Reflecting: A Strange Paradox

My parents married when they were 21 years old and my mother got pregnant with me on their honeymoon. When I was born, I had four grandparents and seven great-grandparents, all of whom lived nearby and were a big part of my life. Two more girls followed -- one three years later, and one seven years later -- and outward appearances showed a perfect little family. But the inside story was much different. My mother was depressed. When she wasn't angry at me or my sisters, she was by herself in her room with the door closed. My father was sweet to us but passive aggressive toward my mother, and the two of them fought constantly. I often turned up my music to drown out the yelling. I was relieved when my father finally left my mother when I was 16 years old. I wanted to escape, too.

What I didn't realize at the time was that my father had found another family to join, and there wasn't room in that family for me. My parents were only in their late 30s at the time, and each decided to start a new life. My sisters and I couldn't find a place in either one. Our large extended family split in half -- there was anger and resentment on both sides -- and the people who I always believed loved each other suddenly hated each other, and they let me know about it. I couldn't spent time with either side of the family without someone trying to convince me that the other parent was a monster. I don't think my brain knew how to process this sudden rip in my world, so I turned to food to get me through it. As long as I was eating, I wasn't feeling. It wasn't until my mid-20s when I finally dealt with my grief and began the process of forgiving my parents for what I now see as their own shortcomings. The little me thought it was all about me. The grown-up me learned it was all about them. I stopped turning to food for comfort. I found healthy ways to deal with stress.

I was in my early 30s when I first learned about our major fertility problem and first started exploring adoption. Open adoption wasn't as widespread as it is today, but it was becoming more and more the norm. When I first heard about open adoption, I was brought back to my own childhood. I imagined an adopted child that would feel torn between two families, each family resenting the other, each family looking for more loyalty, each family finding new reasons to feel betrayed. That was my life, and there was no way I was going to put a child through that. No way at all.

Then, when I was 38, I unexpectedly found myself in an open adoption a week after Lily was born and placed with us. That probably sounds weird, but the circumstances that led to our adoption and then our open adoption were unusual and unexpected. At the beginning, the 16-year-old inside of was begging me to stop. Don't do it. We can't go through this again. But I was a different person with more resources, more experience, more insight, more determination. I would find a way to make this work. When I couldn't find anyone in my real life to give me guidance, I turned to the Internet and found the people I had been looking for. Heather at Production Not Reproduction wrote about the concept of family integration -- the idea that birth families and adoptive families could become intertwined, a different but equally important kind of extended family. I believed I could make that work, and I started at it. We're two and a half years into the journey, and while it hasn't been easy, it's been the most rewarding experience of my life. It's a work in progress, but we do make progress, and I see it.

We saw Fiona and Nate, Lily's first parents, last Saturday. They came to our house for a visit, and I'd have to say it was our best visit yet. It was comfortable and fun. We played, we ate, we talked about silly things and important things. We found more areas we have in common. We watched Lily in amazement. We listened to her contagious laugh. We watched Ferb and Lily go from playing to fighting to playing again. It felt like family, only better. The bond I feel with Fiona and Nate - in some ways - is even stronger than the bond I feel with my immediate family. Their hugs and the things they said made me believe that their love for me is real, too.  I was filled with happiness when they left.

A few days later, I found one of my all-time favorite movies on HBO -- "Crimes and Misdemeanors." It's a story of questions about morality with no finite answers. Interspersed throughout the movie are a series of interviews with a fictitious professor who is based on a real person, and something he said really caught my attention. I was able to find the exact quote online:

“You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact that when we fall in love we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand we ask of our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted on us. So that love contains in it a contradiction, the attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past.”

I've written before about my intense desire to keep our adoption open and healthy. I believe that is what will make Lily feel most whole and complete. However, after hearing this, I started to wonder -- is my desire to sew together so tightly Lily's adoptive family and birth family also an effort to undo the hurt I felt as a child?

I know I want the best for Lily. I know I would walk across hot coals for her. I know my love for Fiona and Nate is real. And I know that - like many parents - I don't want to repeat the mistakes my parents made. I want to protect Lily from the pain that I felt as a child. But we are the sum of our experiences, and perhaps I also need to make sure I don't project my own past into the situation. It's different, and I need to remember that.

