I've been learning about the losses of adoption and "The Family that Came with the Frame"

Posted March 31/2010

For about the past week I have neglected my postings because I have thrown myself into collecting information for someone else this past week - my little unassuming two-year-old.

Ever since Christmas, I've had this frame hanging on my wall. I went ahead and hung it up for its own protection. It was just a matter of time until one of the kids started using it to surf down sofa cushions or something equally as puzzling and hazardous. It has kind of become part of the scenery. It didn't have pictures in it. Well, it didn't have any of our pictures in it.

There's just the family that came with the frame.

And every time I walked by it, I felt this tugging sadness.

The family looks so happy.

They're playing together at the park.

Little Girl is reading a book and blowing bubbles with Mom,

 and riding on Dad's shoulders.

It looks like the sort of family my adopted daughter could have had.

A protective, attentive father. A nurturing mom. A brother to romp around with.

It breaks my heart because all the pieces are there
- a mother, a father, even a brother.
But her family didn't work. It was fragmented and broken.

The person I know best in The Family that Could Have Been is her brother. We had the great honor of being his foster family before she was born. He is the reason she is our daughter. We took in a two-year-old boy for a short-term placement and ended up fostering and adopting his newborn sister.  People thought we were crazy signing up for an additional two-almost-three-year-old. (Our biological daughter was two-almost-three at the time, too.)  And they thought we'd completely lost it when his sister wound up in foster care and we took her in, too. We thought it was crazier to say no - this was his little sister! No way we'd want to be the ones to split them up if they could be together. But then Big Brother was sent to the East Coast to live in a kinship placement. And little Koda was left behind with us. She was a year old when the court terminated the rights of the other family member we knew best - her birth mother.

In the two years I have known our daughter's first mother, I've thought she was a difficult person to nail down. She loves her kids. She would even die for her kids. If there were an out-of-control bus careening toward her kids, I believe that she would rush to save them. But living for your kids, that's a lot harder demand to fulfill. There's no more sleeping in when baby's awake for the day. You have to drag your sleep-deprived self out of bed and fix her a bottle and change her diaper and get the day started. You have to provide stability with things like a place to live and food to eat and supervise baby while she plays. You have to locate and screen responsible people to look after your baby while you go out and earn the funds to make all those necessary things possible.

There are a lot of young mothers that pull it off. But it is a lot of responsibility and a lot of work and I think the siren call of a life run her own way was just too hard for her to ignore. Why work flipping burgers when you can make easier money other ways? And she was fighting the lure of the wrong kind of friends, the wrong kind of "partying", the wrong kind of guy - that assured her that it was ok for her to do her own thing. I remember once when there was a well-baby appointment she was going to attend. I kept waiting for her to show, and then right before doing the shots she arrived, drenched in sweat. Her boyfriend was going to drive her but he decided that she shouldn't go, so she walked the whole way to the hospital. She told me, trying to catch her breath, that her baby came first. It was one of the times that she really shone as a mom, and I will share that with her daughter some day.

Her birth father is another story. I never met him. I have no stories about any efforts he made to be a dad. The court contacted him with information about her, but it returned unacknowledged. I had only his distinctive name and an address. I watched the movie "The Blind Side" last Saturday. (My mom jokingly forbade us from watching it because she was sure we'd have an uncontrollable urge to adopt twenty more children. :) Anyway, there's a part when the main character was asked if he knew his father and he looked off in the distance and had remarked that he hadn't.

And so after I got done watching the movie I sat down at the computer and decided to do a search. I've been working on a family tree with her great grandma and thought it would be helpful if I had something more than question marks on her birth-paternal branch. I'd looked up his name before and it took me an hour before I found anything. I guess the plus side was that it's not a common name and I didn't have to filter through a lot of information about other people. I used to work at a newspaper and so I wielded my sleuthing skills to find some little blurb about an encounter with the authorities. But that was it. A tiny footnote. So this time, I sat down hoping maybe I'd find something more, that I'd think of some backroad way of finding information. Maybe I'd find out what high school he attended or information that would lead me to a birth certificate if I were lucky. I started with his name and city and was shocked to find immediate results. A few articles popped up right away. The little daughter in question wandered up to me and crawled up on my lap as the link opened.

It was an article on his homicide.

He'd been shot to death during some shady dealings.

I looked at my daughter and burst into tears.
"I'm so sorry, baby."

I had hoped to find something about her father and his story, and the only part I got was "The End." It just seemed so unfair. I spilled tears in her ears for the loss she's too young to understand yet.

I kept digging deeper and finding more information about him. Mostly it was a list of offenses against society. Which are numerous. And alarming enough that I would not have allowed him to be around her if he were alive. I printed all the information I found and put it in a sealed envelope for our little daughter to open someday when she's grown. I'll ease her into his story as she grows up so it's not some shocking revelation. But none of the information told me what his favorite food was. Or whether or not he used to pick bouquets of dandelions for his mom when he was a kid. It's a record of what he did, but not who he was.

In the meantime, I have filled the picture frame with our pictures.

There are pictures from the day she was born, with her mom and brother.

We were behind the camera that day.

There are pictures of her proud biological brother with his arm around her shoulder.

There are pictures of an adoring adopted sister "reading" books to her.

There are pictures of a protective, attentive Daddy

who gives her rides around on his shoulders

and pictures of a mommy who will stop everything

when she asks for a hug.

We may not have been the family she came with,

but we'll do our best to fill her life with lots of good memories.

And capture the moments in photos for her frames.

Being part of an adoptive family is a constant learning process.

I'll keep you posted as I learn more...