Are you in the open adoption triad? How do you stay in touch with your birth family / adoptive family?
I recently created a blog for our birth family to read. Little H has a big birth family that we keep in touch with. There's the birth mother and father, her sister and mother and his two grown children. H has a big fan club and might be the most loved kid alive. For the first few months, I was emailing them (one big group email). But I thought it would be nicer for them to have a running script of his life and the pictures to go along with it. So I created a blog for them. It's not any easier or harder for me than sending an email. But it's more soothing for me, I think. Something about the routine calms me. And I think he'll get a kick out of reading it when he's older.
Side note: it's gotten me thinking about creating an email for W and emailing him now so Future W can read emails from his momma.
If you're in the adoption triad somewhere, I'd love to hear how you correspond with the other parties.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
What if...
The husband and I were chatting recently about how nice it is to have two little ones. And how much fun they're going to have together. We feel like our family is complete. Sure, in the beginning, we talked about having three kids. But "having" three kids isn't as easy as we first considered. "Having" another kid for me would mean lots of bed rest and probable pre-eclampsia and prematurity et cetera. And another adoption would just be financially undo-able in the near future. We'll be paying off our adoption loans at the end of this year and it seems that in doing so, we'll be closing the book on familial expansion. And that's totally cool with us. We're happy and content with our perfect little boys.
But then I posed a hypothetical question that really got our minds reeling. What if H's birth mother were to become pregnant again? We believe that she would want to create an adoption plan for any future pregnancies. Would she and the birth father call our agency again? Would they want to keep the siblings together? God, I hope they would! But how would we come up with the means, financially, to tackle that situation? Would our agency be able to help us out in some way? Would they let something like a big, fat, lack of placement fee come between biological siblings? Can our house hold another child? Would our agency overlook the every-child-needs-their-own-bedroom rule? Could we afford another baby? Would having another baby put me over the sleep deprivation threshold (Little H is still waking up for a bottle in the night... at almost 9 months old. We joke that he'll still be waking up at 14 for a ham sandwich)? Questions, questions, questions. For every minute we let this hypothetical float above us, forty seven more questions and worries popped into our heads. I had to shake myself (read: shake myself actually means drink three glasses of wine) out of my tizzy, remind tizzy-me that it was just a hypothetical question and get a grip.
We talked about it a bit more and I think we decided (I say "think" because, as I said earlier, I drank quite a bit) that of course we'd joyously welcome any more babies into our home and we'd worry about the details later. But oye vey did I get myself worked up over it.
Deep in the recesses of my crazy brain, there's a little voice constantly reminding me of that big "what if." Sometimes it's crazy-eyed pulling it's hair out like a Cathy comic, but sometimes it's smiling and shopping for little dresses and tutus. I'm just sayin...
But then I posed a hypothetical question that really got our minds reeling. What if H's birth mother were to become pregnant again? We believe that she would want to create an adoption plan for any future pregnancies. Would she and the birth father call our agency again? Would they want to keep the siblings together? God, I hope they would! But how would we come up with the means, financially, to tackle that situation? Would our agency be able to help us out in some way? Would they let something like a big, fat, lack of placement fee come between biological siblings? Can our house hold another child? Would our agency overlook the every-child-needs-their-own-bedroom rule? Could we afford another baby? Would having another baby put me over the sleep deprivation threshold (Little H is still waking up for a bottle in the night... at almost 9 months old. We joke that he'll still be waking up at 14 for a ham sandwich)? Questions, questions, questions. For every minute we let this hypothetical float above us, forty seven more questions and worries popped into our heads. I had to shake myself (read: shake myself actually means drink three glasses of wine) out of my tizzy, remind tizzy-me that it was just a hypothetical question and get a grip.
We talked about it a bit more and I think we decided (I say "think" because, as I said earlier, I drank quite a bit) that of course we'd joyously welcome any more babies into our home and we'd worry about the details later. But oye vey did I get myself worked up over it.
Deep in the recesses of my crazy brain, there's a little voice constantly reminding me of that big "what if." Sometimes it's crazy-eyed pulling it's hair out like a Cathy comic, but sometimes it's smiling and shopping for little dresses and tutus. I'm just sayin...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)