What really matters is when all of your babies come home, they each know exactly where the key to get into the house is located. This can become complicated when the one who used it last, failed to return it to its rightful place…words are tossed into the air like unanswered questions, yet somehow, the key is found.

What really matters is how many things remain the same, even if my babies continue to change. The kitchen table, having hosted thousands of meals, is christened with paint from art projects two decades ago. We cover her with a tablecloth, and pretend we are fancy. At mealtime we pull up a stool, sometimes two if there is a guest, so that our family with too many people can sit together. This is my church.

Valentines is the literal day I learned love.

I was born on December 7, 1977 and immediately relinquished by the person who cooked and bore me. According to the social workers’ records she was in denial pretty much the whole time I was in there and, once I emerged, she held me once, decided she was sure, and let me go.

I spent two months in foster care, as the charge of a person or people whose names I’ll never know, who fed and changed and (I assume) cuddled me. Who kept me alive and growing such that the periodic medical charts showed that I was progressing the way babies are generally expected to: eating, pooping, getting bigger.

Meanwhile, Charlie & Joanne Mazzola, who had been waiting on the adoption agency’s list since ’73 (after having tried on their own since they were married in ’69), waited still.

“In the days following my mother’s passing, a celebration of her life took away some of the stinging hurt and confusion I felt. People gathered at her best friend’s house with flowers, hugs, and stories. They all looked at me with compassion and sadness. Being older, nobody thought my father would out-live her. She was 56 and he, 70. The celebration of my mother’s life, really, was for his benefit, to ease his pain. It was my first memorial.

Twelve days later, at 5 o’clock in the morning, the phone shattered the quiet at the cabin. My brother was on the other end.

“You’d better come down to Seattle, get on the next ferry, Harry has died.” I heard his words, but it was shocking, I was in disbelief.

“He fell in the night, He had a heart attack.”

(Painting and essay by Annie Howell-Adams)

I can still see my mom’s strut as she maneuvered around memory care tethered to her shiny blue walker with its floral satchel affixed to the front. When she was happy, that girl of ours would sashay down those halls in a way that said, I’ve still got it, leaving all who witnessed her chuckling with delight as that bony butt of hers shook its way to the dining room.

It struck me then that, even five years into her Alzheimer’s journey, she still found a way to shine despite her advancing through a disease that diminishes people until they are dull. And beyond.

It was as if Mom was determined to prove her own self wrong the way she continued to charm a room. After all, she’s the one who once said to me, “The older you get, Shana, the more invisible you become.”