Yesterday

Hello Blogville friends! Welcome back, it is so nice to see you. This morning I am drinking a green tea as I write to you. As an adopted person I feel it is important to open up a dialogue about adoption topics (and sometimes other topics too) that impact on so many of us. 

Yesterday marked the day I was born into a world where people can just disappear from the lives of their babies. I apologize to my maternal birth half sisters for how I feel hurt by their mother, the woman who gave birth to them and kept them, perhaps they should stop reading here. I believe my other maternal birth half sister, also abandoned once she was born, will ‘get’ how I felt yesterday. I felt sad. 
Every year I grieve for what newborn me went through. Yesterday was no different. 

I have talked to you about this before. In my family we have a number of birthdays (husband, two daughters) that we gather to celebrate within a couple of weeks of each other and weeks before my date. We celebrate traditionally, dinner, cake, cards and gifts. I love that they can truly celebrate the day they joined, and were welcomed into their families! As I write this we are just coming out of their celebrations, while I was dreading my own. 

People say, forget what happened, we want to celebrate you! But for nine months I was really no one, belonged to no one, abandoned. How can I possibly forget that? September 22nd marks the beginning of my relinquishment and adoption journey.

I feel like developing a line of birthday greeting cards for people who have been adopted or maybe even in foster or kinship care. The cards would say things like:
*We know today might be hard for you but we are celebrating that you are part of our family. 
*I know today brings on hard feelings but I’m happy you are in my life. Celebrating YOU today!
*Its not about how you got here, we are celebrating that you did, and that you are a part of our family! 

The older I got, the more people who do not know my story think my evasiveness or avoidance of my birth date is about my age. I’m proud of my age, 67 years on the planet as of yesterday, because aging is a privilege denied to too many.

As I have previously talked about, I feel that my real life began on June 19, 1959 when I was placed with my parents at 9 months old. That was the day I joined my family, why doesn’t that date count instead?

As I’ve said before, when I suggested that our family celebrate my ‘birthday’ on June 19th each year my mom simply said, “You just want two birthdays.” In her defence, there was little to no training for adoptive parents back then. Also, the fact that my dad was usually gone hunting on my September birth date solidified that my actual birth date really meant nothing. 

Thankfully, today many adoptive families do celebrate the anniversary of the day the child joined their family, sometimes called ‘Gotcha Day’ ‘Family Day’ or ‘Welcoming Day’. 

Just to complicate even that scenario, infants, children, youth are all placed with their prospective adoptive parents on an ‘adoption probation’ period. It will be months before they are legally adopted. So, which date does the family celebrate, the placement date or the finalization date?

I remember something about a young girl that I had placed with a family when I was an adoption worker. That little girl kept a special coloured pen for the day she would sign her legal adoption papers. Now children don’t actually sign the legal adoption papers, or adoption order, a Judge does that. However, after a little chat with the Judge about this young girl’s plan, his clerk had ‘official papers’ for her to co-sign with the empathetic Judge. I can still see the pride on her face as she chose to be legally adopted that day. 

Adoptive parents, when your child is old enough, please consider having a conversation with them about celebrating their birthday and/or the anniversary of them becoming a family member. Trust me when I tell you it is not about having ‘two birthdays’. As adopted people we already feel different, we certainly do not want to stand out even more by having two ‘birthday’ celebrations. 

So I thank my family members and friends for understanding how I feel about ‘celebrating’ the anniversary of the date I was born. I know all of you just want to mark the day and I appreciate it, and your good wishes. However, it remains a date when I mourn for infant me (Yvonne Marie) and for my birth parents. As a result, June 19th will always be my real ‘birth’ date; because it marks the day that Lynn Etmanski was ‘born’.

Thank you for reading. As ever, if you have a comment, please feel free to leave it here. If you wish to comment more privately, please feel free to send me an email [email protected] 
Take good care of yourself and each other.