Adoption is such a strange, strange thing.
Opening up a mostly closed adoption introduces all sorts of emotions and complexities.
Here I have this child that I feel I know inside and out, back and front, from the top of his curly head to the tips of his arched toe nails. I feel like I know his first mother. I've met her. I have her picture. I've written to her, telling her endless details about my child for the whole of my parenting existence. We've shared this journey of mothering. That is, I've shared it with her. Because I've opened up all of our life before her eyes, I feel that I trust her. I know her.
But I don't.
I've spent years looking at my son imagining what his father must look like. I take the features of his face that don't resemble his first mother and I imagine those on a male face. I imagine different characters: "sporty guy" and "nerdy guy" and "rapper guy" and "working man", trying to fasten on an image that goes with the scant details I have.
When the letter comes in the mail, the letter with pictures, I just stare and stare. If I squint, I can see my son in there, but at first glance I don't. I see a man I don't know. A man who is my son's father, but that I don't feel like I have anything in common with. If we were at the same party, I don't think we would talk. But he is my son's father.
In a mostly closed adoption, where all the communication is going one way, the adoptive family shares details about the most precious part of their life - their child, sending it out into the unknown, not knowing where it will land. Will all these personal details end up in a file in an agency office? Or in a shoe box on a shelf under a stack of lumpy sweaters? Or will the pictures go on the mantle with the other grandkids?
How far will the information go? Will the agency social worker be the only one that knows about my son's first day at preschool or will his mom tell her boss, and show the pictures to her friends?
I save the best pictures, record the sweetest moments, take notes of the funniest sayings, and then I send them on the wind, like dandelion seeds, scattering.
I don't know where they'll go.
Adoption is a strange, strange thing.
Over my son's bed there are pictures hanging. Pictures of people that I don't know, but who are just as close to my son as I am. Even closer, in some ways.
My family's photographs are on the walls of a woman far away, and I don't know who stands in her house and sees us.
I hold this door open, and I don't know who will walk through.
Tears. I have tears.
And more tears as I read the post that preceded this one. So much emotion--right now expressed in tears.
Posted by: Lori | 13 January 2010 at 07:31 PM