Sugar coating
I know what’s been frustrating me. I feel like I’m giving an incomplete picture and only talking up how great the visit was. And it was great but it was also hard.
As I mentioned in the entry below, not everyone was supportive of J’s decision to place her baby for adoption. I knew this heading out there and it made me nervous. Would this mean that I would end up in the middle of a family fight? Would they hate me for adopting Madison? J was sure everyone would be nice to me but she was worried that I would find her family too anxious to get a hold of Madison.
I quizzed J on the way to the airport. Were there any off-limit topics? Politics? Sports? Was there a public figure her father hated? A food he didn’t like? What if a cuss-word slipped out — big deal or non-issue?
I can only imagine what they were going through on their end.
This very careful feeling didn’t let up for the whole trip, which is one reason J and I got closer. She was the only person I knew there and I was the only person who knew her as [insert nickname here] there. So we did some serious bonding between family events.
(You need to understand that J and I talk on the phone at least every two weeks and she comes over or we go over there at least once a month so we do know each other fairly well. It would have been harder had we not.)
Here’s something weird: I’m only a few years younger than J’s dad. Ok, more than a few but not a lot. We wouldn’t have gone to high school together, say, but he and Brett could have. I’ve noticed that while you’re parenting, the ages of your kids has more to do with parent-parent bonding than does your age so in parent years, he was much older. I saw him as much older but that might have more to do with the way J and I were giggling in the backseat whenever he was driving.
One reason J wants him to come out here is that next time she wants us both on our own turf. I wonder how that will make things different?
Oh and I have to apologize if all of this trip talk gets boring. I use my blog as my journal these days, too, so you’re stuck with whatever I’m obsessing on at the moment. That’s another reason I welcome questions. For one, your questions give me new avenues for my thoughts but also then I know if I’m leaving something out that might be important someday when I’m rereading.
For me dealing with the birthfamily is sometimes like dealing with in-laws. There are wonderful things, and there are trying things. I have never been with them for days on end like you have, since Mallory’s birthfamily either lives here, or visits us.
I think you will probably have to write about it a ton in order to process it. I’m still thinking, writing, contemplating it, all these years later. Different issues spring up at different times. Plus we have no real role models in our daily lives, so we have more to figure out. There is no one to emulate, nothing we just observe growing up about how open adoption is done.
I don’t think you’re blogging about this too much–I am fascinated by it. I haven’t been commenting, because this is so far out of the realm of my experience that I don’t feel qualified to, but I’m running over here every time I see you have a new post on my bloglines feedroll.
I want to phrase this delicately, because I don’t want you to see it as coming off as critical of you, or J, or Madison…It’s just that I’m interested in why you think Madison still won’t go to J, especially since, as you point out above, she’s hardly a stranger. Do you think Madison “remembers” her in some way and doesn’t know how to deal with the emotions that memory brings up? Is it something much more basic like a personality conflict? Or am I just reading way, way, way too much into this?
It made me think because it brought back to mind the conversation I often have about how my kids, who see their grandparents, cousins, and certain aunts and uncles so very infrequently, and yet have this bizarre, almost immediate bond with them. I’ve never quite understood how they know that they’re ‘related’ and just fall in with one another so quickly. It’s especially striking with regards to my young son, whose social skills are generally so bad that he’s being evaluated for developmental delays.
In any case, I was wondering if you had any thoughts on this. And no, I won’t mind at all if you don’t want to answer this, so long as you understand it’s asked out of simple intellectual curiosity.
Oh, never stop talking about what’s going on with you! I love every little detail.