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Lewis starts to wonder and think about his birth mother a lot… dreams she is out there looking for him, is his perfect mother, etc. and decides he has to find her. We know that “fantasizing” birth parents is VERY common for kids who do not know anything about their birth parents, so again, I thought this was handled realistically.

Lewis decides that since he has seen his birth mother when he was a baby, the key to finding her would be to invent a “Memory Maker”, so he can remember her face and what she looks like, and he goes about trying to invent such a machine.

The story goes all over the place from here and through countless twists and turns, he meets a wonderful (yet highly quirky!!) family in the future, which he later finds out it HIS family...the boy he hangs out with is his future son, the "mom" of the boy he comes to love is his future wife, and the boys’ grandparents are the parents that end up adopting Lewis.

The message of the movie is "Keep Moving Forward", and Lewis realizes what an awesome and loving future he has. His self-esteem and confidence grow by leaps and bounds with this knowledge.

After finding and meeting his family in the future, he does get the opportunity to go back in time to the day he was left at the orphanage. He sees his birth mother (in a long hooded coat...) and sees her hug him (as a baby), kiss him, and then leave him carefully on the doorstep of the orphanage. When he has the opportunity to see her, meet her and confront her, (which has been his goal since early in the movie) he chooses not to. Seeing her hug him (and obviously care for him) seems to be enough for him at that point and he lets her go on her way without knowing he was there. He his happy and peaceful with his decision.

Later on when he is asked why he didn't contact her in any way when he had the opportunity, he smiles and says something along the lines of "I already found my family." This was “good adoption message number two” for me. He recognized his adoptive family simply as “his family.”

The message was that his adoptive family WAS his real family, that his birth mother seemed to genuinely love and care for him but chose adoption for whatever reason, that our pasts are important but what really matters in life is to "Keep Moving Forward" to the future.

I like that while he was curious about his birth mother and wanted to find her (and did), that he didn’t need a reunion with her to feel happy and move on with his life. I say this not because I am against reunions, but because for so many adopted children, reunions are not possible.

I was worried as the movie was progressing that Lewis would end up finding his birth mother and she would turn out to be just like him and the perfect family he was longing for. Again, I was worried about that not because I don’t think life ever happens that way, and not because I am against children who were adopted seeking out and reuniting with their birth parents, but because if that was Lewis’s happy ending, I worried that the message my kids would get from that was that their “perfect” family was their birth family, and that their own happy endings required a successful reunion with their birth parents (which for most of my kids is not possible.) I think that a happy-happy perfect reunion with his birth mom would have been setting up a lot of kids for disappointment, since it is unrealistic for many.

Instead, Lewis found that his adoptive parents, siblings, wife and son were his perfect family. They loved him unconditionally, they supported him through good and bad and they were the perfect “fit” for him.

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