ADOPTION: YOU CAN DO IT! Blog post #20, Chapter 15 – The Relatives–Birth and Adopted
This is my third blog post today to catch-up from enjoying my annual beach vacation. I hope you’ll read, enjoy, and share this excerpt from ADOPTION: YOU CAN DO IT! A Husband-Wife Guide for Successfully Raising Adopted Children in the Christian Home, available next month!
But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. 1 Timothy 5:8
There are a lot of good jokes and hilarious movies about ‘the relatives.’ I think my (least?) favorite joke regarding our relatives is about our house plumbing. It seems that whenever we are going to have relatives visit, our sewer system backs up and makes a huge, disgusting mess just as our guests are pulling in the driveway. Once, in the middle of the night when I got up to use the bathroom, our toilet overflowed and I frantically awoke my husband from a deep sleep. He jumped out of bed when I told him to grab the plunger, and on his way to the bathroom he shouted, “Are your parents or mine coming to visit in the morning?”
Relatives are a more serious issue when it comes to the topic of adoption. Though many of our extended family members supported our adoptions, I mentioned earlier that I have certain relatives who no longer get together with us since we adopted. It is a bit difficult to explain to my adopted children why we don’t see or hear from them. Their names come up when other relatives are visiting as we discuss old memories, and my polite kids wait until after our company leaves to ask “Why don’t we ever get together with so-and-so; don’t they live just a couple hours away?”
On the other side of the coin are the birth relatives who want to be involved with their family’s children—who are now my children—and yet are unsafe. Therefore, any contact with them is not only unwise, but potentially dangerous. Foreign adoption probably doesn’t have such a problem associated with it, but I would suspect that private adoption could certainly have similar issues. I know from personal experience that child welfare adoption can often have ‘unsafe,’ even criminal birth relatives lurking online, or snooping over the shoulder of ‘safe’ birth relatives who receive Christmas photos or Easter update letters regarding the adopted children.
In our family, in order to protect our children from both types of issues with relatives, we have set a few guidelines in place over the years, which have helped alleviate stress. First, I have stayed in contact with my relationship-resistant relatives through annual Christmas letters detailing our lives through the previous year. Whether they read these greetings or not, I have at least taken the high road to reach out and inform them of our blessings. If they ever want to resume contact, there will be no ill will or awkwardness on my part because I endeavored to do the right thing.
Second, for the ‘unsafe’ birth relatives we choose not to deal with, we have set boundaries and made them known to our children and to the ‘safe’ relatives so everyone understands the limits. We have told our adopted children, “The judge said your birth parents are not safe. If you are interested, we will help you contact them after you graduate high school, or later, when you are ready.” My son asked permission to contact his birth mom on his eighteenth birthday. I replied “yes” because I wanted him to be able to communicate with me about how it went, instead of telling him “no” and he would contact her secretly. I did talk with him about setting boundaries with birth relatives, including such things as refusing money requests they might make to him. Overall, there seems to have been successes for him in the reunion. I try to keep my mouth shut and not say anything interfering or judgmental, as he is old enough to navigate the situation himself. It is “going okay” he tells me. He is in control of the situation and doing it on his terms, not hers.
