open adoption

A time of honor and remembrance …

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A Time of Honor and Remembrance
It is no small thing to give life.
To feel the kick of tiny feet.
To know that no matter how far apart you are,
there will always be someone out there
with whom you are connected.
To be a mother is to love,
to nurture,
to care.
To be a mother means to give your children the chance to be.
Birthmothers hold a very special place in the community of mothers.
On Mother’s Day especially, we deserve to be honored for all we have done for our children.
For the love we will always have for them.
For the place that is theirs alone in our hearts.
We begin by honoring each other.
~ Brenda Romanchik

This weekend is Mother’s Day and without the two women in our lives I would not be celebrating this day … the decisions they made and choosing us to be parents of their daughter’s has given me the opportunity to be a Mom and I cannot thank them enough …

We see this weekend of Mother’s Day/Birth Mother’s Day as a way to recognize the shared love we have for our children …

I personally do not choose one day over the other to let our daughter’s birth mothers know how much they mean to us …

We celebrate it as Mother’s Day with cards, gifts made by our girls (now almost 7 and 5 years old) and flowers from us sent to them.

We know how blessed we are throughout the year and to have both women and their extended families be part of our families … but we believe showing an extra special recognition on this weekend is important too!

looking from the outside in …

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i·ro·ny (r-n, r-)

NOUN:
pl. i·ro·nies
1. The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning.
2. An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning.

We’ve been home from our trip for a couple of weeks now and I have been reflecting on what became a regular occurrence from our time away …

It seemed almost everyone who saw us, whether they were other vacationers, or staff particularly at the resort, the common question to us was “are the girls twins?” The irony of this as you know is that our girls came to our family through adoption and they were born to different birth families and they are two years and a month apart ….

Why have I been thinking about this since our trip? Our girls know they were adopted, they each have a relationship with their birth mothers and extended family … and they know they are sisters because of our family.

But I wonder if their understanding has matured to see the irony in these pleasant comments. We are a family that blends in … all of us are Caucasian and that just happened … we did not know what background our future child might have … we were not specific to ‘caucasian only’ when we began our journey to parenthood through adoption…it just happened.

I do see that there are some resemblances of our girls to each my husband and I … each of their birth mothers resemble us … so it would seem the girls would somehow resemble us at some point too. This just happened it wasn’t something we tried to do … we took this journey understanding that without a genetic connection our future children would resemble the families they were born to and not us ….

When these pleasantries were shared I had a thought “Do I just smile and let them know that they are two years apart?” or “Do I educate that our family was formed through adoption and how they couldn’t really be twins?” I realized now that our girls are 6-1/2 and 4-1/2 years old it really is up to them to share their story and not me or is it at this age? We’ve always felt their adoptions are our families business and not necessarily for the world’s opinion BUT am I wrong to think this way?

after a visit …

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How do we feel after a visit?

Last night C left to return home to her home state she left with eyes brimming over with tears and I saw A was looking sad about her departure as well. So I started a conversation with our girls about our family and their birth families. I asked each of them how they feel after we have seen C and S. Each of them enthusiastically said they are happy when they see them and they feel sad after they have left.

Now at 6-1/2 and 4-1/2 these times together mean more to our girls then when they were babies. We see them developing their own independent relationships and with these relationships come the emotions for them of happy and sad. We talked about it’s okay to be sad when someone we love leaves after a visit.  That shows us how much we love and miss them when we are not together…

We realize that this is not something we can wipe away or hug away. These are their feelings, even now when they can’t put it all into words… but we see it come out as anger, disobedience and quietness (which if you knew our girls you would know something is up). My husband and I have shared with our daughter’s birth moms that the girls do feel sadness when a visit is over so that they know too it’s not just them (both women have shared their feelings of sadness after spending time together). As our girls get older and their understanding of being adopted is more fully understood, I think we will see a variety of emotions before, during and after visits. It is something we have learned to be watchful for to be there as support in the best way we can.

I know both my husband and I each enjoy and look forward to our visits with our family. Some of our get togethers need to be planned, as one family lives out-of-state and the other although close to us, busy schedules have made it that we have to plan a date or days we will be together somewhat in advance. Sometimes these visits include all family and a mix of family from Aunts, Uncles, Cousins and Grandparents including our sides of the family as well.

We are prepared to be there as the emotional support for our girls for whatever and whenever the need arises. We are here to hear what they are feeling and sit and listen allow them the comfort and space to feel what they are feeling … for now they allow us to be and sit with them and talk about it and our hope as they are older they will continue to do the same, allow us to be their emotional support.

Visits together are fun and we all enjoy them, it’s when the time has come to leave that we all feel sad. What helps is we know we will be getting back together and spending time together another time sooner than later.

OAR #44 What Openness Means to me

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Open Adoption Bloggers has created a new prompt through the Open Adoption Roundtable.  It’s designed to be a showcase of the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community.  SO here is the prompt for OAR #44:

What is “openness” to you?

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To us openness equals family.  What do you mean by family you ask?  Well I looked up the definition and found many but none that completely fit what we believe to be the definition except this one from the “Your Dictionary” found on the internet:

Family means a specific group of people that may be made up of partners, children, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents. (noun)

This definition didn’t define family by DNA, just by relationships.  That’s how we perceive our family.  It’s not just your connection by DNA makeup but by the relationships we have together.

We can share milestones and discover when members of birth family had theirs, we can see nature vs nuture at work together, being family means we spend time together, we visit, we do things together, we talk on the phone when we want, we share pictures, we send gifts, we do all of that and more not just for us but for our girls to know where they came from and who they are …

Our girls each entrusted to us at birth, know their families not by happenstance, but because that is how we wanted our family to be.  We embraced all of our girls’ families that include their birth mothers, birth fathers, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, great-grandparents as our family and in return they have embraced us.

Our girls know no better they just know who is their family and they love them and are loved by them.