OA Roundtable: Grandparents

This month's OART is all about grandparents. My children have many grandparents in their lives, and, for my son, that includes his biological maternal grandparents.

I'll start with my own parents. I could not dream of better grandparents for my children. When I first became a mother, I came to know and understand my mother in a whole new way. This understanding continues to grow as my journey in motherhood continues. So having my parents turn into grandparents has been a really important experience for me personally. That said, my parents have a phenomenal relationship with both my children - most especially our daughter. She was the first grandchild for my parents, and my mom has committed to spending a lot of time with her. Their bond is palpable. My father as well is the typical doting grandfather who constantly shows pictures of his grandchildren to any and all that cross his path. Even our son who is just 7 months is bonded to both of them. It's amazing to watch.

My son's biological grandparents are very committed to maintaining a relationship with him, and I would say that that also extends to building a relationship with us. I have always felt extremely comfortable around them. I think the fact that we all speak Spanish helps things tremendously, but beyond just that, they strike me as very welcoming and warm people. They bought things for little G before he was born, and continue to bring things for him whenever we see each other. I feel so lucky to have that connection in our lives, and most especially in little G's life.

But life is not all roses in the grandparent category for us. When we first brought little A home, my dad spoke to his father (my grandfather) and told him the news. Apparently my grandfather made a snide comment about the fact that she was adopted - or maybe adoption more generally, I'm not sure - which really set my dad off. I don't know what it was that he said, but my mom said she could hear my dad going off on him from across the house. My dad hung up the phone and they never spoke again. My grandfather died one year ago. In fact, I didn't know the details of this story until he died. My father had never mentioned the conversation and while I knew that my father and his father weren't speaking, I didn't know the reason that had prompted the freeze. I'm not surprised at all by my grandfather's behavior. I had heard him in the past say horrible things related to adoption, such as, in relation to his wife's grandchildren - all of whom are adopted - "I also thought it was a shame that [his wife] never had any of her 'own' grandchildren." I never mentioned to him that we were even in the process of adoption because I knew how he felt about it. He only ever spoke to me once about little A, and it was a generic "congratulations". While I feel sad about the way the relationship between my dad and his father ended up, I also think of my dad as a bit of a hero to stand up to him like that, in defense of this little girl that he loves so fiercely.

It's the little things

Since I've last written we had our second visit with little G's birth family, this time at GM's family home. GM and GD were there, as well as GM's sisters (little G's aunts) and GM's parents. It was a lovely visit where we stared a lot at little G, ate delicious food, took some walks, and little A played a lot. I felt that having little A there - who is such a presence - was especially nice because she takes up a lot of our energies and so I felt that GM and GD (and the rest of the family) could chill with little G while we kept little A occupied.

I find myself obsessing over the details of each interaction we have with little G's family. I stress because I am worried about doing things "right", by which I mean I want to honor the feelings and wishes of little G's family. As I've mentioned before, our relationship thus far has felt very comfortable and I have no reason to believe that GM and GD want something different from this relationship. But... since we are just forming this relationship it's hard to really know what every wants from it. We are still very much getting to know each other. Because this relationship is so important to me and to my family, I tend to overanalyze things.

For instance, when little G's family first came to visit us in the city, I was so thrilled that GD rode in the same car with GM and her family. GD, I've been told, isn't the most favorite person of GM's parents. My assumption is that they see him as "the guy who got our daughter pregnant" and so they aren't big fans. In fact, GM and GD had told us that most likely we would need to keep visits separate - some with GD and GM and others with GM and her family. So I took the fact that GD came along not just on the visit, but in the same car, as a really great sign. Same thing with the fact that GD was there for our last visit at GM's house.

Then we made photo albums for GD and GM of little G for Christmas. We had them sent to GM since we don't have GD's address. I let GM know to expect them. When they were delivered, I didn't hear from either of them. And I obsessed. I read into it. My mind started racing with all that could mean. I worried that they didn't like the album, the pictures we chose, maybe it was too much to see, maybe they wanted to make the album themselves with pictures they choose.... You can see how my mind raced.

Then a few weeks later is was Christmas day, I texted, they responded. It was New Year's. GD texted, I responded. And she mentioned that she got the album, loved it, and thought it was adorable. I breathed a sigh of relief.

It's not really fair of me to put so much stress (even if just in my mind) on this budding, and ever-important, relationship. But that's what I do. I hang on every action/inter-action/non-interaction.

