Guest Blogger
“You can’t tell anyone.” My 30-year-old daughter had called to confined in me. “Promise you won’t even tell dad until everything is over. Promise?”
“I promise,” I said for the third time.
“If you do,” my adult daughter threatened. “I’ll have Cindy (her birth mother) adopt me.”
“I will send her an itemized statement of expenses incurred,” I replied. I could hear the woman I’d raised from infancy smile on the other end.
Her comment about being readopted and my comment about money had a negligible emotional effect on either of us.
This was the kind of chitchat which had developed since she was out of high school. NOT so much while in high school
Her comment about having her birth mother adopt her and my reply was not a conversation we would have had when she was eight years old.
When she was eight-years-old, I might have been threatened by her suggesting she would go live with her birth mother.
She might have been insulted when I mentioned how much raising children costs. In fact, she might have said something like, “Well, I’m sorry I cost money,” or “No one asked you to adopt me.”
However, let’s be honest, I’ve heard children tell their biological parents, “I never asked to be born.”
Biological children from great homes threaten to move in with someone else. Why shouldn’t an adopted child threaten to move in with someone else? Much of this trauma and angst is simply part of growing up.
Adoption does add different components to your relationship. Some of them good. Some not so good. But that’s life.
I do regret ever being threatened by a child wanting to go live with a biological mother. Of course, children want to connect with biology.
I love more than one child. Why do I question that children can love more than one mother?
And now, the references and jokes between my daughter and myself about adoption are so normal, neither one of us has an emotional reaction. Instead, the witticisms bond us more.
