Adoption Blogs

My seventeen-year-old son eked out passing grades and has finished his junior year of high school. Yesterday he started a summer-session welding program at the local applied technology college. He's actually excited, dare I say happy? They told him at orientation that he can make $62,000 a year starting out with a certificate in welding. Face shining, he told us the good news then added, "See? I told you I would have a Lamborghini!" Ah youth. Wait until he gets his first electric bill. But I digress. His first love is woodworking. He made the guitar pictured in the photo above during Wood Shop last semester. I asked him to take Auto Mechanics last year and to try welding to see if… [more]

A lot has been happening on the home front these days. There was my “Easter surprise” in which I had an unexpected 9 day luxury vacation with meals delivered bedside and round the clock attendants. Okay, okay, the attendants were nurses and the food was hospital food but it was still extremely relaxing. While I was on my luxurious "spa" vacation, I got hired for the second job. This was only day 2 of my stay so I optimistically still expected them to walk in and say, "Our mistake, you're perfectly healthy. So I said, "yes" to the job. I started work a week after coming home from the hospital. Just prior to that unexpected sojourn I had begun applying for jobs. It… [more]

Well dearies, I'm back. I've been on a little adventure that reminded me once more, I'm no "spring chicken."'In March, I caught a cold. At least I thought it was a cold. I coughed a lot, my chest hurt, I was out of breath and I was exhausted. Toward the end of the third week, I realized my heart was doing this weird thing it has done before, beating out of rhythm. It has done this off and on for years but this time it was very distracting. I seemed to afternoon, I had "rest" from folding a load of clothes. At that point, I realized I'd better go get it checked out. I called my doctor who, sounding alarmed, said I… [more]

My heart is breaking for my daughter tonight, and at the same time, I'm just sick over her behavior toward yet another girl that could have been a friend but for Kaylyn's actions. The latest incident started when a nice girl at school let Kaylyn borrow a cool pair of tennis shoes for an activity on the last day of school. So far so good. The problem started when the girl left school early that day, and Kaylyn in her infinite wisdom decided to leave the shoes outside the girl's locker. Not bring them home and return them later. Leave them out in the open among hordes of kids on the last day of school. I'm sure you can guess where this… [more]

It's an incredible thing, the way your body remembers things that you thought you had forgotten. You'll hear a lyric on the radio, and suddenly, you are transported to another time, a memory reflecting in the walls of your mind. Sometimes it's a smell, or a texture, occasionally, the memory can surprise you. Other times it can be more predictable, because it's a date, something you know is coming- a birthday, an anniversary. This year, my son turned ten. I expected his birthday to be hardest, and I prepped myself for the emotional onslaught that is usually attached with the day. However, the day came and went with little notice for me. I celebrated him in my own ways, as I always do, and I still felt that deep sense of… [more]

I found a note in my daughter's jeans the other day while I was doing laundry. It was from a girl at school and basically called Kaylyn out for being a fake friend, accused her of not really caring and only talking to the note's author because she didn't have anyone else to talk to. Put together with Kaylyn ditching her ride at the dance to go hang with the "cool" girls, the light came on for me. Apparently, like all of us, Kaylyn prefers fun, interesting, happy, dare I say cool people. Unlike most of us, however, she hasn't yet realized that sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes you get stuck at the boring people table. Suddenly it all made sense, the… [more]

Today, my son is ten. In fact, on this evening, ten years ago, I was sitting in a hospital room, with a good friend, eating dinner, while he convinced me that I should name my son after him. After all, he had been there when I found out I was pregnant, and had been ready to tell everyone he was the father, too. He wasn't, but his devotion to me, and to my son was sweet. He just wanted to make me smile; and I did, for the most part when he was around. The rest of out my hours were spent crying. Those hours turned into night, and into day, and then night again, and suddenly, it was time for me to… [more]

My darling, sweet, totally socially clueless fifteen-year-old daughter can't make (or keep) a friend to save her life. The more desperately she chases after friends, the faster they run. Just this week I got a call from a mother whose sixteen-year-old daughter (with her own schizo-affective sister and therefore a tender heart toward the friendless) had tried to reach out to my daughter. A little background: sixteen-year-old Tender Heart had witnessed an awkward situation between my daughter and two other girls (one of whom has bullied my daughter in the past). The cool girls were talking about going to a dance, and my darling, sweet, totally socially clueless daughter said, "Oh, fun, I want to come with you." The cool girls back-pedaled… [more]

In May, there is often a lot of focus on the adoption community mainly due to Mother's Day, and of course, Birthmother's Day. Myself personally, I don't celebrate Birthmother's Day.  Mother's Day is just one of those really tough days for me as mother who has relinquished. Beyond that, I struggle with the very idea that once a year, we should pay tribute to the women who had mothering roles in our life. I don't like that there is this expectation, one that I admittedly have and do participate in to a degree, that we shower our mother's with extravagance, and devoted love, on just one day. We should be doing our best to honor our mother's throughout the year. Nothing fancy… [more]

So I gave my seventeen-year-old son the driver's wheel on his high school education. Not because I wanted to, but because what I was doing wasn't working. Supervising him closely and catching all his missing assignments for him to complete just caused him to lie to me and let me be his safety net. With the counselor's agreement, I took my hands off the wheel, and he is succeeding or failing on his own. Initially he became uber-responsible, skipping lunch at Arby's with his friends so that he could go to the library and catch up on work. He came home a week ago saying he no longer had an F in History. I asked him how he managed that. He said he… [more]