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Drawing a Line Between Family and Family

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Daddy and SonI peel the top half of a banana and hold it out to my little boy. The little man, who is about two months shy of his second birthday, claps his hands and takes it from me with a smile. He bites off the top inch then holds it out for me to take a bite. I tell him that I don’t want any, so he chomps off another piece and chews on it. He makes his way over to his baby sister, lying on a blanket, and holds the banana out for her to take a bite. Of course, Baby Sister doesn’t even have teeth, nor has she started on solid foods, so she just looks up at him and coos. After a few more tries to get her excited about his banana, he takes another bite and then moves on to offer some to Mom.

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Sharing is the operative word in open adoption, but where is the line? Is it truly a case of “what’s yours is mine and mine is yours?” With a lot of things in our home, that’s how it is… but not quite everything. Our birth parents know that they could pretty much call us up and, assuming we’re not in the middle of something else, they’re welcome to swing by. We’re very open that way. So where is our line?

For one, we’ve got a line between our family/friends and our birthparents. We have a lot of correspondence with our family/friends, and we have a lot of correspondence with our birthparents, but our birthparents don’t correspond with our family/friends. We prefer it that way. It’s not that we’re trying to hide anything, but some things we just keep close to our own hearts. We feel it protects the situation and it protects our birthmothers so that they can control the information regarding their own story and their identity. People are naturally drawn to dramatic situations and adoption is one of those. Naturally, everyone is curious about the situation, but nobody likes to be “observed”, so we like to give our birthparents some breathing room.

We look at it the same way for their side of the situation. We love our birthparents’ families, but when we’ve done things, like set up times to get together, we always do it through the birthparent.

Another reason we keep them separate is illustrated in a funny conversation that I had with my sister about my son:

“He tends to pick things up with his left hand,” I said. “Even if he picks things up with his right, he usually switches it to his left. I’m thinking he might end up a southpaw.”

“Well, is Jammie left-handed?” my sister wondered.

“What’s that got to do with it?” I laughed, wondering how long it would take for her to remember his origins.

“Because it’s hereditary,” she said, matter-of-factly.

My wife and I chuckled a little, still waiting for her to realize.

“What?” my sister said. “It is. “

“I know,” I laughed. “But he doesn’t have our genes.”

“Oh yeah,” she laughed. “I forgot.”

It’s nice to think that people don’t immediately think of someone else when they see our kids. Everybody draws the line in different areas and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I’ve never seen any indication to think that our birth parents wish they had a closer relationship with the rest of our family or friends. We love every branch of our family tree!


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