oa roundtable

The Open Adoption Roundtable is a series of occasional writing prompts about open adoption. It's designed to showcase the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community. Click here to link to what other bloggers are writing about this topic.

The instructions this time around are to write about open adoption and the holiday season.

I must admit that with my current reality of working part-time and becoming a mom I hadn't put much thought into the holidays and our open adoption. At the best of times I'm scattered at Christmas and this year has left me much more disorganized.

I had been thinking about how different the holiday season is this year with baby T -- pondering traditions we want to build as a family and how it feels to actually be a family this year. I'd been thinking about how this is T's first Christmas and how I want to make it a special experience for all of us. Then Heather's OA question brought me to a different place. Even though I think about T's birth mom all the time I hadn't fully thought through her holiday experience this year and how that will impact my own.

We have limited contact with J. We send monthly letters and pictures to our American agency who forwards them to her. We exchanged email addresses with J but except for a couple of texts in September we haven't heard from her. So I feel disconnected from J. Earlier this month I inquired at our agency if any of our packages to J have come back, none have, so I assume she is getting them. This is good news.

This week, D, T, and I went Christmas shopping for J and her daughter (T's half sister). We got them both special gifts that I'm pretty sure they'll love. I wish I could hand deliver the presents and see their expressions as they open them. But for now this is our reality. I hope things will change in the future and our contact with J will be more open. There are some good reasons why we have limited contact with J at this time but that doesn't make it any easier. She is a very real part of T and that makes her a pivotal member of our family.

Our experience of what family means and looks like is now different. So while we celebrate the holidays with mine and D's families, it will be apparent that an important part of our family is missing. It will be fulfilling to experience Christmas as a mom, but I am aware of another mom who will have a different Christmas holiday this year.