My Boy, Just Shy of Three

Sometime in the last year, Puppy stretched into a long, skinny boy. The lack of diaper only accentuates it. I put a new pair of 3T pants on him, adjustable waist pulled tight, and they fell to his ankles. He eats quite a bit but seems to burn it right off, constantly running and moving and jumping.

***

"Do you want to play princess, Mama?" he asks.

"Sure." The answer is always, "Yes."

He climbs behind me on the chair and begins piling my hair on top of my head, pushing and twirling it into a mess of knots.

"You're a princess! You're a princess, Mama!"

He holds up a ruler and pretend to measure the height of the 'do. "How tall is it? Is it seven, Mama?"

"Sure, why not?" I have yet to figure out where this game came from.

"Give me 52 pennies. You're a princess!"

***

After Firefly came home, he started to ask to be carried more, which we expected. He holds his arms up toward us, opening and closing his hands like little lobster claws. He shorthands his request to be picked up: "Pick me! Pick me, please," making me feel like he's pleading for us to choose him over his sister.

***

He is big into puzzles right now, the 20-40 piece ones with the oversized pieces. He sits surrounded by pieces on the floor, methodically matching pictures together. When finished, he wants to undo it right away so he can reform it again. As a kid, I never wanted to take them apart once I'd finished. I like how how easily he returns to the beginning.

***

Someone once told me that each stage in your child's life is the best. You think it can't get any better than it is, and then it does. I was skeptical when I first heard it and still doubt it sometimes. How could I enjoy this little person any more than I do right now? Then the next stage comes and brings some novel bit of independence or ability. The wonderful things about this age: his imagination is showing more and more, we can trade sentences back and forth, we laugh about things together, he so easily finds wonder in things.

***

He still loves books. The librarian handed him a tote bag as his reward for participating in the summer reading program and he ran excitedly around the children's section, filling it with picture books to take home. At my parents' house, he always pulls out his favorite book, one from my childhood, it's purple cover worn. He wants us to read it to him again and again. He wants to take books to bed and in the car. He pretends to read the used car catalogs from the stand outside the post office, calling them his magazines. Nearly every day he asks if his real magazine came in the mail.

I try not to get too excited about his fondness for books. It's a bit early to be dreaming of passionate literary discussions and trading paperbacks back and forth. But the bookworm in me, the one who'd read for hours each day if she could? She's loving it.

***

Every now and then he asks me to lie down next to him while he falls asleep. I pause to stretch out on my side for five or ten minutes on his bed. Each time I start to think about how quickly this will pass, how little time we have left before he'll want privacy and independence. Gazing at his tiny silhouette, I try to memorize what it feels like to be close to him, the weight of him on my lap or in my arms, his giggling squirminess as I zerbert his cheek.

What I Said

I'm amused at the shocked response in the comments to the oddly titled The Open Adoption Book: A Guide to Adoption Without Tears after my off-hand mention of it. I'm kind of glad some of you hadn't heard of it before, as it's crap on a cracker as far as being a comprehensive open adoption guide. It was required reading at the agency we used for our first adoption. (Which is symbolic of our experience with that agency, in a way: they set us on a good path by insisting on openness, but didn't give us any tools to make that openness work long-term. It was a glossy version of open adoption.) I probably shouldn't say this, but ... it's so over-the-top pro-open adoption, pro-adoptive family that it might be useful propaganda to give to relatives who insist you should be adopting the "old-fashioned" way. Do with that what you will.

I thought about posting what I wrote in response to the friend of a co-worker who asked for feedback on a facilitator, but it turns out I don't have a copy of the sent email. It essentially went like this:

• I'm glad you're thinking about adopting! It's been an incredible experience for us.
• This is how much we spent on our two adoption processes and what I think is reasonable (she had also asked about costs for domestic adoption in general).
• We personally shied away from facilitators. There are some decent ones out there, but these are my concerns about adoption facilitation.
  
• I don't know anything about that particular facilitator first-hand. I looked at her firm's website and a number of things they do don't line up with what are currently considered best practices, here's what they are.
  
• Plug for agency adoption as the best shot at a well-done adoption. Empathetic statement about how hard it is to pick one.
  
• Offer to talk more. Yay for adoption.
  

That's obviously quite paraphrased, but you get the idea. I liked Dawn's comment about leaning in before you pull back when offering advice. It's been something I've been trying to teach myself: finding a point of connection before laying out a critique and using lots of "I" statements as I do so.

After reading all your comments, I do wish I had been more direct than I was about the lack of respect shown for all parties by that facilitator--not just in the quote I shared, but in the way their whole process is structured. I appreciated Megan's take for the way she connected it to the child being adopted, as I think that's something most prospective adoptive parents will take seriously:

I suppose I would encourage this person to read some books on open adoption and warn him/her that an agency/facilitator who does not speak with respect and dignity towards an expectant mother cannot, by default, truly respect the child. It's a difficult process regardless of how great your agency or facilitator or lawyer is, so you really want to find someone who is not out to degrade your potential child's birth family or DNA. You also want someone who is brutally honest.

(Heh. "Brutally honest" is a good description of our most recent social worker. In a good way.)

I did hear back from the friend of the co-worker. She thanked me for my opinions and said she was going to follow up on one of my suggestions, but didn't say much else. I really do wish her well. I'm grateful I'll never be at that place again, trying to figure out the 150,000 options available to adopting parents with no personal experience to guide me. I wonder how many of us would make different choices were we able to start over knowing what we know now.

At Least

"At least you were able to adopt."
"At least you were able to be there when he was born."
"At least you got a kid who looks like you."
"At least you know where she came from."

"At least you still get to see her."
"At least you know you're not infertile."
"At least you know he's safe."
"At least you don't have to deal with diapers and screaming kids."

"At least she has some medical history."
"At least he has that one copy of his original birth certificate."
"At least he wasn't abandoned on a doorstep or something."
"At least they'll know you wanted them."

These are all things people have said to me, to my kids' first moms, or about my children. Always in response to us opening up about the harder aspects of infertility or adoption. We crack the door to give them a peek at our emotions and they use the opening to kick us.

I'm know they're trying to be comforting, pointing out the cloud's silver lining and all that. (Although sometimes they're lashing out of their own hurt.) I admit that I've done it to others in the past, especially when I was younger and hadn't yet experienced core-shaking grief. Looking back, I'm ashamed at how I tried to mitigate their loss.

There are experiences in life which permanently change us. To have someone minimize those is deeply troubling. I love the mis-matched, not-genetically-related, adoptive family we are. I wouldn't change who my children are for the world. But the parallel losses--not knowing what a biological child of ours would look like, not being my children's sole mother, not knowing them from the womb--are still there. Even though they no longer hold the emotional power they once did, they have shaped the ways I identify myself. When someone minimizes those losses, they are minimizing me. The same goes for my children or their first parents.

There will be a moment when you're confronted with a friend's anger, grief or fear over an injustice or loss. Maybe it will make you uncomfortable. Maybe it will dredge up a hurt of your own. If you find yourself about to point out that it could be worse, please don't.

At least you could honor her experience.