Mother’s Day is a complicated day in our home. I didn’t cart home from the hospital the three kids that made me a mom. They did not grow in my body. They arrived, fully formed, at ages ten months, two years and three years old.

We celebrate Mother’s Day with such gratefulness that God has knit our family together through adoption. We celebrate how adoption beautifully models how God adopts and grafts us into His family. And then we mourn.

We mourn with our children for all they have lost. We grieve for what could have been—what should have been—for our children. The aftermath of Mother’s Day has always brought questions.

Why didn’t she keep me?

Why didn’t they try harder?

Why didn’t God make it right?

Who am I?

Mother’s Day after Mother’s Day after Mother’s Day, we speak of God’s goodness and our broken world. We discuss God’s sovereignty and how He takes what man planned for evil and uses it for good. We discuss a heart torn in two, between what is and what might have been, and how our God is bigger than both. We affirm His love, His plan, and how He never defaults to plan “B” because plan “A” always works.

We bend our knees to pray for the family they didn’t get to know. We thank the Lord that when unwanted pregnancies are easily terminated, our children were born to a woman that valued life. We pray for God’s mercy in her home, for His saving arm to reach down and retrieve the lost from the miry bog and set her feet on solid ground.

As the kids have aged, Mother’s Day has become less traumatic, but the grief is just below the surface. The questions are still there.  Who am I?

We praise the Lord that all three of our kids have confessed Christ as their Saviour, and that decision defines them more than anything else ever will. God defines them as forgiven and clean, and God calls them holy. Col 3:12, “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved…” 1 Pet 2:9, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation….”

They are holy, not because they have earned it or made themselves holy by responding to God’s call, but rather, they are holy because those adopted into the family of God are made holy by Christ. They belong to God. They are His child, and nothing can never sever that relationship.

Year after year, we witness God giving them the strength to endure their losses as they lean into Him. As they mature in Christ, we see them stand more confidently because they understand their status is secure because Jesus not only stands with them, but He stands in their place.

And every Mother’s Day I am overwhelmed afresh by the blessing it is for them to call me mom.