When Julie and I started dating, she was 18 and already a mom. She had an infant girl, and becoming a mother had changed her profoundly.
Over the years, I’ve been asked many times whether I hesitated, as a young man, at the idea that being with her meant accepting Madison as part of the deal.
The honest answer is that I did. For about seven minutes. It was easier than I thought it would be.
It’s only recently that I figured out why.
When I was four, my parents adopted an infant girl. We picked her up, and one of my earliest memories is watching her in her car seat on the way home.
My parents never hid that she was adopted. They talked about it openly, and the way they said it made it clear she was chosen.
From a very young age, I had a framework for what it meant to make someone else’s child, as some people unfairly put it, part of your family. I was taught that my sister was my sister. Genetics played no part in it whatsoever.
So in those seven minutes, the question wasn’t whether I could love a child who wasn’t mine. It was whether I was ready to go all in. Being with Julie meant being with both of them. There was no halfway version.
I didn’t have to learn how to do that. I’d been practicing since I was four.