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Originally Posted by SuddenlySusan
Another great post, Susanne.
Susanne... how wonderful to have some time to get to know your son better while he's living with you and your husband. Wow...
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Susan--
You're not kidding--WOW! I guess now you know why I've been off the forums and out of the "loop" for awhile. It's been a little busy around here...
Things are going well, and it's been a very healing experience for both of us. I don't know where it will lead, but for now, it feels right, so we're just going to roll with it.
It has been a delightful surprise that my three raised children have accepted the change so well. My youngest had the most to say about it. Of course, she still lives here when she's not away at college so her life is most directly impacted, but she also tends to be the most insightful and introspective, and she's a psych major so she's always looking at the interpersonal and psycho-social ramifications of any change in our lives. She was the one who, when we first told the three about their "secret brother," said, "It's like we're living in a Lifetime Channel movie of the week! You mean all this time I thought there were five of us and there are really six of us?" She was also the one who, upon being presented with the idea of the first sibling encounter said that she had thought about it and decided that she could view having another sibling as a good thing or a bad thing, and she had decided to view it as a good thing. This doesn't mean she hasn't struggled with her own variety of angst over the past year and a half. She most certainly has, and has availed herself of the counseling services at her college, etc. She is still not as comfortable with him and the situation as she would like to be, but it's a process and she is on her way...
What I think is most interesting about both my daughters' reactions is that, when we got to the bottom of it, their issues were NOT with my son, their brother, but with me. At first they expressed it as being about the secret-keeping (clearly one of our worst decisions, ever; not quite, but almost as bad as the adoption decision, itself), but even though I know that created trust issues, it didn't seem to be adequate to explain all of their reactions to me. I finally had to call them on it: their father kept the secret, too, and NO ONE was mad at him or had trouble trusting him. NO ONE called into question his love or judgement, and NO ONE told him that their relationship with him would never be the same again.
That's when I knew it had to be something else, and eventually realized it had to do with the adoption act, itself. They saw me as an alien, someone not really the mother they had always known because the mother they knew would not, COULD NOT have allowed her baby to leave her. It was a tough one to tackle and I have to accept that they can never understand. But we seem to have found a way to bypass that need to "understand" once we remembered the love and allowed that to lead to acceptance. And I can't underestimate the value of the passage of time and seeing this family--in its current form--create a history together. I think the one-year mark is significant, too. Although I first learned of my son through a third party in November 2006, our first direct contact via email was in April 2007. Having that year anniversary roll around last week was a way of marking time. My three raised children are all quite practical and would look at this milestone as a sign that it's time to get on with it and make the effort to get things "normal." Still not all smooth-sailing, but oh! so much progress and so much more comfortable for everyone than a year or more ago. And we continue to remember that everyone needs respect and time and space to travel her/his own journey in this thing. Everyone has a right to that, at the very least. I believe that this is one of the fundamental demands of unconditional love.
I feel for all the siblings just beginning this journey with their mothers and their newfound family members. It's so very difficult to discern all the different feelings and to know what to do with them once you've identified them. And making it all so much more difficult is the reality of the reunion experience for the first mother--the tidal wave of emotion that we feel, how blindsided and unprepared we are for it, no matter how much reading and studying we've done ahead of time, how much counseling we've had, how "at peace" (HA!) we thought we were with our decision to place. Our kids are dealing with what looks like a "new" mother, one who is remembering and reliving and reprocessing so much long-held trauma, so much unspeakable pain, shame, guilt, anger, loss--scary stuff, indeed, both for the mother to live through and for the children they raised who now have to witness it. Many times during this process my husband has remarked how good it was that all the kids were out of the house while this was going on. He talks about how awful it was to witness what was happening to me, and how powerless he was to do anything much to help. As you may recall, these forums really helped him as he saw that I wasn't the only crazy person, but rather that "craziness" was normal given the circumstances of relinquishment and reunion. The kids don't talk about how strange I was anymore; they're just glad that most of it seems to be past and I'm looking more and more like the mother they knew growing up. That said, I think it's been healthy for them to see these other parts of me, parts that only my son seems to have been able to evoke in me--the person I was before pregnancy and relinquishment, before the guilt and shame and secrets formed and defined my entire adult life until I began to find freedom from them through reunion...
It's good for me to be back to the forums again. I'll talk to you soon!
Susanne
