Now I have to remember where I left off… Hmmm…
What we decided to do is leave the door as open as we can, while keeping in mind that the safety of our children.
We entered into an open adoption agreement with Bean’s mom. The agreement states that we’ll write to her four times a year and she’ll do the same. And both parties will keep an address available. So, we got a P.O. Box. And since we had the P.O. Box we decided to share it with the boys’ family. It’s pretty inexpensive and gives us at least a little more security.
For the first year after Bean’s adoption we wrote our letters and never heard anything. In fact, I tried sending one of them registered so that I could be sure that it was getting there, but I still didn’t hear anything.
And then November of 2010, we got our first letter from her. She asked about meeting with B and me. We were in the process of buying a house and moving and getting ready for the holidays and it was all just too much. I wrote her briefly and told her that she’d need to be patient and I’d reply to her soon.
And I just tried to put it aside and deal with life. But, as life often does, it threw us a curve ball. In June of last year, we received a letter from our boys’ mom. She told us that one of the biological dad’s was very ill and hospitalized and wanted us to take his son to see him as he had a 50/50 chance of surviving. B can tell you where he was when I called. I stood outside of the car while the kids were inside listening to music and talked to him about this turn. We had no reason to ever expect to get a letter like that. The letter had been sent several days earlier (we don’t get to the post office everyday), and it didn’t have very much useful information. Add to that, we had no way to call bio-mom to find out more. So, we tried calling the hospital, but they wouldn’t give us any information other than to say that he wasn’t a patient…
I think that that letter was one of the things that pushed us to get back into contact with Bean’s bio-mom.
So, we did.
We contacted her and worked on setting up a meeting. She provided us with a medical history (This was *huge* for me… I hate filling out medical forms for my kids and having “unknown” be the only thing that I can write). She tried to let us into her life as much as she could.
Last fall we met with her for lunch.
It was a painful, beautiful meeting. There were tears and there was laughter.
It’s a very odd balancing act. We didn’t want to hurt her. We can only imagine how painful it would be to know that you’re missing out on the everyday. But, we also wanted to share our daughter. We adore her and we wanted her mom to see that.
I think it was good.
We have been working on another meeting, but it’s hard with two different families and busy schedules to plan.
And it’s hard to know what should be next. But, for now we’re taking baby-steps and getting to know her and letting her know us.
So, that’s *this* end of our open adoptions. There is a little more that I will share about our boys in the future.
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