Written by Kaycee, adoptive mother
She would join us to celebrate our son’s first birthday. A tag on a Christmas gift under the tree would bear her name. We would all meet at the park on a Saturday morning to talk and watch him play. It would feel natural to see her name come across my phone as she sends a text. Conversations would be frequent, meals would be shared, and photos would be taken to document the beauty of an open adoption. Those were our hopes and dreams.
Although my husband and I had wonderful conversations about openness with both of our son’s birth parents early on, it hasn’t quite turn out the way we all planned. Within just a couple months of our son being born, his birth father moved out of state. Later in the fall, his birth mother moved out of state. And when our son was almost a year old, we moved as well.
Distance has separated us, and we really only post photos in an app we share across the miles at this point. We send them Christmas gifts, and my husband gets the occasional text from our son’s birth father, but that’s usually the extent of it. Over the first several months of our son’s young life, my husband and I saw our plans for a truly open adoption slipping through our fingers, and we felt loss and grief for our son all over again.
But the openness we didn’t see coming is with our son’s birth father’s mother – the biological grandmother of this sweet little boy. She is the one who joined us to celebrate his first birthday. She is the one we meet up with for a play date several times a year. Her name is the one that pops up on my phone regularly. She is a blessing we didn’t see coming, and we are so thankful for her and for the connection it means for our son.
Life has a way of changing and shifting in unforeseen ways, doesn’t it? And some of it is simply out of our control. The best we can do sometimes is make decisions on what we believe is right in the moment, and adjust accordingly. But we have also learned through this process over the past couple of years that every open adoption looks different from the next, and different can still be beautiful.
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