Ganesha is not my biological daughter she is my niece. She has been living with me for over 4 years now and while I passionately refer to her as my daughter and she is more and more referring to me as mommy the fact still remains that I am not her mother. Below is the story about how I became Ganesha's mother in my heart though she is still struggling to accept me as that.....
I knew that Ganesha was going to be living with me at some point in her life from the very moment that I found out about her conception. She was just a ball of cells, in her existence, when I found out about her and knew that this would some day be our fate. Having her in my life and being her primary caregiver was never a question to me. People tell me that they don't think that they could have done what I am doing, I guess that makes me special because I never even questioned it. I just didn't think that she was going to be only be 2 1/2 years old when she would be coming to live with me.
Ganesha was born in Georgia and when she was six months old my sisters relationship with her Ganesha's father fell apart so she and Ganesha moved back to NJ and in with my parents. In the beginning Ganesha's Bio Mother was an extremely attentive mother to Ganesha able to anticipate and meet each of her needs, but as Ganesha became more independent and began to develop her own sense of self things began to fall apart. It became harder and harder for Ganesha's Bio Mother to attend to Ganesha's needs and she started turning to "self-medication" and she would begin to disappear for longer periods of time during the day and when she was home she was typically sleeping. There was several attempts to work, and go to school but my sister would run into challenges that she was not able to overcome and as she struggled with each challenge she would fall deeper into despair and become more and more distant from Briana and the family.
By the time that Ganesha was 2 1/2 years old my sister was mostly absent in her life. Ganesha would get herself up in the morning, feed herself breakfast from whatever scraps were laying around from my sisters snacks the night before, and then get herself dressed before going downstairs to her grandparents. She had very little stability in her life from her mother. Her mother would say that she was going out for coffee and then come home 10 hours later, meanwhile Ganesha was left wondering where her mother was and feeling very insecure in herself.
Then one day in late August I get a call from my sister telling me that she is moving in Louisiana in two weeks and would I stop by on the weekends to help my parents with Ganesha so that they aren't so overwhelmed. She was going to LA to work for my best friend who she had worked for before, successfully, in order to try to get a fresh start in things. I quickly decided that my parents raising Ganesha was not the right decision and the day that she moved to LA I moved in with my parents to help with Ganesha As time quickly progressed it became clear that she was not going to be able to pull herself together and bring Ganesha down to LA any time soon so six weeks after my sister moved out I brought Ganesha to Jersey City to live with me in my apartment.
Shortly after Christmas my sisters downward spiral quickly began and it became clear that this was going to be a more permanent situation. By March we had drafted a guardianship agreement and my sister had given me temporary guardianship of Ganesha, but the agreement was written in such a way that it would take her until she was 18.
So in a nutshell that is how Ganesha came to live with me 4 1/2 years ago and we began our journey together as a small and perfectly imperfect family.
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