Magicpointeshoe’s comment below (”Most
Magicpointeshoe’s comment below (”Most of your adoption story has been about fitting J into your lives, and this was pretty much about you fitting into your adoptive mama role within the birthfamily.”) got me thinking. (She always gets me thinking! Darn her!)
One odd part about being there was that only one person (not a family member) who asked me anything about myself. No one asked me what I did for a living or anything about Noah or Brett — just this one person and her role in the family event was a sticky one — more sticky than mine for reasons I can’t get into here. I didn’t like her much but when she asked me questions about myself, I realized that she was the first person to do that. I very much felt that my only purpose there was as Madison’s escort but that was totally ok with me.
Since one of the things that Magicpointeshoe has helped me understand is that the experiences of adoptive moms and birth moms often mirror each other, this made me think about how in some adoptions, the birth mother is only seen as the woman who gave birth to the child the family now parents. I think there’s a parallel to how adoptive parents can be seen by birth families.
There was one member of J’s family who was (and is) against the adoption. This person very recently asked J if she could undo her decision and get Madison back; this is one of the people I met this past weekend. I knew this going into the visit and I figured that I didn’t need to let it impact my feelings about going out there. I was glad that my concerns about dealing with outright hostility were unfounded but on the other hand, my fantasies of an emotional turn-around didn’t play out either.
For this person — and for others, I guess — I am both Madison’s mother and not her mother. By which I mean, it may be that this person will always see me as … not an impostor but not entirely valid either.
J and I have gotten way past these limited roles in our personal relationship but in our respective extended families, there is still a struggle to understand how that works. And in my family, there is much less vulnerability because legally there is no question — Madison belongs to us. It’s easier for us to be generous and even so, it’s still a challenge as everyone — not just Brett and me — learns how to do an open adoption.
I can’t speak for anyone in either family (my own or J’s) so I’m just surmising and this is all from my own point of view.
There are a lot of careful social niceties that go with an open adoption but there is a lot of unsaid, roiling emotion, too. I am not privy to much of the roiling emotion on J’s side of the family nor should I be. The most I ask for myself (and am fortunate enough to receive) is respect and courtesy.
In some ways, it really doesn’t matter how I fit — or don’t fit — into Madison’s birth family. I strongly feel that my necessary role is to facilitate some kind of relationship until Madison is old enough to manage one — if she desires — for herself. In my mind, this means pictures and updates as long as they are open to them with visits as time/money/emotions allow. It also means understanding that because of the legal weight of my role, I am an all powerful gatekeeper and so it is easier for me to step back than to ask them to always step forward.
Like this pork chop deal. I was telling J on the flight back that had someone offered Noah a pork chop at that age, I would have flung my body across the plate to keep it from him. We were talking about this in the context of my past insanity as a mother and I meant to demonstrate that I’d loosened up this second time around. But what J said, shrewdly, was this, “Well, why didn’t you stop them then? Isn’t she every bit your child as much as Noah?”
And so I explained to her that in my mind, any harm that would come from eating a pork chop was nothing compared to the harm I would have done had I not let that bonding moment happen. (This was something I would not have understood with Noah — ask my mother-in-law.)
One of my worries before the visit was knowing that I’m a tad controlling when it comes to my kids — media, food, etc. — and wondering how I would balance this with my conviction that Madison needs and deserves a relationship with her extended birth family. God, who has a sense of humor, heard me worrying up in my head specifically about pork. Seriously. “What if they offer her some bacon?” I fretted. “What will I do?” And then they went and served pork chops. But what happened is that I saw Madison in the arms of someone who was loving her and wanting to reach out to her. Then I understood that even a pork chop can be an act of spiritual communion.
Had it been, say, a family tradition that babies ride on the hood of cars or play with loaded guns, that would have been an easy no but pork chops? Hey, what’s a pork chop in the grand scheme of things? Even talking about this much makes it a bigger deal than it was. Understand that I mean that pork chop to be symbolic — I’m trying to talk about how my role is to facilitate and to balance our everyday parenting values with our broader values about love and compassion.
I guess as I’m wandering around this entry thinking out loud that I’m realizing how accepting I am of my careful, outsider role in this. I feel a lot of the compassion for the family members who are grieving; I am very grateful for their welcome. They don’t have to like me or even care about me. I hope they do but it’s not necessary. We barely know each other now and it’s a little early to say whether or not it would be possible to have a relationship that moves beyond our shared commitment to Madison’s well-being anyway so I haven’t really worried about it.
We’ve made it past this first hurdle and no matter what happens in the future (since things will surely change as their family continues to expand and more grandchildren come into the world), we had this visit. And we have the pictures to prove it.
=o) Now that’s what you were shifting around delicately in all of those posts! There was a lot of references of wallflower tendancies of letting them interact without you invading, and there also seemed to be the “how do these adoptive mom shoes fit?” when surrounded by birthfamily. Thanks for pondering what it meant, it makes for a much more rich story telling of what had happened!
I think the comparison someone made with in-laws is apt. Of course it’s not that same, by any means, but I do find myself having some of these same feelings about Liam interacting with my in-laws, and even, to a lesser extent, my own family.
It’s really important to me that he has a strong sense of connction with his extended family, especially because he doesn’t have any cousin’s of his own age (the closest one at this point is about 25 years older than him, although my sister is working on producing one now). So I find myself desperately biting my tongue, trying not to be overprotective/controlling, on an almost weekly basis with some grandparents.
Of course, one of the big differences is that he is going to see most of them much more often than Madison will see J’s family, so of course I don’t bite my tongue all the time…
Is Madison the only grandchild in J’s family? (You know, the member of that generation–I’m not sure how else to phrase that question.)
i stumbled into here via lj and am just tickled too death to see someone talking about the hard questions/issues in adoptions with such eloquence.
We adopted our daughter through foster care and like the issues with your adoption and your friend who adopted from china you mentioned below, there is a lot of overlap but also some different tweaks along the way.
Take care and good luck, I’ll be back to read more.