She sees us as part of her whole …

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manipulative-fraction-circle-whole-outline

During this school year our second grader had a project related to social studies that included finding out your families ancestry.  She had worked on this project speaking with both her birth mother’s family and her birth father.  We learned from both sides she shared similar ancestry like being Scottish, Norwegian, Belgium and more.

Recently she and I were discussing what to have for dinner and the conversation turned into what you may eat if you are Chinese, Chinese food; Mexican, Mexican food; Irish, Irish food; etc.  I then explained that that may be true when living in your home country but you don’t have to be that ethnicity to eat that type of food.

Her response was well I eat Italian food and I’m Italian.  I looked at her thinking how I can respond to her as technically she is not Italian but I am.  I asked her if she remembered her school project from earlier this year and what we had learned about her ancestry.  She told me yes she remembered but that SHE IS Italian because I am.

I sit here today thinking about this conversation and being glad that our daughter knows where she comes from from the relationships we have with her birth families. It tells me she is not split on who her family is. She is confident in that she belongs to ALL of our families and we are all a part of her wholeness.

Mother’s Day for me is bittersweet …

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I want to wish all the REAL Moms I know a Happy Mother’s Day, each of you inspire me and to each of our girls’ birth moms I want to send my love to you for making my dreams come true and am so happy to share this day with you and our love for our daughters! ♥

Merriam-Webster definition

Bittersweet adj

1. :being at once bitter and sweet; especially : pleasant but including or marked by elements of suffering or regret

We began our journey to parenthood through adoption in 2005, and by some miracle we became parents in 2006 and again in 2008! It was a challenging experience to get from those days to today. The whole time while I wondered, when would it hit me that we were picked, that this baby was born, that we took her home, that we adopted her and were parents? Guess that day decided to show up… Bigger than Christmas and more meaningful than my birthday… and it happened twice! but I realize as my dreams came true there was another who made the choices and sacrificies to fulfill my dream and it was not something they had originally dreamed for themselves.

So it is on this day, Mother’s Day, that I have very mixed feelings … our girls have relationships with two mothers, the one who loved and cared for them for nine months and the one who loves and is raising them…and together we share the love of our daughters everyday!

I realized how blessed we all are, to first be a family and to call our girls’ birth families our family. I am thankful everyday that C and then S chose me to be the mother of their daughters.

Yes this is a pleasant day to be remembered as my daughters’ mother, but I know there are others who feel elements of suffering or unhappiness that they are not with their children everyday …

And here we are a family which means being there for each other during the fun and happy times, and the sad and unhappy so for that I wish all the REAL mothers I know a good day and hope they are feeling good about themselves!

do you celebrate your child’s family day?

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This is a question I see come up often in the different groups I am part of on the internet. Some refer to it as “Gotcha Day” while others like ours call it “Family Day”.

What is family day you ask? For us it is the anniversary of the day we sat before a family judge in court and officially became a legal family. Although both of our girls were entrusted to us at birth, there is a time period during post-placement that you are assisted with social worker visits to ensure all is going well and then the final report and documents are drawn up that will be presented in court. Here in California the timeline is about 6-9 months for the post-placement visits. For our second daughter it was shorter as we had adopted only 2 years before.

We received a court date for our local county family court and on that day friends & family joined us for each of our daughter’s finalization hearings. We pledged before the judge our love and care for our daughter as we had to their birth parents.

Our first daughter’s birth father himself is an adoptee. He was interested in how we would recognize our court date when it came. He shared how much he liked having his family celebrate and recognize his family day. We knew from his positive experience that this was something we would do as well.

Now that our girls are 7 and 5 years old, they like the recognition and celebration of their family day. We allow them to choose the way they want to celebrate. Usually a dinner out or something fun to do.

Our girls like to see the pictures that were taken with us and the family judge that presided over our hearing.

It is a reminder to all of us that this is how our family was formed. As I sit here today we are reminded that it is our youngest daughter’s family day. In May we will celebrate our older daughter’s day as well.

Do you celebrate or recognize Family Day within your own family?

thinking back … remembering how it all started …

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Start

memories thinking back to when we began our journey to parenthood …

Our journey to parenthood began officially in July of 2005 signing on with an adoption agency here in San Francisco and signing on with a well known and trusted adoption facilitator in the area as well.