Attachment

In the adoption world, attachment usually refers to the attachment between a child and a parent, but I'm actually thinking today about my attachment to Fiona and Nate, my daughter's first parents. Early on, I was fairly open with my friends and family about how much I cared about Fiona and Nate. My feelings were met with resistance, and comments I received ranged from "don't let them get too close" to "everyone needs to move on." I pushed back when I got those kinds of comments, but I also stopped talking about Fiona and Nate as much as I had at the beginning. When I do talk about them now, people know better than to try to convince me my relationship with them is wrong; instead, I receive nods and lots of "uh-huh"s.

The truth is, I think about Fiona and Nate every day. I worry about them. I wonder how they're doing. I have an intense need -- and it is my own need -- to know they are okay. They are struggling right now, and I really want to help them. But there's no real way for me to help them. I can continue to show them my love, but somehow that falls short in my mind. Theoretically, there may be ways I could help them, but when I think intellectually and not emotionally, I know that kind of helping wouldn't be appropriate or good for any of us in the long run. So I just stew in my head.

I've come to understand that until someone relinquishes their child to you, there's just no way to understand the bond that can exist between a birth parent and an adoptive parent. I have two younger sisters who I feel very maternal toward, and if I had to compare the way I feel toward Fiona and Nate, it would be closest to the way I feel about my younger sisters with a dash of the way I feel about my kids. It's a complicated feeling that even I don't fully understand despite my constant reflection on it.

I've read blog comments that theorize that sometimes adoptive parents are more "comfortable" if the first parents maintain an unstable life that would make it difficult for them to raise a child. That, the theory continues, would further validate the need for the adoption and therefore validate the need for the adoptive parents. When I read that, I wondered if in some deep part of my subconscious I felt that way. But as I watch Fiona and Nate struggle and feel helpless in helping them, I'm pretty sure that I receive no reassurance from their instability. It just makes me sad and frustrated.

G doesn't have the same attachment to Fiona and Nate as I do. He likes them, he's very friendly with them when we all get together, but I don't think they really cross his mind unless I bring them up -- which I don't do very often even though I'm thinking about them constantly. Part of that is G's personality. He's very social and loves being around family and friends, but he rarely initiates plans or picks up the phone to call anyone.

I do wonder if I will ever "move on" - meaning I wonder if there will be a time when I don't think about them constantly. Sometimes, I worry that my attachment to them is unhealthy, and that it could impact Lily as she gets older. Will she worry about them too? Will she worry about me worrying about them? Just more for me to worry about, I suppose.

Last Night

Last night Ferb and Lily were playing together, basically chasing each other around the house and laughing. When they stopped, Ferb said this: "Even though Lily was adopted, when I look at her, it's like looking in the mirror."

G and I were stunned. How does Ferb come up with these things? I can't quite figure it out, but I'm not going to complain. We are two very lucky parents.

Open Adoption Roundtable #32

The Open Adoption Roundtable is a series of occasional writing prompts about open adoption. It's designed to showcase of the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community.

Open Adoption Roundtable #32: Share a holiday memory that involves open adoption.

This will be Lily's third Christmas, and our third Christmas in an open adoption. While we never created a formal open adoption plan with Fiona and Nate, we did at some point agree that we always wanted to get together on or around Lily's birthday and on or around Christmas. Our first visit outside of the adoption agency was in December 2009 when Lily was around six months old. I wrote about that visit and how Ferb's conversation with Nate was a turning point in our open adoption.

There's another holiday memory that stands out to me, too. It was last Christmas; Fiona and Nate came over to our house a few days after Christmas. We exchanged gifts (as we had the year before), only this year Fiona and Nate also brought gifts for Ferb, which I thought was incredibly sweet. Ferb LOVES animals, and Fiona and Nate got him two animal-themed gifts, including a Smithsonian animal book that became Ferb's absolute favorite. He went through a phase where he refused to leave the house without the book -- and it's a BIG book!

But what really stands out about this visit was one of the gifts they gave to Lily. It was a pink, heart-shaped jewelry box, and when you open it up, it plays music and a little ballerina figure spins around inside. I remember when Lily opened the box. The music was kind of melancholy, so I got a little choked up as soon as I heard it. Lily was really mesmerized by it, and we all sat in silence watching her watch the ballerina. While we were all looking at Lily, Fiona said that she had one just like it when she was a little girl. And suddenly I could picture little girl Fiona looking at her own ballerina twirl around inside the pink, heart-shaped jewelry box. Tears welled up in my eyes, but I didn't let them come out. Now, I'm not feeling quite as strong.