Mommy’s Little Helper

“You’re not my real mother,” Hannah says to me in her matter-of-fact way as I am taking her to school.  I have been expecting this, sooner or later.  Hannah has known for years, of course, that Jane is her birth mother and that I adopted her.  We have shown her the pictures from the adoption, her little two-month-old self held in my arms and then in the arms of the judge.  She knows her adoption story. 

I am, by legal decree, her real mother.  I carry in my wallet a piece of paper verifying this.  I think about taking it out and showing it to her. 

 “I’m not?” I say.

“Nope,” she says happily.  “Mommy is.  She’s the one who had me inside her.”

“So, what am I?” I ask. 

“You’re her helper.”

Her helper?????  She couldn’t have chosen partner?  Friend?  Even Dad?  But helper?  I feel like Alice on The Brady Bunch.

“Hmmm,” I say, as a truck passes in the next lane.  “I’m pretty sure I’m your Mama.”

There is a pause as Hannah looks out the window and picks at the High School Musical stickers she has pasted on the glass.

“Tell me a story,” she says.  She wants the next installment of Makena and Her Pet Unicorns, an endless tale that involves fairies and invisible castles and lots of pregnancies and an army of mice.  I oblige, because that is what she wants.  I suppose, that is what helpers do.  And it’s definitely what Mamas do.