Interview Project: Thorn of Mother Issues.

I had the great pleasure of being matched with Thorn of Mother Issues for this November's Interview Project. I was a reader of Thorn's back when we both started blogging in the summer of 2008. Shortly thereafter I became a mom and subsequently the blog didn't get as much attention as I had intended, nor was I able to keep up as much with other bloggers I had started to read. So I was especially excited to get reacquainted with Thorn and her family.

What follows is my interview of her, and make sure to check out what more she has to say at her blog, as well as her interview of me here.

M de P: Being a parent is a stressful task, and you and Lee have had more than your fair share of ups and downs in building your family. How do you and Lee keep your relationship strong?

Thorn: This one is a hard one because we're at the point of most stress right now, though the time this summer when we were desperately trying to buy a house while the bank processing our loans seemed to be falling apart was not much fun either. I think we're pretty good at respecting each other's strengths, even if we aren't always as good about forgiving or accommodating each other's weaknesses. We've also been either smart or lucky about deciding when to "agree to disagree" (though I hate that phrase) as opposed to compromising. Plus we've got the built-in excuse that pretty much nobody who's one year into parenting or parenting a preschooler has a totally satisfying romantic or friend-driven life, and so being harried and stressed is totally normal and something we can accept as temporary. Living with that sort of low bar makes it easy for the little loving things we do to mean more.

M de P: It seems you went into fostering/adoption expecting to parent an older child and are now raising a toddler and also fostering two young children. As a parent of a toddler and a middle school teacher, I constantly see the similarities between toddlers and adolescents. Would you agree? What has surprised you about parenting a toddler?

Thorn: I definitely think there's a lot of overlap between parenting a teenager and a toddler! You have to deal with the emotional meltdowns and ill-defined surliness, not to mention the developmentally appropriate swings between wanting to be younger and older than they actually are or close to parents versus independent in identities. I'm a wordy person, as you know if you've read my blog, and I think being able to interact verbally with teens is more satisfying to me than the toddler side of things. I was absolutely convinced we'd end up parenting a teen boy and I think we could have been good at that, but we absolutely adore Mara and that placement has been fantastic too.

M de P: I may have missed this on your blog, but how did you make the decision that Lee would legally adopt Mara (as opposed to you, or trying to co-adopt)?

Thorn: This is a question with a lot of answers. Our original plan was that one of us would adopt and the other would do a second-parent adoption, which at the time was something you could do if you found a sympathetic judge. As time went on and we got our training and worked to be matched with a child, our state supreme court issued a ruling that took that option off the table. So we had to make a decision, and we factored in several different things. One is that Lee teaches at a community college where any child of hers would then get tuition assistance, so that was a plus for sure. Another is that she makes a bit more money than I do and that our old house was bought in her name, so on paper she'd look more settled. It factored in that she is black and I'm white, and while race-matching with nothing else to back it up isn't legal, it was a way of signaling strongly that we were hoping to parent a child of color. And there's also the reality of our situations, that I would have the option to take parental leave (which I did with Mara) and the inclination to do a lot of the things that read as "mom jobs" so that it would be easy for people on the outside to see that I'm actively being her mom even if I don't have that legal status. If we'd ever ended up in a situation where I was fighting for custody, that could count in my favor.

We will have a co-parenting agreement that will give me basically the same rights I have as a foster parent, so I will be able to make decisions about Mara's education, healthcare, and so on. We do hope and expect that eventually the law will change in a way that recognizes families like ours, and I'd definitely get parental rights as soon as it was possible. I'm finding it emotionally challenging to deal with an adoption that's not about me, but Mara will bear my name (we're adding Lee's and mine as hyphenated last name and keeping her first and middle, though with the spelling of her first name that matches the pronunciation her mother preferred) and she absolutely knows I'm her mom.

M deP: I’m really interested in the role of religion in your lives. Again, I may have missed this in the blog, but how did it come about that you began attending Lee’s church while maintaining your atheism?

