And I have these moments where I desperately want to just reach out my finger and push the power button — hold it steady until everything goes black. Turn it all off, power it all down.

The truth is, it never gets easier. Spending so much time and effort slowly building a life only to tear it all down again a few years later. Carefully crafting friendships, exposing vulnerabilities, risking rejection -- it's a delicate dance starting from scratch while desperately trying to make it all feel like a continuation.

I don't think he remembers feeling lonely or unloved, or bored or maybe sometimes hungry. But the scars are still there, carried in his little soul across the water, crashing like waves into our lives.

Before he was ours, a year felt like a long time, like for sure we'd have it all figured out by the time he'd been home an entire year. Now, it feels like an instant.

Tonight he said, "Mom, I can see my own self in your eyes." Oh buddy, I hope so, because it's beautiful.

Christmas is about -- making mistakes and accepting forgiveness, seeing beauty in the things you already have, sacrificing yourself for the joy of others, and most importantly, Christmas is, and has always been, about people.

She just loves that I love her -- and sometimes, when I'm caught off-guard by that spectacular truth, it stuns me.