It’s Ask Maralee time! I wrote an introduction to give you some background info on my life experience and what kind of questions I’d love to have from you, but really ANYTHING is on the table. When Brian and I were first starting out on the journey of group home work, adoption, foster parenting, and being a big(ish) multiracial family, I LONGED to peek inside the lives of people who had walked the road before us and see how they were doing it. I had a hard time finding those kinds of families, so I became a researcher to learn all I could. Now I want to offer you the results of my research, resources, connections, and life experience, as you come up with questions of your own. If you would like to submit a question, here’s the form.
“How do/will you balance your adopted children having both a “adoption/gotcha day” and a birthday, and your biological child only having a birthday? I’m just curious from the outside looking in on your wonderful world and am very unfamiliar with many of the family dynamics in adoptive families.”
Great question!
I want to start by acknowledging that the adoption community has a mixed opinion on the right words to use to describe this day. When I first heard about an annual celebration of the day a child was adopted, it was called a Gotcha Day. Over the years that terminology has fallen out of favor with some people because it sounds like what you might yell if you jumped out from behind the door and scared somebody. GOTCHA! We don’t want to imply that we snatched out kids in some kind of terrifying manner. It also can seem to downplay all the hard aspects of adoption. Yes, it was a happy day for us as we added a child to our family, but there were losses on that day, too. Our child lost the legal connection to their biological family. Families have called it a Gotcha Day, or Family Day, or Adoption Anniversary, or whatever works for their family, but the idea is to acknowledge that something special happened the day YOU came into our lives. Oddly enough, because we used to say “Gotcha Day” and have modified that to “Adoption Day” (but kind of half-heartedly) our kids have called it a “Goption Day”, and I find it hilarious enough that I haven’t corrected them. They know what it signifies and that’s what matters to me.
Josh’s Adoption Day has always been uniquely special to us because it is the day we went from being not parents to becoming parents. It’s a day I will never forget. The adoption of my other two kids takes a little more conscious remembering because they had been with us for 17 months as our foster children before their official adoptions. We do celebrations on those days, but I also talk with them about their addition to our family around the anniversary of the dates they came to live with us since those were very meaningful dates in their lives as well.
Photo by Rebecca Tredway
Outside the courthouse after Danny’s adoption
As far as your question, it’s something that hasn’t been an issue in our family yet. Our biological child is not yet two, so he really doesn’t have an idea about fairness. But, soon enough he will! My plan is that the way we celebrate is going to shift a little bit as the kids get older. Right now we make it a special day for the kids, similar to a birthday but without a party. We talk about it a lot, look through their adoption pictures, get them a little gift, make a special meal and have a special dessert. I see us shifting this from a celebration of each individual kid to a celebration of our family. The day each of our children became official members of our family was a day of celebration for ALL of us and I’d like that to be the main focus. We may do less of the gifts and more of the activities that benefit our whole family: a trip to the zoo, a meal out together, or a family movie night, with still a lot of talk about our thankfulness at our child’s adoption and a rehashing of their history.
The reason this day has been very important to us isn’t just about celebrating their adoption, but about having an annual time where the kids know their adoption questions can get answered. We hope they know we are always happy to talk about these questions with them, but sometimes in the business of life these topics just don’t come up. On their adoption days we talk openly about their birthparents, the process of their adoptions, and the feelings all of us had. It’s been interesting to hear the kids talk about how they felt at the time of their adoptions, even though they were generally too young to have conscious memories. I see the “memories” they come up with as their own way of processing what that experience was like for them and it’s very enlightening. These are experiences we wouldn’t have if we didn’t take the time to talk it all through.
I also think that while it’s important for us to realize that celebrating an Adoption Day may feel unfair to our biological child, there is already a great unfairness in our family that we can’t correct. It’s unfair that my adopted kids don’t get to live with biological relatives. It’s unfair that they will have questions I can’t answer. It’s unfair that they suffer for choices their birthmothers made while they were pregnant. It’s unfair that a very private part of their history is obvious to anyone when we go out together as a family. If there’s a little unfairness to our biological child a couple times a year as we attempt to honor what our other kids go through because of their adoption, I think as Joel gets older he will understand that unfairness in the proper context.
I’d love to hear from other adoptive parents or adoptees about how they handle this issue! Leave your thoughts in the comments. (I loved this recent post from my friend Tara about embracing her Adoption Day as an adult.)
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