by Michele Hriciso

Created on: April 18, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

People can see how much I love the little boy in my custody. They understand that I'm committed to seeing that he's raised right.

If only they knew where he comes from.

Christopher's birth mother is related to me; I don't know anything about his birth father but a name. Both of them are heavily involved in the drug culture. If either of them is interested in having custody of him, they haven't proven it to me or anyone I know.

I accepted long ago that if I raised a child, it would be someone else's. We didn't want to go through in vitro fertilization, and I had severe endometriosis. It just wasn't in the cards to have our own.

We were sure that Christopher was going to need a home someday. Since his grandparents had already told his birth mother that they wouldn't raise another one of her children, I was prepared to love Christopher as my own from the very beginning.

I cried the night I found out his birth mother was using drugs while she was pregnant, and I cried again the night she asked me to take him so she could go to rehab. The next morning, the state gave me emergency custody of him. It was as if everything I'd ever done in my lifetime up to that moment was in preparation for taking that child into my home.

We could hardly sleep that first night, afraid that he would stop breathing and we'd miss it somehow. The next day he was well-rested and we were colicky. Finally we began to relax a bit and it hit us ... we are parents. It didn't matter that my husband and I had never had a child of our own before, and it didn't matter that the one we had didn't look like us. We are parents.

Christopher is biracial, and I have learned that people see what they want to see in him. His birth mother is white and blonde; his birth father is a moderately dark-skinned black man.

White people see Christopher as white; black people see him as black. Some just see that he is something mixed with something else and ask what his ethnicity is. So far, it doesn't seem to matter; people are just curious about his parentage.

We know that someday it will matter. Fortunately, we'll have time to prepare for that discussion, which come as early as the day Christopher is able to look in the mirror and have the realization that he doesn't look like either one of us. He has a little bit of me in him through his birth mother, but nothing of my husband.

What he will have of my husband is respect for everyone around him. My husband will be sure to teach him that. To me, that's more important than any appearance issue.

Hopefully, Christopher will also have my creativity and will learn how to properly direct it at a younger age than I did.

Already he appears to have the makings of an athlete, with his precocious physical activity. We'll encourage that, of course, because we don't know where he got it from and we don't know where he can go with it.

It is tough to raise another woman's child and handle the issues that inevitably come up in such an endeavor.

The toughest thing of all is looking into Christopher's eyes and knowing that someone chose drugs over him. I simply can't wrap my mind around it. All I can do is look into his eyes with love and patience and understanding, then hope he'll know that even though he didn't grow inside my body, he grew inside my heart and will be there forever.

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