Being a Mom when You Aren't the Mom

As many of you know, September was a major turning point in my life. If not, you might want to read these posts first:

I'm Back, Part 1

I'm Back, Part 2

I'm Back, Part 3

God and Answered Prayer


My younger sister died of cancer, and left an 11 year old son behind. My husband and I took him in and are raising him as our own. There have been a lot of adjustments to make by both my nephew and by us. After all, I’ve already raised three boys, the youngest being 26 this summer, and W. and I were looking forward to time alone for the first time. God planned otherwise. My nephew wasn’t planning on having to uproot from his home of 11 years and move to Louisiana to live with relatives he didn’t really know very well. Again, God had other plans.

We’ve been through some tough adjustments in the last eight months. My sister was not much on discipline, and in the last few years, her sickness made discipline even less feasible. So he’d never been spanked till he met us. Let’s just say, he didn’t like THAT much at all. He fought every disciplinary measure we took for the first few months, but we kept on loving him and kept on telling him that life would be much better once he figured out that we were the boss and he was the kid and living by our rules voluntarily would make for a much more pleasant atmosphere than having us force everything on him. Over the last few months, he has come around, and has blossomed into a kid who seems to want to please us, has become more organized, more respectful, more self-disciplined and more submissive. We’ve had some really good family times, and we are all bonding well. Kids like boundaries. They know that parents have rules because they love you, not because they are trying to make your life miserable. But they also need to know they are loved, and we do a lot of family things together, W. prays with him each night before bedtime, and he and I go on little short adventures off and on just to spend time together. My youngest son is giving him personal training in preparation for football next fall, and he’s in my oldest son’s SS class for teens. He truly has become part of the family.

Saturday before Mother’s Day, he and I were riding in the car running errands. I told him that I realized that tomorrow was probably going to be a rough day for him, since it would be his first Mother’s Day since his mom died. I said if there was anything special he wanted to do in memory of mom, to let me know, but if he didn’t want to do anything, that was ok too. He got really quiet and didn’t say much after that for a while. I had decided to keep things low key for that day. My husband was out of town to visit with him mom, so we would just have our usual Sunday, with services, Sunday school, an afternoon nap, etc.

Sunday morning I woke up to find a pretty red gift bag on the nightstand beside my bed. “Happy Mom’s Day” had been written on the outside of it. I didn’t expect to find what I did inside.

My nephew had gone outside into the storage building and found a little plaque that he had made for his mom last year for Mother’s Day. It had a little butterfly on it, with pretty painted flowers on it and “Happy Mom’s Day 2007” on it. Really cute. He had wrapped it in paper and put it in the little red gift bag and given it to me…

When I told him how much his present meant to me, I told him that I knew I could never replace his mom – no one can replace our mama – but that the longer he stayed with us, the more I felt like he was my kid, and felt more and more like a son to me instead of a nephew. He smiled and said, “I already feel that way about you.”. He pulled out his cell phone and scrolled through the address book to my number. Out beside it, it said, “Mama".