It was our first night home. I woke up that morning with the winter sun peeking lazily through the bedroom blinds. With a stretch of my arms and a twist, I rolled over. There he was, my new baby, in his co-sleeper. He was swaddled in the fuzzy blue blanket I had meticulously shopped for a few months earlier. Craig’s lips puckered and relaxed repetitively, as if drinking a bottle in his sleep. I touched his arm gently; he was definitely not a dream.
Behind me, my husband, Jimmy woke up and asked quietly, “He okay?”
“Yes,” I said in a whisper.
“Why didn’t you wake me up to help you during the night?”
I turned to face him, put my hand on his sharp stubbly cheek, “Because that’s my job. We can take care of him together during the day.” He kissed my palm and smiled.
I was finally, once again, a member of the middle-of-the-night-mother’s club. I would be the parent to get up in the darkest hours, rock our crying son, feed him, change him and soothe him back to sleep. Craig and I would be the only two awake in an otherwise quiet home. That night, as we began our new routine, I imagined an invisible connection to all the other mothers out there, solitarily and sleepily doing the same thing. I felt selfish and I didn’t want to share that experience, not even with my husband.
Questions
“You’re okay with his real mother seeing him?” a co-worker asked when she found out my youngest son was adopted. He was fourteen months old now, and I still wasn’t very good at answering questions like that.
“Yes, totally,” I said. However, I felt flustered, I was his real mother and wasn’t sure how to set her straight on that without seeming rude.
“So how often does she get to see him?”
“His birth mother? Whenever. It’s really casual.” We had no set schedule, I hadn’t even thought about it in terms of x number of visits per time frame.
“Is this him?” She pointed to some photos I had set out across my desk.
“That one is Jared. This one here is of Jay and Craig.”
“Oh, did you adopt Jay too?”
“No.”
“So, he’s your real son?”
“He’s my biological son, Craig is my adopted son. But really, they are both just my sons.”
She smiled at me and cocked her head as if studying a bug under a microscope. A small part of me felt like I was being interrogated, but I knew she was just curious.
“So that’s really good you to let her come over and help raise him and stuff. I totally wouldn’t be comfortable with sharing parenting like that.”
“Sharing?” Is that what she thought open adoption was? “No, we’re not co-parenting. I’m his mom. We don’t share the parenting.”
She looked confused. I felt tyrannical.
Before Craig was born I studied the different types of adoptions. From the beginning ours was considered open. We knew who our son’s birth mother was. It was also an independent adoption, meaning that we didn’t have a facilitator or agency. From the time we matched up, my son’s birth mother invited me along to the checkups. We both heard the news that Craig was a boy at the 26th week ultrasound. She told me when she first felt him kick and later, when he was really active, she relayed how it felt like he grabbed her ribs and bounced up and down like he was on a trampoline. These were the small moments that meant the world to me, and she shared them freely.
“Don’t you get jealous though?”
“No.” This was an easy question for me to answer. “Not at all. It would be like getting jealous of my mother for being a grandmother or my sister for being his aunt.”
“Oh.” She nodded like it made more sense to her now.
Open adoption was hard to explain. Sure there was the tangible things like how Craig’s birth mom spent the Fourth of July with us or how we sent her pictures. But the comfort and dynamics of the relationship was harder to relay. It was more than “we’ll do this because it’s best for our son” feeling. Like with Craig’s grandmothers and aunt, I wanted to share with his birth mom the daily miracles of him growing up. I wanted to give her the same small, special moments she gave me when she was pregnant.
Being Open
I can’t remember what I thought adoption was before Craig. I’m sure it was something along the lines of this magical person putting a baby in my arms and we lived happily ever after like in the fairy tales. During the five months my husband and I waited for Craig to be born, I read books, web sites and online forums and learned as much as I could about the different types of adoption.
That first night home, as Craig and I started our new middle-of-the-night routine, the one I wanted for myself, I knew Jimmy and I made the right choice. We wanted what was best for our son, and for us that meant a very open adoption.
Craig’s birth mom was the one who conceived him, felt him grow inside of her and made the difficult decision of placing him for adoption. Jimmy got to be Craig’s dad and I his mom. We would be the ones who parented him, watched him grow and guided him on his journey to becoming a man. I tried finding a two-sentence sound bite on why this relationship works for us. I wanted something that was easy to understand for those outside of our adoption triad. Now after fourteen months and many strange questions, I realize, I don’t need one. The dynamic between us each of us is too rich and complex to reduce it. The focus for others shouldn’t be on how we are able to make this work. It should stay on the real magic, our shared love for Craig and how we are all doing what’s best for him
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Genevieve Hinson is a social media coordinator for Children's Hospital Central California. She's also a writer, wife and mom to two boys and a girl. The opinions she expresses here are her own, as is her obsession for coffee.