Thorn: This is a hard thing to explain to people all over the religious spectrum, I think, which is why it will probably be my longest answer! Lee had grown up very religious but had a hard time finding a church as an adult that would have the more charismatic, music-heavy worship of the churches of her youth but also let her feel comfortable as a lesbian, though she was not always out to the extent she is now. We did a small amount of church shopping, mostly at my urging because I wanted us to have a church where we felt comfortable in case we were matched with a child who wanted to have a church community. Once I found the church I currently attend, it was pretty obvious that we weren't going to find any other church where just about everyone involved is a black lesbian with children or a transwoman, though the demographics have shifted a bit in the time we've gone there. At first, I went both to support Lee and because it seemed important to push myself out of my comfort zone. I got involved with volunteer work (tutoring church-affiliated kids and serving a community dinner once a month) again as a way to feel like I had some purpose in being there. I never claimed to be a believer, never took communion or used religious language, but I tried to find a place for myself there anyway.

To most of my atheist friends, this probably sounds ridiculous. I mean, here I was spending multiple hours a week listening to people talk about something that I believed was basically ridiculous. But I don't believe it's ridiculous from their perspectives, and to me that mattered. I think that so much of the black church experience in the US comes out of the post-slavery desire to take a religion that was used as a tool of oppression and twist it into something liberating. So here's a community of these people who've largely been let down by the churches of their youth, told that they'll be going to hell because of who they are and so forth, and so I think it's that same spirit of against-the-grain liberation that lets them take part in the kind of worship they grew up with anyway. I still have a hard time at times with the speaking in tongues and that sort of thing, but mostly just remind myself that it's whatever each individual feels she or he needs that's being expressed, and so I don't find it too hard not to be judgmental.

Lee, though, got frustrated early with the church, because services last for multiple hours and everything starts late and is basically disorganized. All of this is true, and I know it was the nail in the coffin when the minister of music moved away and the part of the service she found most moving was no longer meeting her needs. I kept going because I had obligations, because I'd be meeting a teen who needed Latin help after the service or I needed to talk to someone. Once Mara arrived, I took her to church because wanted her to grow up with an innate understanding of the kind of church experience she might have had if she'd stayed with her mother. I also took her because there's nowhere else we can go to see so many other black kids with gay moms, and I want her to feel normal and supported about that too. I hope she'll be more educated about Christianity and certainly non-Christian religions and atheism than many of her fellow church-goers, but I also want her to have some positive memories about church as she ages rather than scorn or unfamiliarity.

Lee is not comfortable raising Mara to be an atheist, but that means that I let Mara make a lot of decisions herself. I let her take communion because she wanted to and since many of the small kids at church do, though I later found out this annoyed Lee, who thought she wasn't old enough. I've asked her if she wanted to pray for her family, something that's often on her mind, and I say things like, "Someone might say, 'Let's pray for Mara's daddy, because she loves him and wants good things for him in his life. May he have the chance to know her....'" I'm not sure if bracketing it that way is actually meaningful to her or will be as she gets older, but it's the only way I can say anything without feeling like I'm lying to her. I do a lot of "some people believe..." statements and she's just going to have to make do with that. Lee has prayed with her a few times, but I'm not exactly sure how they do it.

The real benefit of going to church, though, is that it puts me in the role of being in the minority time after time after time, when in the larger world I do get white privilege. I'm often the only one there who's white, perhaps the only one there who doesn't believe in a god, the only one there who's not in a butch/femme relationship. However I'm usually not the only one who is or has been a foster parent, which is nice. I realized the first time I left a message on Mara's former family caregiver Samara's phone and her voicemail chirped, "Have a blessed day!" that I was not in over my head the way I might have been had I not spent several years forging friendships within the church. There was at least one moment I want to write about someday in meeting her aunts and siblings where I knew exactly how to respond to something only because I've been going to church, because I've seen that exact movement made before and what the traditional reaction was. I was able to just instinctively do the right thing and I'm not sure whether Mara's aunts even noticed the way I did, though I think they would have noticed and thought that yeah, well, Thorn is white and you know how that is if I hadn't known how to respond. To me, just that little moment made it worthwhile and made me believe I'm doing the right thing with church for Mara in terms of giving her tools to code-switch as she grows, to understand where she comes from as well as her life with us.

M de P: Is there a conscious (or unconscious) difference between the way you enter a relationship with a child who you expect will be temporarily in your home versus a child that is on the foster-adopt path?

