Evil Mommy asks
It’s been anticlimactic for us, so usually we don’t celebrate it. … Do you celebrate finalization/adoption day?
No, we don’t. I can’t even remember what month it was except that I know it was six months after she arrived so I guess it was Septemberish? I’d have to look it up in my blog.
The only day we celebrate is Madison’s birthday. Placement day came so soon after (72 hours) and also it was such a complicated sad/happy day. For us, so far, it’s been a day where Brett and I give solemn thanks but I don’t know what it will be to Madison as she grows. The adoption itself, it definitely seemed anticlimactic. I can see how it would be different if we had been doing foster-to-adopt and it seemed less certain but having a judge formally acknowledge our relationship was … it was just what it was.
There are two things I really remember about it:
1. Noah forgot to take off his baseball cap (and we forgot he was wearing it because he pretty much was always wearing it then) and the judge admonished him.
2. The judge was very nice but part of the ceremony was this whole thing about how Madison’s birth family had no right to her and that we were fully responsible and that we had no obligation to them from here on out. I know it was to reiterate that we couldn’t “give her back” but it bothered both of us (Brett and me). I said, “But we have a moral obligation and they have a moral right to her…”
3. He also asked if we liked her or something similar. Again, I get why and what he was doing but yuck.
Anyway, we don’t celebrate adoption day but I get why people do.
Apple’s was in June, she was six months old. My whole family went out to dinner that night to celebrate. It’s the only day we have recognized it. I was happy, but the paper didn’t make her my daughter. Loving her did. We celebrate her birthday.
We never did anything to recognize the day we went to court for Scruffy. We celebrate his birth. Just this weekend I found a picture of us taken the day before we took custody of him. The last day we were a family of five. The next day was very traumatic and the realization that we were going to become his parents had a great deal of sorrow tied to it. There is no way I would ever celebrate a day that basically ripped my child’s life apart, as well as our lives and the lives of his first parents. It started in such a sad place, though it has ended well for all of us, there is just no way I want to comemorate that time. His birth was happy, for all of us. That’s the day we celebrate him.
I didn’t even KNOW when my adoption day was, until I was 20 and started searching, and asked my mother for documents around my adoption. I just celebrated my birthday. I think when I was growing up an adoption day would have been upsetting, just another reminder of how different I was.
But my daughter’s best friend has an annual Adoption Day party, I think which is the anniversary of the day that she met her adoptive mother, and she says she feels she is lucky to have yet another reason to celebrate, have a special dinner, etc. So, I dunno.
We just do the birthday. I have the actual events of placement and court date and final papers in the mail (separate from court in our state) all scrapbooked in her book, complete with photocopies of relevant documents and photos of us all being happy. But an American kid growing up middle class in the 21st century just needs one “birthday” in my humble opinion. And celebrating placement seems kind of grim and insensitive to her first family.
We think of it and all, when it happens, but just one “special Nat day” on her birthday.
Thanks for the link, Dawn!
That seems odd that the judge would mention Madison’s first family in that way. A bit rude, too. I don’t think our judge said anything at all about Alena’s birthparents - just about our responsibilities and obligations to our baby.
Yuk that judge is so ignorant and well ….lacking in basic human decency. Thank God you don’t use that Gotcha word, it’s so triumphant and well….. lacking in basic human decency…
I missed this post originally.
We didn’t celebrate it this year, because it was the day after my surgery, and there’s no way I was going to let my daughter see me all tubed up. In previous years, we’ve celebrated, but kept it small–no big gifts, and we tried to keep the grandparents from giving anything. The first year, we got together with the other family who went to Georgia with us, and let the kids play.
We talk about her adoption casually, when it comes up, but for me this is a day to talk about it a little more intentionally, just like her birthday is a day to talk a little more intentionally about her birthmom. We don’t have a party; we might go out to dinner, or let her pick what we’re going to have, but we do that some days anyway.
When we’re older, we’ll definitely go with the flow with regard to how she’s reacting. The adoption day celebrations in Digging to America, carried on even when at least one of the kids in question very clearly didn’t want to have anything to do with it, made me kind of ill.
We celebrate the day that we arrived home, rather than the day that we met, the day her adoption was made official, or the day we took custody of her. Between being stuck in Georgia longer than expected due to visa problems and having a paperwork snafu in Moscow–they wanted a particular wording, and it wasn’t there–there were times when I thought we might not make it home. So I can’t let the anniversary of the day we got home pass unremarked, even if I only mention it to myself.
Oh, and the judge? Pretty disgusting.