him. He was a son to me. I wanted him to be mine forever.

And now he is. I am so grateful he is a part of my life. I will always be grateful that he is my son. He has problems. And that’s OK. Together we will work them out. Because of circumstances that I will not get into right now, my son is coming home. He is 23 but he needs his mom right now and he is coming home. I get my son back today. And I am SO GLAD to have him home.