Thorn: It's hard for me to generalize this since we haven't had as many placements as many foster parents have, but there are real differences in seeing myself as not-the-mom versus seeing myself as on-the-way-to-being-mom. With Val, who's five, she gets annoyed if I'm picking her up and the afterschool program worker assumes I'm her mom, so it's important to say that no, I'm just taking care of her for a while until her mom's able to do it again. It's been very different, too, from taking placement of Mara, who was not quite three and very much in need of constant holding, which is what brought me to the "mom" feelings what felt like instantly. Val and Alex I enjoyed and loved and nurtured from the start, but I was also encouraging each of the three little ones to be independent in a very different way from how I treated Mara in the early days. I gave hugs and tucked them into bed and then got up a billion times to check on them, but they weren't barnacled to me the same way, partly because I just can't physically do that with three kids. I do think I loved them just as much on day one as I do now, but also that it felt different from loving Mara because loving her meant taking care of her needs forever and loving them means helping them keep their love for their family strong and helping them toward reunification. It was also obvious once they arrived what a different it makes to parent a child who understands attachment, who knows to go to the grown-up for help. Mara didn't have that kind of trust and we had to build it up over a long, long time. For Val and Alex, that work was already done by the parents and other relatives who loved them and cared for them before they came to us.

With older kids, I'm not sure how much difference there is. In meeting both Rowan and Colton, I didn't feel the same warm maternal feelings I felt about Mara when she was a little drooly non-talker, but I think that's because of age and not because I was more suited to be her mom. I feel a fierce love for both of our older boys, one of whom stays in touch by phone and one online, even though I'll never get to adopt either of them. I think that they came into our lives as semi-strangers in a weird way, since we'd read their files and felt like we knew everything about them except who they actually were. Having Rowan in the house was more like bringing in a new roommate, which I think was more appropriate than if I'd tried to push myself into a mom role, especially early on when he was very nervous about the idea of parents. The foster mom who ended up being his adoptive mother had him call her Mama from day one, though, and obviously that worked out for them. I think I push kids to have their autonomy and define their own terms more than the average foster parent. (Mara's the one who decided that I would be Mommy and Lee would be Mama. We'd been introducing ourselves to her as Mama Thorn and Mommy Lee, but she had other ideas. I wasn't surprised I became "mommy" immediately, though, because it was the same name she'd used for her prior foster mom.)

M de P: Early on in in your blog you had mentioned that you and Lee would eventually look for a place to live that would be more supportive for a lesbian couple/inter-racial family. Is this still a priority for you? I am especially interested in this because I live in one of the most diverse cities in the country, with some neighborhoods boasting to be among the most diverse places on the planet. I love my city for that and many other reasons, but I still often wonder how it all really makes a difference. Perhaps I have lived here so long that I take for granted that the diversity in my family is reflected in the larger community.

Thorn: We started out living in a two-bedroom house in a 90-something-percent white, working-class community. This summer we were able to move to our dream neighborhood three quarters of a mile away, into a big old six-bedroom house in a city with more wealth than the town next door where we'd previous lived but also more extreme poverty. We live in the wealthier but not the wealthiest pocket, which was definitely apparent on Halloween, when there were hundreds (or maybe over a thousand, as one neighbor who'd counted candy thought) trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood.

This city is eighty-something-percent white, but that means that when I drop our foster children Val and Alex at school every day, there are black children in every single classroom. Because I do see the elementary school where Val's in kindergarten and the middle school where Alex's preschool is housed as well as all the high school students walking past our street to get to school, I feel comfortable that there's a lot of race-mixing going on, that it's normal for friend groups to include children of different races at all different age levels. That's something we really want for Mara. So while we're the only non-white family on our block, there are others we know on the next block in every direction and we don't feel isolated or alone. I don't know any other interracial same-sex families with children, but there are two different black-white interracial gay male couples within a block of us, and plenty of other lesbians too.

Lee would love to move away someday, preferably overseas. After moving this summer, my goal is to stay in this house for as long as we possibly can since selling, buying, and moving are all such huge strains. For now, though, this seems like a good place for our family, even though we're in a more conservative and less diverse location than you might be. We appreciate the flexibility that the low cost of living gives us and the many activities that are available to us here. And maybe most importantly from my perspective, Mara's family is here. In part, that's a factor because at this point if Mara's mother has another child, we'll probably be asked to accept that baby from the hospital. If we left the state or something, we wouldn't have the option of keeping siblings together unless it got to the point of adoption. But Mara is also loving having relationships with her siblings and her dad, and I really don't want to take that away from her. She's going to grow up with more economic privilege than her siblings, but I don't want that to mean taking her out of their lives or making their lives inaccessible to her. Now, our city is one away from theirs and in fact one sister visits her dad, who lives in our city. It's a ten-minute drive to the complex where all her siblings live. Her mother probably lives in our city somewhere. Because there are no reasons to fear for her safety, I think this physical proximity will make openness much easier than it would be if we were trying to keep connections going from far away. For her sake, this seems like a good place for us all.

