The dreaded school Family project, or is it?

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Our eldest daughter is in second grade. This seems to be the school year where the curriculum moves to tracking/tracing/sharing your Family Tree and/or Family Ancestry.

As a family built through adoption this could go one of two ways, we either dread it or look at it as a learning lesson. You may recall our family is living in very open adoptions so our family is looking at this project as a learning lesson one where we don’t hide who we are and use my husband and my ancestry but reach out and have our daughter learn more about herself by seeking this information on who she is.

How you ask will we approach this school project then? Good question. Our daughter (and her sister) obviously know that they were adopted, know who their family members are and how they are related to who and how so digging deeper into her family roots through her birth family is the best way to approach this project in our opinion!

We have reached out to our daughter’s birth mom and told her about the project and who else we would like A to interview which would include her Aunts and Grandparents through C. We are setting up a Skype call for all of them to interact and assist A with this project!

We believe this will further connect A to her birth family by learning her ancestry giving her a deeper understanding of where she came from. Our intent is to reach out to her birth father as well and have him contribute since she is part of both of them and their families are part of A.

It will be interesting for all of us to learn the ancestry of where A’s families come from!

OAR #51 Does it get easier?

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The Open Adoption Roundtable is a series of occasional writing prompts about open adoption. It’s designed to be a showcase of the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community.   This open adoption roundtable prompt #51 is … living in an open adoption, does it get easier?

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I have sat with this prompt for a couple of days before sitting down to write what my thoughts are.  I wondered since our girls are now 7 and 5 years old is our family life easier?

I wanted to look back and think about what our expectations were while starting our journey to parenthood through adoption, especially moving towards open adoption.  I think our exposure to other families already parenting children with connections to their families gave us a better sense of what it might look like in reality versus what you may read.  We were able to meet and see these families and get to know them.  We got to hear from them what it was like for them.  Through the facilitator we worked with, Ellen Roseman of Cooperative Adoption, we met a community of other families that would be just like ours.  The beauty of this was it just wasn’t families with infants, we also met families with children who could share for themselves what this meant for them.

So I think our expectation on our journey to parenthood in open adoption would be that it is relationship building and like any relationship it takes work and trust and communication.

So I have to say for us our open adoption family life is better and stronger.  Not only have our relationships with each of our girls birth mothers grown deeper but so have our relationships with their extended families.  At the same we have reconnected and developed relationships with each of our girls birth fathers.

Has it been easier now that our girls are 7 and 5 years old?  In some ways, yes!  It’s easier because we have all gotten to know each other better, it’s easier in that our girls are now developing their own independent relationships with their families.  It’s easier in that we see each other more readily as family (something that we wanted but had to adjust to in the early days).  It’s easier because we all wanted the same thing ~ a family relationship with each of us, not just our girls and their birth family.  We all are striving for the same thing ~ to be a family together.

Are their difficult times?, yes there are!  Do you have difficult times with any of your family members?  I bet you do!  It’s only natural in a human relationship to have good and bad times.  But it’s what you do during these times that will make or break a relationship.  Our mantra during a time that wasn’t that good is that we are family, family works through it and together we learn and we walk forward together hand in hand.

Connection to biology …

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#adoption #openadoption not just about the love and connection to a birth mother or birth father it is the family connection to the whole family that is important #familylove

It has become more and more important to our family that the ties our girls have and keep are not just to their birth mother or birth father but through to their siblings, to aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents even to great grandparents.

The main focus started and continues to be with visits with their birth mother or birth father.  We have come to a time where we want to make sure that our girls know and have a deeper connection to the grandparents and  other family members and to have these ties and connections.  Get togethers are looked at now not to just include them but to have separate visits when we can.  Time spent with each other is time well spent.

Why you ask?  Sometimes in your life there may be times your connection to someone may fade in an ebb and flow way but doesn’t break and you feel the need to reach over that connection and strengthen the ties above and beyond it.  Our intent is to keep these family ties and not limit them to just one or two people.  To have our girls understand the width and breadth of the love that surrounds them and the love they can share on their own through their families.  Our hope and dream is that they never feel too separated from those they are connected to by biology.

(whispered) Do they know they are adopted?

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There are occasions when someone learns our family journey to parenthood, that this question happens in a whisper to us if our girls are present.  I understand there was a time that talking about adoption didn’t happen often and even still there were children who did not know they had been adopted. 

I’m never offended, I usually smile with a bit of a laugh and say they sure do!  You see we have ongoing in-person family relationships with each of our girls birth mothers and their extended family and their birth fathers and their family.  It would be a very hard secret to keep anyway!  When we changed our path from trying to have a baby to hoping to adopt for our family building we basically sat on our rooftop and shouted it out to the world.  SO a lot of people in our immediate world know how our family came to be. 

Our girls have heard their story pretty much from the time they were born.  Each girl was entrusted to us right after their birth from the hospital.  My husband created a song/lullaby that tells them their story about our family entwined with their birth families.  Each girl can now proudly and loudly sing their song 🙂  There are many story books that we incorporate into our night time reading that talk about adoption “Tell Me About The Night I was Born” by Jamie Lee Curtis, “How I was Adopted” by Joanna Coles, “We Belong Together” by Todd Parr, “Happy Adoption Day” by John McCutcheon, and “Forever Fingerprints” by Sherrie Eldridge. 

Our girls are 7 and 5 years old now and can understand their story, that they each grew in another’s tummy.  That their birth mother and birth father made them and that’s who they get certain features and some of their personalities from.  That we were chosen by their birth parents to be their Mommy & Daddy.  That they are loved by all of us.

So it’s okay to ask in front of our girls if they are adopted, they know and they may even answer you who they were born to and who they call Mommy & Daddy all by themselves.