My Christmas Story

Season’s Greetings my Blogville friends. I am sipping on a turmeric chai tea for it’s lovely aroma. I hope that you are, or will be, in the company of family and friends this time of year. 


Personally, the Christmas movies about family can make me laugh or cry depending on the feelings they touch at this time of year. I remember my childhood Christmases and they were happy times for the most part. I mean, everyone has that one Christmas that they did not get exactly what they hoped for, or get to do something they may have wanted to do. However, there were two things I remember that I always thought about at this time of year. 


First, I wondered about my first Christmas. I had been in foster care since my birth and would have just turned three months old on my first Christmas. Did I get any presents? Did I have a visit with Santa? Was there a photo of my first Christmas anywhere? My whole childhood prior to being placed with my parents at 9 months old remained a mystery that piqued my interest every year. 


Next, as I got older and understood more about what adoption actually meant, every Christmas I wondered what my birth parents were doing. I wondered if they had other children and if they got them presents. Did my birth parents get the kids that they liked enough to keep everything those kids had asked for? I wondered if they had other kids, did those kids know about me?


I also wondered about that birth ‘brother’ (who turned out to be a sister) that my parents were told my maternal birth grandparents kept (it turned out that this baby boy was actually an uncle born around the same time as my birth sister), but I digress, that was another story for another blog. My point is that I wondered if my birth mother got him a present and if she did, did she sign his tag/card as his sister or as his mother? 


Since my birth mother had relinquished her parental rights to me I was mostly sure she was not getting me a gift, despite my fantasies. But how was little kid me to know that for sure? This led me to wonder how she would sign my card/tag.


For some reason, I was pretty sure that my birth parents were not together but I still wondered if they thought about me at Christmas. I wondered if they too were wondering how my Christmas was, in the same way I was wondering about theirs. Were they wondering what I got for Christmas and if I was happy with my adoptive parents? I wondered why I couldn’t just call them and tell them I was ok. I felt like this was Jesus’ fault. I kept hearing stories of how Jesus was Joseph’s adopted son but Jesus kept talking to “God”. In my young mind, every Christmas, on his birthday, Jesus got to talk to his birth father. So, why couldn’t I talk to mine on my birthday or at Christmas?


I was raised Catholic, so Jesus’ story was very clear in my mind. I am sure you won’t be surprised to learn that I was more focused on his relationship with Joseph, who was not his ‘biological’ dad. I remember thinking how my dad was kind of like Joseph because he was not my ‘biological’ dad either but he sure acted like he was, just like Joseph did with Jesus. So I pretty much took it upon myself to believe that Jesus and I were both adopted. Well, technically his was a step-parent adoption, but still, I had something in common with Jesus.


There were other silly thoughts too when I was little. It didn’t happen often, but if I didn’t get something that I had wanted for Christmas, I would wonder if my birth parents would have bought me that longed-for gift. I would wonder if I lived with my birth parents, would I have to go to Midnight Mass? It feels like Christmas Eve was the only night of the year that I did NOT want to get to stay up late.


The Christmas season always had this tremendous magic. I mean, you could ask Santa for almost anything and he would make your wish come true. I’m sure I traumatized many Santas with my Christmas wish; to meet my birth parents. I am not one hundred percent sure but I feel like I remember the Santas would suddenly list a bunch of alternative ‘girl’ toys that I might like instead. In hindsight, growing up in a small town, half the Santas were probably guys that worked with my dad or were adoptive dads themselves. There were a lot of adoptive dads in my parents’ circle of friends. Leave it to me to make a fun activity extremely uncomfortable for those poor Santas.


Please do not misunderstand, I LOVED my parents. I think it was just that I had options; or thought I did. Christmas magic got into my mind and offered the impossible. Christmas, when all your dreams could come true!
Also, its not that I wanted to leave my parents, I just wanted to know who my birth parents were and if they thought of me too. I was both excited and terrified at the idea of meeting my birth parents, or about them finding out where I lived and coming to get me back. There was the feeling of being accepted by my birth parents, instead of having been abandoned, and being wanted by them, not unwanted, that was always there in a teeny tiny part of my brain and my heart. I guess I figured Santa and the magic of Christmas could sort that out for me.


You cannot put a price on the gift I continued to ask Santa for, information about my birth parents. If there had been a price, my parents would have gladly paid it. What price would you put on the gift of information for your child? My parents understood my curiosity, my wanting to know about my ‘roots’ if you will. My mother shared everything she knew; she simply was not told that much, nor was she given anything in writing. My mother would have gladly put a bow on the truth and shared it with me; such as the fact that I had a birth half-sister, and that the parental rights to her were also relinquished by our birth mother, and that my sister too had been adopted. My parents believed that I deserved to know the answers to the many questions I had, they simply did not know them.


It would have helped me to grow up knowing my ‘story’ as told to the agency by my birth mother. I grew up in a time where you raised adopted children ‘as if born to you’, as if no birth family members existed. But I was not born to my parents; my love for them, and a legal system made me their daughter. We grew in each other’s hearts and became a family through experience, not through blood. But make no mistake, we were a family, with our own story, I was just missing chapter one. 


One thing I would change in my story was the lack of information my parents were given about my birth family, and about my time in foster care before I came to live with them. This lack of information forced my parents to be evasive and for me not to trust that they really didn’t know the answers to my questions. How could a system give you a kid and not tell you anything about where that kid came from? Some of my friends who were adopted privately seemed to know a little bit more about their birth families than I did. It falsely led me to believe that if your adoptive parents ‘paid for you’, they received more information. 


So if I could give every adopted child a Christmas gift, it would be that they would arrive into their new parents’ arms with a full history of their birth families, both maternal and paternal. This would allow their adoptive parents to answer their myriad of questions, to share their medical history information, and to help them know why their birth parents let them go. 


Adoptive parents, please believe me when I say that this is your child, but that the child comes with a past, and that knowing this past, and sharing it with your child as they grow and mature helps you to raise a whole child into a secure and trusting adult. Biology caused this child to be born to their birth parents, but your dedication to the adoption process and to their adoption finalization has made them your child (lovingly and legally). Trust their love for you, it has grown through experience, if not through biology. Give them the gift of answering their questions to the best of your ability, do not be afraid because love should know no fear. Be their Santa Claus. 


Thank you for continuing to read my blogs and for your comments. Please feel free to continue to comment here or more privately using my email [email protected] 
These are your gifts to me all year, thank you. 
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I wish you a Merry Christmas (if it applies to you).