M de P: How and why did you start blogging? What role does in play in your life? When do you usually sit down to write (and how do you find the time – you are so busy!!)?

Thorn: I started blogging the day I called the state to sign us up for foster/adoption parenting classes in early summer 2008. I had been reading adoption blogs for years and wanted to be able to join the conversation, but I also wanted to be able to document our progress and process (and process and process) what I was thinking about without annoying Lee or any of my real-life friends by talking about it non-stop.

I do think of myself as a blogger, though it's not something I share with many of the people in my day-to-day life. I appreciate the connections and friendships I've made. I also know that I don't have time to write as much as I'd like to, that I'll probably never be one of those post-a-day bloggers. I write during my lunch break, generally, which is why I don't edit or always get my thoughts in line. I think for as long as I can, but then just write, publish, and try to get to the bathroom before I have to go back to reality. If I can't manage that, it has to be before Mara wakes up or after all the kids are asleep, because typing on the computer is so fascinating to little ones that they don't let me do it alone, which is not conducive to a productive thought flow!

M de P: How do the conversations usually go when you and Lee are called about potentially fostering a child or children? What kinds of things help you make that decision? How long are you given to think it over and how much information are you given? How often do you get a call?

Thorn: Once we had a large house and said we were open to placements, we definitely felt we were getting a lot of calls, maybe once a week or so. Sometimes it's easy to rule things out if it's a large sibling set or a teen boy with anger management problems (which we know is a trigger for Mara) or the multiple calls we got right before we left the country on vacation, which would not have been compatible with a new foster placement. We had our list of preferences (no boys older than Mara, black because we know so many foster homes disprefer black kids, school-aged, and from our community) and it was only the last item that actually applied to Val and Alex, but because we were the only open foster home in our city we went along with the placement anyway. In some ways, it's been a better match than we would have guessed, but I am definitely better with older kids than with having three within an eighteen-month age range, and Lee has had a hard time with the whole thing. I think in general, older and more verbal and independent kids might be a better fit with our two-working-moms lifestyle, but we'll see what happens in our next placement. And the more we've talked about it lately, the more I think there will be a next placement once we've had some time to rest and regroup and do the work we need to do to truly be prepared.

Mara was placed with us from another foster home that had put in their two weeks' notice on her and planned to close as a foster home because of medical and other problems the parents were having. I got the call in the morning, then waited to hear from Lee before saying we'd accept the placement even though I wanted to just do it unilaterally because I wanted this little girl so much! Within the next day or two, I'd talked to her foster mother on the phone and we'd made plans to meet. I think we visited with Mara either at our house or her foster home every other day during the week between our first meeting and the day we picked her up and brought her home for good. Her foster mother wanted a longer transition period, which is what would have been standard in returning a child to biological parents, but we pushed for a quicker transition because it was clear that Mara wasn't getting all her needs met there and because it was also apparent that she had figured out what was going on and that making the wait last longer was going to be hard on her.

With Val and Alex, Lee also got a call mid-morning, which seems to be when most of the calls come in. I told her my reservations but that I thought it sounded doable. I think by then she'd already called the workers back to say that yes, we were interested. By that time it was about noon, and we had to pick the kids up at 4:00, which meant we also needed to have two beds put together and various other things ready. That was stressful and not entirely successful, but I ran around and got just about everything done in time to go meet the kids. It would have been better if we'd truly had the room ready, but I'm sure then I'd have tried to go buy clothes or food or something, and still used the time in frenzied preparation.

M de P: What is the best/most important thing that you have learned from the children in your life?

Thorn: I'm having a hard time answering this one without resorting to cliches. I'm so grateful for every single child we've had in our hearts and in our home. Even LeeLee, who stayed with us for a weekend on respite and then was not welcome to stay on as a longer placement even though she said she wanted to, taught me that I can manage to be kind to someone who does nothing but lie to me. I've learned to have the empathy to respect the love that Rowan has for his abuser. I trusted Mara when she told us stories about her dad and now she's able to have some connection with the father she loved and loves so much. I've learned that it's my job to take on as much of the uncertainty and pain that I can, meaning that even when I was hurt when Rowan ran away from us and when Colton decided he didn't want to be adopted I was able to reach out to each of them with genuine messages of love and forgiveness that set the groundwork for the supportive but non-adoptive relationships we have now.

