Adoption Day
Or maybe it’s just this: our younger two children will always and forever have a road not taken. And that’s confusing.
Last week, our family of six ate hotdogs and cupcakes on a blanket in front of the fire to mark a special occasion.
“Happy Adoption Anniversary TO us,” we sang. “Happy Adoption Anniversary TOOOO UUUUUS!”
Happy indeed: we squeezed the unfamiliar syllables into the old, familiar tune while the kids boogied. It will always be happy. And it will always be sad.
Imposter Syndrome is a real part of parenting. Does everyone else know what they’re doing? It seems like everyone else knows what they’re doing. We must be messing up so hard for our kids to scream all the time. Do other parents’ kids scream all the time? Or even close to this amount of time? It seems like way too much screaming and my husband and I suspect it’s all our fault and we read the wrong parenting books and let them have too much screen time and didn’t sing the alphabet enough times and dressed them in too many secondhand clothes and now they are doomed to be wild things For. Ev. Er.
I’m pretty good at telling Imposter Syndrome to take a hike. I’ve named it! It comes in handy, hearing Larry’s needling voice and saying “Shuttup, Larry.” Highly recommend if you, like me, are mildly insane.
But when it comes to parenting through adoption, Larry has sneakier weapons.
Are you giving them the life they deserve?
[Larry pauses to stare into my soul]
Because if not, what have you done?
I didn’t write much about Adoption Day when it happened. In one way, it felt too Big and Nuanced, and Emotionally Important. And in another, it felt so small as to not be worth writing about. After all, they’d already been our kids for years.
I could write – I want to write – about what it took to get there. And I’ve tried, here and there. But it’s still so close: so Big, and Nuanced, and Emotionally Important. What is It even? The experience of foster care, with the cast of characters involved? The court dates that repeatedly raised and dashed our hopes? The quiet persistent fear that these kids we loved would be taken away? Or simply the day-to-day challenge of raising a third and then a fourth newborn into toddlers?
Or maybe it’s just this: our younger two children will always and forever have a road not taken. And that’s confusing.
As Adoption Day neared last year, our older kids buzzed with excitement. There would be cake! They could dress in fancy clothes! But they also understood the complexity better than many adults who congratulated us with unfettered happiness. It was happy, of course. But it was also deeply sad.
“I have a question…” one or the other of our older two would yelp approximately 9,422 times each day, and we would brace for one of three things:
A question about when and how we would die
A request to Google What type of scales did dinosaurs have?
An exploration of the subtleties of adoption
“Will their other parents be at Adoption Day?”
“Will they ever go back with their other parents?”
“Will their other parents be sad that they're going to be our babies?”
No.
No.
Yes, probably.
Will they be sad that they’re your babies? Larry might fast-follow.
Shuttup, Larry.
We’ve been through a lot together in the one year since Adoption Day. Larry still sounds off on the regular. We don’t read to them enough (hello, birth order), we don’t spend enough one-on-one time with them (hello, four kids), we don’t appreciate the little things (hello, the essential paradox of parenting). Seriously though, Larry, STFU.
Because look what they do have: a brother and sister who will forever love and celebrate them, while somehow, at their tiny ages, holding space for the loss inherent in adoption.
There will always be more we should do to be worthy of these kids. They will always have a right to grief. We’ll always be grateful they came to us.
We hope they will, too.
