I miss my daughter. I’ll just be honest. There’s nothing anyone can or should do about it; it is what it is. I miss her like crazy.
The COVID pandemic has hit the adoption community pretty hard, if I’m being honest. Those of us with open or semi-open adoptions, who typically get to see our children on a frequent or semi-frequent basis, are struggling a lot. Think of anyone you know who’s gone on a work trip for any length of time and talked about how much they miss their kids. That’s normal to us. Going weeks or months without seeing our kids is the status quo, because they live with their parents and families, and that’s what we all signed up for.
Going over a year without seeing her (with no particular end date in sight) is asking a lot of my emotions. It’s a lot to ask of any birth parents. But of course, no one is asking us to stay away from our children. They don’t have to. It’s simply the only logical course of action. Of course I shouldn’t see her. She doesn’t live with me and therefore is not part of my “bubble,” and I would never expose her or her family to the risk. I would never ask them to. For now, the best thing I can do for her is to be apart.
It’s just a hard thing to do. Adoption, at its core, is the decision that the best thing for your child is for someone else to take care of them. Whatever your reasons are, whatever your circumstances, you want your child to be happy and healthy and taken care of, and so you entrust other people to take that on. The idea of personal sacrifice for my daughter’s sake is nothing new to me, or to any birth parents. We know that concept all too well; it’s in our bones. We live it every single day, and I mean that literally.
This pandemic and the resulting separation is simply another layer of personal sacrifice, and some days that’s harder than others.
I think a lot about my daughter’s parents, and all the other adoptive parents out there. Because this doesn’t just affect me, or L; it affects them too. The loss of that in-person connection has to be hard for them, too. Birth parents are a resource; someone who is on the journey with you, who is available for questions and connection. (At least in our adoption; all adoptions are different, as I’ve said, and there’s no right or wrong way to do it.) So being unable to properly discuss anything at the moment has to be difficult on both sides.
I’ve considered asking them to do a Zoom meeting or something. We’ve never done anything like that, and I honestly don’t know how it would go. It feels intimate, asking them to chat over the phone from their home. I don’t necessarily know how to approach the conversation.
Anyway. All my love to all members of the adoption triad.
A Flower That Lives On A Star 