Right now, Val and Alex are teaching me about patience and love and knowing my limits. If we decide that they need to move into a long-term foster home elsewhere, it's going to break my heart and yet I'll know why I'm making that decision and do all that I can to help them understand it too. I know that they're thriving with the security, sleep, and consistency they get with us. I know I'm giving as much time, energy, love as I can to them and I see the impact that has. But I also know that I have to love and support Lee, find a way for us to have a balanced life as a family and a foster family, and I realize this will mean that Val and Alex can't stay with us more than a few more months. I don't know if I can handle their transition from our home with grace whenever it does happen, but I hope I'll be able to and I know I'll be able to be proud that I really did work with their parents as a support for the good parenting that they did and for my hopes of reunification.

Right now, Mara has been teaching me the joy of watching a person heal and grow. She is just an amazing girl and it's a privilege every day (even at bedtime, though that's when I notice it least) to be such an active part of her life. She is a marvel, and I couldn't have chosen a child who was a better fit for Lee and for me. She is tenacious, resilient, smart, creative, hilarious, and I can't wait to see another year with her and another and another! The most important thing I've learned from her and from all the kids that I actually am a good parent, whether despite or because of all the worrying I did about that before I had the chance to find out.

M de P: How do you imagine your family in ten years?

Thorn: This is a really hard one! I do think that we'll have more children, probably children plural, though Lee might disagree on that point. I think within a year, we'll start working toward placement of an older girl. I also think that realistically, the odds are good that Mara's mother will eventually have another child and I know that despite not going into this wanting a baby we may end up parenting a baby, whether temporarily or permanently. Having seen all the effects of a lack of early nurturing on Mara's life, the chance to take a baby with the beauty and spirit and potential she and all her siblings have and give that baby a good start on life, well, that's pretty appealing.

Lee is up for tenure soon, so I expect her job to be secure and that she'll find ways to keep loving it and finding it fulfilling. I've been thinking more and more about going back to school to get a counseling or social work degree so I can be more actively involved with these older kids I've found I connect with well. In ten years, Mara will be 14, one of those older kids, which probably means I'll be losing my patience with older kids and getting involved in mother-daughter arguments and misunderstandings! I hope by that time we'll have our house fixed up the way we want to, that it will be a warm and welcoming place. I hope that means my writing nook in the attic will be put together, which I really hope will happen in the next few months, and I hope that I'll be making good use of it. Mostly I hope our house is still full of love and laughter.

You can check out all of the other (hundreds!) of interview over at Production, Not Reproduction. Many thanks to Thorn once again for taking time out of an incredibly busy schedule to do this with me.

"secrets"

When we recently had our first post-placement meeting with little G's first family, not only were GM and GD there, also GM's parents and her younger sister. We had met GM's older sister prior to little G's birth, when we first met GM. The occasion of our first post-placement meeting was an annual picnic that our agency puts on for families in open adoptions. The plan was for everyone to come to our place first for some breakfast and then head down to the picnic together. In the end, GM, GD and the family got a bit lost (they rarely come in to the city), and we just met up in the park where the picnic was being held. Which I think ended up being for the best.

This was the first time meeting GM's parents. We had talked about them a fair amount leading up to little G's birth and placement. GM told us that her father hadn't wanted to look at our profile, our picture, and in general didn't want to talk about the adoption plan. GM's older sister also placed her first child for adoption through our agency, so we talked about that as well. The sense that I got from our conversations was that GM's parents are very supportive of the adoption plans, want to maintain a relationship with both of their grandchildren, but they don't want to talk a whole lot about it. My take is that they love their grandchildren and children fiercely, feel that adoption is the best plan for them, but don't really want to talk about the adoption or recognize it openly, if that makes sense.

When we arrived at the picnic there were hugs all around, including with GM's parents whom we were meeting for the first time. I went to GM's little sister, gave her a hug and immediately asked her if she had met little G at the hospital or if this was the first time seeing him. She gave me a bit of a blank stare. But she's a 12-year old girl who showed a lot of interested in her iPod, so I didn't think much of it. Shortly thereafter, however, GM's parents reminded GM (and us) that little sis "doesn't know". Hm. In other words, GM's parents didn't want us to let on that little G is GM's son, that we are his adoptive parents, all while we are at an open adoption picnic, sponsored by an adoption agency, with maybe 100 other people in open adoptions. Okay.