After our homestudy was complete we began work on our outreach, telling the world we wanted to be a Mommy & Daddy and we were looking to adopt! Our letters mailed to healthcare professionals, and our website turned on on the internet to help us become a family … The letters and website both were done and up and out by Thanksgiving of 2005.

We started to receive phone calls from our website, but there was one that my husband (who answered the phone) felt connected to. C called in early December and talked to my husband for quite some time that day. He listened and heard her and asked some questions. After he got off the phone, we talked together and wondered could this be the call?

The holidays that year came at us in a rush … and before we knew it C called us back again in early January. We had previously shared with the facilitator we were working with the info we had gotten from C on the first call and then the two of them spoke. At that time, C was very early in her pregnancy (about 8 or 9 weeks) and we were all told this was too early to be considered a ‘match’ (the engagement of prospective adoptive families with an expectant mother) and were to build a relationship and see what transpires.

C lives in Minnesota and we live in California so building a relationship meant phone calls, emails, and instant messaging through YAHOO! We did develop a relationship … all three of us … and before we knew it she was six months into her pregnancy and it was time to meet in person. Arrangements were made for C to come visit us here in our home and to meet with Ellen, our facilitator. I can still remember the date of her trip … April 29, 2006!

Picking her up at the airport was nerve wracking, we did know her through our communications, and we each knew what we looked like as we had all shared many photos … but we were meeting in person for the first time … we were meeting the young woman who might choose us to parent the baby she was carrying … how do you prepare for this meeting? We bought her her favorite flowers that we took to the airport, we also had bought her favorite fragrance of showergel to have in the guest bathroom and when food shopping had her favorite foods and drink! We are a family that food is always part of any kind of celebration so for us that felt right!

Meeting her in person, my nerves melted away … it was like an old friend coming to visit! My husband felt the same way and so did our dog, Cody! We had a great time getting to know each other in person, showing her the sights of San Francisco, having her see the home we hoped to raise her baby in and just spending time together!

By the end of our visit she had officially asked us to be the parents of her baby and asked us to join her for a birthing class and to meet her OB/GYN back in Minnesota the next month. We happily agreed.

In July near the baby’s due date we packed up our car, our dog, and everything but the kitchen sink to be with C when she gave birth and then on July 21, 2006 we met our daughter.

When our first daughter turned one, we began talking again about adding to our family. We found this time we were a little slower to get some of the things done … her birthday is in July and in July of 2007 we asked our agency for an updated homestudy and we finally finished it by February of 2008. By the time we officially re-signed on with Ellen, our adoption facilitator, it was just after June 2008 ….

At the beginning of August 2008, we were called by S having ‘met’ through our facilitator Ellen, to meet in person. S lived an hour south of us and as luck would have it when she called my husband and daughter had just left for their swim lesson so I told her we could meet later in the day.

We drove down to meet S full of excitement and nerves! We knew before meeting S that her baby was due in two weeks … after building a relationship with C for almost seven months this would be very quick and different from our previous experience.

We got down to where she lived a little later than we anticipated and wondered would she care that although we called we were late! So not only were we nervous we felt bad we might be starting off on the wrong foot … with our elder daughter in tow we sat down to get to know each other, all of us sharing how nervous we were … she telling us she had never known or met any adoptive parents before and us sharing we were just nervous meeting her … our nerves and fears subsided and before we knew it we had all been talking, laughing and watching our daughter for over four hours. After our meeting we immediately called our facilitator, Ellen, and shared with her we would be very open to moving forward whatever S decided and unbeknown to us, S phoned Ellen and told her we were it, she had found the family for her baby.

We had two weeks to start developing a relationship that would last all of us a lifetime and we all made haste to get to know each other … we had her over for dinner a few times and we met at a park near to where she lives another and then we got the call …. her water had broken and it was five days before her due date … like with C, we were invited to be at the hospital to support her and meet our newest addition …and on August 22, 2008 our daughter was born.

Our girls are now 7 and 5 years old, we have extended our family not only through each of our daughter’s birth mothers but through their extended families and at the time each girl turned 4 we reconnected with each of their birth fathers. We could not imagine it any other way!

So you never know what a first meeting will bring … but in each of our cases it started what is now a life long relationship with each of our daughter’s families that have seamlessly become part of ours 🙂

Its the memories of where we started to know where we are today that got me thinking about our initial journey to parenthood.