Have you ever tried to read a book of a very sensitive subject to a child and wanted to “unread” part of a sentence or a page? Have you ever found yourself trying to explain a paragraph that you had read aloud but didn’t really need to mention it at all… or at least not yet? This happened to me! Not long after adopting my daughter years ago, we read some of the adoption books available. Some were great stories, but I found myself skipping parts that I wasn’t sure how I felt about or how it related to her story. I realized that what I wanted her to KNOW and to FEEL just wasn’t exactly out there as an option.

I was looking for a simple message regarding the fulfillment that could take place in adoption just like the fulfillment of giving birth to a child. Having both experiences, I was able to pick up on what I didn’t want to say about a baby who grew in my tummy versus a baby who grew in my heart. Many of the books I found told more of a story than I wanted to introduce at the time. I wanted my daughter to learn her own story as she was ready and not put specific ideas in her head. To me, it was a straightforward, uncomplicated message: I WANTED you, you wanted me, and we were brought together to feel amazingly complete. This seemed consistent with giving birth to my son and having him as the perfect match to complete me at that time. I had read many stories to my son when he was little without feeling the need to discuss details of his birth. This epiphany led me to want to write about fulfillment. In the story, the mother feels a void, the child fills the void. It does not matter if the child “climbed up the thread” to the mother’s heart from a distant country or from her tummy; it matters only that she did.