I really don’t want my blog to become all Open Adoption stuff all the time. We have a lot more going on than just figuring out how to manage contact with L’s family, but when I sit down at the computer, it seems that those are the issues that rise to the top. Please indulge my habit of processing here a little bit longer, because I am struggling.
Contact is much more of a balancing act than I expected. In fact, it is all just more than I thought it would be. I think of myself as a very practical, not-overly-emotional person, but the last couple months are challenging my own self image. Seeing L’s father’s reaction to her birthday sent me into a tailspin. Of course I expect that the anniversary of her birth and loss would be hard for them, but it hasn’t been hard for me before. There is no pretending that they painlessly moved on with their lives. They miss her.
The converse of that is they have moved on with their lives without L, which also stings. When I think of the losses and harm L experienced due to her time in the orphanage, I wonder how they could move on so easily. (And I know it wasn’t easy, but this is still my subconscious mama-bear reaction.)
I struggle with the issue of what I should share with them. The potentially endless parade of soccer game, birthday party, gymnastic lesson and zoo visit photos are easy enough for me to send, but are they a good idea? These things are totally normal middle/upper middle class suburban American activities. They are probably not the kind of things kids do in the rural part of China where L’s siblings are growing up. I doubt her parents can relate to these experiences at all.
Is it counterproductive to try to build a relationship on such disparate experiences? Does sharing them emphasize the cultural distance and bizarreness (to them) of L’s life with our family? Do they reinforce the privileges of wealth that L’s parents can’t provide for her siblings and would not have been able to provide for L had she had been raised by their family?
There is also the issue of the flow of information being largely one-way. They get to see what our lives are like, but we have very little knowledge of what their lives are like. Does showing them all our privileged American-ness make them feel uncomfortable sharing pictures of their home or village of family life with us? Her dad said they have a digital camera, but I am not entirely certain that is true. I would like to see pictures of L’s relatives, of their home, of her parents when they were children, of her siblings’ daily lives. But I also don’t want to be too pushy.
I am sure it is just as much a balancing act for them as it is for me. It might sound like I am losing sight of that, but I am not. It is just that this blog is where I talk about me and my experiences.
Please spare me any emails or comments about my oh-so-First-World, privileged adoptive parent angst. I know this.
In addition to working things out by writing, I see many adoptive parents who are very excited by our story (and others similar to ours) who are rushing off into searches without thinking about the challenges of reunion. I worry about them, about their children and about the birth families they seek. I am afraid many of them haven’t thought through the life-long commitment they should expect. Reunion is not a fairy tale with an automatic happy ending. If there is going to be a happy ending, it is going to be earned through blood, sweat and tears.
I really believe I was as emotionally and practically prepared as was possible (given the scarcity of information about birth family reunion in China) and 100% committed to openness despite whatever challenges we found along the way. But here I sit, blindsided by the emotional fallout. Unemotional, practical me, tangled up in all these feelings. I was completely unprepared for this.
