Considering that my eyes and hair are brown while my little ones could not be more blond and blue as well as the fact that I talk to their mother at least weekly, you’d think that there would be no forgetting that I adopted rather than bore them.
You’d think!
And yet I was gobsmacked — gobsmacked, I tell you! — to find a friend request on Facebook recently from my son’s biological father’s long-time girlfriend. What in the world does she want from me? I wondered, clueless. Why would she want to be friends with me?
It was easy, all too easy to click the “ignore” button and carry on my merry Facebooking way but something nudged me to check if her photos were viewable to the world at large. They were, and in an album creatively titled “Family” I found scads and scores of images of my children. My children! And yet there they were, in a stranger’s photo album!
My friends, I’m somewhat chagrined to tell you that I stewed over this. I agonized, I fretted, I brooded, before finally reason suggested that she likely feels the same about my children as I feel about their new baby sister, the spitting image of my kids who does not live with me. This is why she reached out to me, and why her albums are full of my children and their unknown siblings, and why her partner’s albums are similarly stuffed with a happy mix of clone-like little ones.
Why wouldn’t I be open to the possibility of some sort of relationship with the woman helping to raise my son’s siblings? I’ve done as much as I can do to further the goal of keeping the siblings on the maternal side of the family in contact. Shouldn’t I want the same for the siblings from the other branches of the genetic tree?
I took one last look at my children in her album and accepted her request.
Now, we’ll see how it goes.
Very strong woman. Strangly enough a very similar thing happened this week. I clicked accept, not for me but for the woman who lived as their other mom for a year before their father died. Strangly enough I felt she deserved nine years later to know they were well. I still dislike like the woman, but it is what it is.
Wow, your family is growing leaps and bounds!