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.