I forgot to tell you we came home one night last week to a message from Ray saying that he wanted to wish Puppy a happy birthday. Just to close the birth parent birthday loop that I thought was closed but was apparently half-dangling.
It was late, so Todd called him back on another evening. Ray and Puppy had one of those five-sentence conversations before Puppy decided he was done, which is so typical of his phone skills right now. Very charmed by the idea of talking on the phone, not so great with the execution.
My reaction was...neutral, I guess? Relieved a call eventually come, but not so much that it erased my disappointment from two weeks ago. All in all it was rather anti-climatic. But, really, my reaction is quite beside the point. What matters is what kind of building blocks Ray is laying down in his relationship with Puppy right now, and this was one of those. Puppy has been planning his fifth and sixth birthdays since pretty much the minute after this year's party ended. So that idea that someone was calling about the birthday that just went by was a little "huh?" for him. But he bounced up the stairs with with a goofy grin when I asked if he wanted to talk to Ray. And surely that is worth something.
5 comments:
Slightly off subject...we had to make it a rule that children weren't allowed to discuss upcoming birthdays until a month before said birthday. This grew out of their starting planning next day for their next birthday, a mere 364 days away! Drove me insane.
It's def worth something! :)
This must be so hard for you, given that your children's birth parents are generally happy, nice people I gather, that you feel are safe around your children and have never done anything to hurt your children...
(sorry if that is a completely patronising classification!)
We're hopefully adopting a US domestic infant but with the environment here being that most children are removed from their birth parents not by choice and most children would therefore have very, very low expectations of their birth parents - and adoptive parents would have no reason to give their children any expectations, in fact it would be safer, well, not to make the birth parents sound "awful" but at least to tell children their birth parents don't really KNOW how to parent.
I am curious how you might handle this with your children when you don't really believe their birth parents are completely unable to parent, and therefore (at least in a child's view) should meet some of the standards children expect from adults (presents, reliability) but perhaps don't meet those?
(by "this" of course I mean the whole situation, not the coming through with the phone call now...)
@DrSpouse - That's a really good question. I think it deserves a post of its own, though.
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