Another week come and gone. I posted a new picture on my site margiewongmusic.com
My daughter took this four years ago now. We were at my parents house visiting and I was teaching her how to play guitar. My mom had dementia really bad for a couple of years from several mini strokes and while she always knew who I was she wasn't always there. She had her eyes closed most of the time because she had double vision and her conversations were very bazaar to say the least. At this time it was early in the evening and me and Lindsay were on the floor playing guitar and I was showing her several easy chords and said see you can write about anything. I turned around and my mom was awake and smiling and very alert! I said you can write about Grandma. Then I started lightheartedly saying anything but the more I looked at my mom the more the emotions of her failing health and what an awesome mother she had been to me flooded me and I poured out my heart in the song "For Grandma".
My brother, sister and me are all adopted and my parents adopted late in life. She really was the first to love me and we never felt any less loved than anyone else, maybe even more loved than others. She was so kind hearted telling me growing up that they chose me over all the other babies in the nursery. It was only as an adult did she tell me the truth of my adoption. My mom had a tumor and back then the remedy was a hysterectomy. So in her late thirties she and my dad wanted children. The agencies said they were unsuitable because they were older. So they went to a private agency in San Francisco and they gave them my brother who at the time was deemed hard to place because he had a lot of colds and was over 2. That worked well and two years later the agency called them and told them they had another baby to place and if they wanted to adopt again. They said yes and that is my sister. Two years later they called again with another little girl to place at two months old and they said yes and that is me. Two years later they called and said they had a boy, but I guess I broke the mold because my dad said no, but they let the agency know of the family across the street from us wanting a baby. So the boy I played with growing up could have been my brother, how weird.
Having older parents, 41 years older, is different, everyone thinks they are your grandparents, so when I had my first child at 23 I started calling them grandma and grandpa and never went back. They were married 57 years by the time she passed three and a half years ago, six months after I wrote the song and took these pictures. My dad passed a year and a half ago in September, so now I am an orphan again as it were. They were devout Catholics and loved God. When I was born again they didn't understand it but were open to me telling them about Jesus and even went to my church once or twice over the years. God really does supply all our needs. My birth mother was also a Catholic and did not believe in abortion. She was from Missouri and was going to college at the time. Not wanting to shame the family she told no one she was pregnant and came out to San Francisco to St. Elizabeth's Hospital for several months to have me. Once I was placed she went back and got a degree in special education from Columbia college. I never knew her, she died ten years before I found her, in her forties, but I met her older brother once and his family and they gave me pictures and said I sound just like her. God has preserved my life and set me in such a great family with two parents who loved each other, a brother a sister and with a solid foundation in Him. God supplied all my need, He really does form us in our mother's womb and is with us always. We are fearfully and wonderfully made, He knows the beginning from the end and loves us all the way.
So I wrote the song from a grateful and broken heart dedicated to my mom, the sweetest, kindest gentlest woman I was ever privileged to know. I miss my mom and dad but am confident in God's goodness that I really will see them again one day.
