Hellobee

When I last updated you with the emotional part of our current adoption process, we were in a deep dark place while hoping and waiting for placement. Since that time, we’ve had moments of elation and moments of despair. Such is the story with matched and waiting adoptive families.

It’s interesting. If you go with the agency version of how our process is going, you’d think that everything was sunshine and rainbows at every turn. But, if you happen to have other insights into the real day to day of a birth family before placement (as we do through our pre-existing relationship with birth mom), you know that it is all so much more complicated than “everything is going great!” It doesn’t take much to imagine the complex feelings, loneliness, hope, and fears of a mother choosing a different family to raise her child. Being able to see a glimpse of that in real time as the adoptive parent just heightens the emotional complexity of the sacred compact that you are entering in to. We knew that when we matched with Jack Jack, we committed ourselves to a lifelong kinship relationship with her birth family. We never want her to wonder where she came from or whether we would be upset if she wanted to explore her relationship with her birth mama. We view ourselves as one big family, in one of the most complex formations of what family can look like. It’s like an arranged marriage where we’ve pledged “Til death do us part” with people that we had never met. And we take that pledge very seriously.

Still, during this fragile matching period, we weren’t sure if Jack Jack’s birth mom would welcome contact with us. It felt weird to reach out. I wanted our communication to be on her terms… and yet, in the time after we first said yes to the current match, we hadn’t heard directly from her. Normally, we are in casual contact frequently, so we acutely felt the absence of her presence. Whenever we take a cute picture or Jack Jack hits a milestone or does something particularly sweet, our first instinct is to send off an email to birth parents. It was really important to us, though, that birth mom not feel coerced or pressured by our pre-existing relationship to place this new baby with us. So, in this already anxiety provoking waiting period, we waited in unnatural silence as a way to respect birth mother autonomy.

Well, imagine my delight when we recently received an email from Mama S. It was a short note but pitch perfect, saying how excited she was that we agreed to parent again and how she had a lot of faith that our home was the right place for this new baby to grow up. It was like coming out at the bottom of the roller coaster for a moment. Just a few words lifted me out of a dark place for days!

But the adoption roller coaster is on a repeating loop until agreements are signed and our complicated family leaves the hospital for our separate homes. So we are prepared for more ups and downs through the last two weeks of our wait. I always tell others that the few weeks before birth and placement are the last moments of uncomplicated relationship between birth mother and child. It’s a unique pause just before the looming stressors and the placement decision become unavoidable. In this period, it can seem like a birth mother may pull away or disconnect. It’s a time of unpredictability for adoptive families and for reflection by birth families. We are currently deep in that phase and hoping that our dear family members who make up the other part of this triad are finding peace in these last few weeks of waiting. Our angst is nothing compared to theirs in this moment… but it is scary and real. Soon enough, we will be brought together in person again. Our best hope is that all the parties will leave the hospital with a sense of peace, lifelong commitment to each other, and a strong sense of the shared goal to provide the best possible life for the new little soul entering the world– no matter which part of this unique family he may go home with.