Please vote in the poll to your right -- what adoption-related days does your family celebrate? Please elaborate in the comments here! Has what days you celebrate changed over time? How do you celebrate? How has that changed over time? Do you include birth parents or thoughts of birth parents in any of these celebrations?
Everyone celebrates birthdays, right? Which is bigger, your birthday celebrations or your gotcha day celebrations? How do you handle estimated birthdays, or if you think the paperwork birthday is wrong? Do birthdays trigger thoughts of birth parents for your child? For you?
Given the loss and sadness included in adoption, is it appropriate to celebrate adoption-related days? Why or why not?
Adoption Initiative Conference 2022
2 years ago
6 comments:
We do celebrate the day M came to us, but we do not refer to it as "Gotcha" day--I think many families are moving away from that term; we have never used it.
When celebrating her birthday we always include her birth family in a special way as well as her foster family because they spent the first two birthdays with her. Actually, we celebrate them on their birthdays as well--we have ongoing contact.
Celebrate probably isn't the right word for what we do for all of those anniversaries, but I try to acknowledge them. We've only had our first or second anniversary in most categories so I'm still trying to work out the kinks before she's able to remember how I kept changing my mind about them! The day we met was a very sad day for Chloe so I don't throw a party for that day, but it's a milestone. Our adoption day, 2 days later, we celebrate as Mama and Chloe Day as our beginning as a family. Her birthday is definitely a bigger celebration because it is her beginning as a person. I think it's very important for me to keep that in mind, anniversaries of adoption milestones are/were important in my life. Her life started long before we met. It took a definite fork in the road on adoption day, but that was not the beginning for either one of us, but a beginning of us. (It's late so that's my excuse if this rambling doesn't make sense!!)
I agree Chloe's mom, it is not a celebration as such. Birthdays are bittersweet for her so we tend to have her party on a different day and use her birthday to remember her birth family too. I don't want her birthday party to be too stressful and usually her emotions are raw on her birthday and she tends to like to have her "friend" parties on different days.
Thanks for leaving a comment on my blog on the "Talking about adoption is hard" post. A couple of people mentioned your blog but I thought they were talking about the Rumor Queen's web site (your urls are similar). Sorry! :-) Looking forward to reading more.
M3 -- thanks to you for tackling such a hard topic on your blog! As you can see, we agree with you here that talking about adoption is hard, but we're committed to doing it!
I'm glad I found your blog, too -- your girls are adorable!
I had heard of Rumor Queen when I started my blog, but I had no idea what her url was when I chose mine. I'm sure I get traffic intended for her, and probably vice versa. Ah, the internets!
We celebrate our daughter's (assumed) birth date just as we would our own. She's only 3 and hasn't asked too many adoption questions yet so, that might evolve as she ages.
We also celebrate the beginning of our journey as a family. Since the day we met and the China adoption were 1 day apart, we just chose one date and went forward with that. We call it 'Family Day' and so far we have celebrated two of them. Daddylicious takes a day off of work and we all spend the day together doing something fun. As our daughter ages, we will explain to her more about the signifigance of the day.
On Mother's Day, we set out one red carnation for each year of our daughter's life...to honor her birth mother. So far, this is the only way we've incorporated the birth parents (or birth mother) into our celebrations.
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