I turned to GM and asked, "What does she [little sis] think we are doing here?" GM just kind of rolled her eyes and shrugged her shoulders.

My feeling is that little sis knows exactly who we are, what is going on, who little G is, etc... But apparently it isn't something discussed or recognized. I have a real serious problem with secrets. Hubs' family is pretty big on secrets and in my own family we have our fair share. And I hate it. As a parent in an open adoption, I take a hard stance that there will be no secrets in our family. And now I find myself in this strange situation where who little G is and who we are are officially "secrets" to people with whom we plan to have an ongoing relationship. I'm not sure how to navigate this. We are going to visit GM, GD and the whole family at their house in two weeks. What will little sis think of that visit? I mean, obviously she gets it, but we are supposed to pretend that she doesn't.

I should say that GM's parents are extremely warm people, who were very affectionate with us and with little G. They had no problem discussing the whole situation quite openly with us (we spoke in Spanish, which little sis apparently doesn't understand), but if the word adoption (adopción) was mentioned, they would shush us. It's all a bit weird and will take some getting used to for me.

opening...

I haven't written much about our developing relationship with our little guy's first parents and extended family so far. We've had one visit with both parents and extended family on mom's side and we are set to go for another visit in just a few weeks. In between there has been lots of texting, sending of photos via text, a phone call and skyping once. So far, I have to say, the relationship has been very easy. I have always felt comfortable during all of our interactions, and, especially in the case of little guy's first mom, it seems to be a mutual sense of comfort and ease.

Was I even close to this mature when I was her age? I can't imagine that I was. At the risk of falling into the fantasy trap of idolizing our children's first parents, I really have been nothing but impressed with these two people, as well as the extended family that we have met so far. Little guy's first dad is so incredibly loving and sweet toward little guy as well as big sis every time we are together. There are some issues with secrecy that I am trying to wrap my head around, but that I will save for another post.

not for sale

Yesterday we all went to a friend's apartment/art studio where she and her husband were showing their art as part of an open house. We stayed quite a bit and people came in and out to see the art. My three year old daughter was running about, pretending to skate, and reminding people to "look at these paintings!". Baby boy was hanging out with us on the couch. A couple came in and was looking around the apartment. On their way out, one of them says to us, "this is your baby?" yes. "And her, too?" Yes. "Oh, you bought her?"

WTF?

Okay, the worst part of this whole exchange, for me, is that neither my husband or I responded. I was dumbfounded and concerned that my daughter may have heard him. Thankfully, I *think* she was too wrapped up in playing/jumping to notice. My husband really didn't understand what he had said, as English is his second language and the guy saying these things was a mumbling type in any case.

But all of this doesn't erase the fact that neither one of us addressed it. I feel ashamed to even write this. I do write it because it's a fact of our family, and I really need to think of what to say before this happens again so I make sure it doesn't go unaddressed again. We've been sick about it since it happened yesterday afternoon. My husband feels horrible that he didn't understand what he had said. What will I say next time? Children placed for adoption are not for sale? No human being can be bought or sold? Still even now I'm not sure what would be the best response.

Looking back

The other day my husband was stopped on the street by a couple who had recognized him from our picture on our agency's "waiting families" web page. He really should work in television because people never, ever, forget his face. The couple had been doing some research into becoming adoptive parents, and have settled on our agency. They are just barely starting the process. The also happen to live next door! What are the chances in this city of millions? Anyway, we had them over for a chat to tell them about our experience, see if they had questions, etc...

Meeting with this couple really brought me back to when we were first starting this journey, and the emotions that I felt at that time. It was a vulnerable time for me and I haven't really thought much about those feelings since I was a just-starting-out mom. I remember the anxiety about telling people that we were starting the process, and the defensiveness I felt then. I sent out an email that basically outlined how people should and should not respond to us (i.e., don't tell me about Lifetime movies, don't ask if we are scared that the baby's parents will come knocking on our door to demand the child back, etc.) I shared our infertility experiences and our adoption process with very few people at that time. At this point, I look for any opportunity to share our adoption experience! (see above).

In any case, it made me really feel for this couple as well as the person I was back then. It made me want to throw my arms around them and around my former self and say it's all okay, it gets a lot better, and you will have the family you want one day. Instead I offered both of these future parents a glass of wine, our stories, an open invitation to talk to us whenever they wanted to, and a hug when they left.