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I reunited with my son, R, in Jan 2007, through a profile he posted on this web site two years prior. He is 36 now, married with three beautiful children. My husband and I flew cross-country to meet them in August, and spent nearly a week getting to know them (we stayed at a B&B close by). Two months later, in October, R flew out to see us, and to meet his brother, sister, nephew, cousin, g-aunt and g-uncle. It was great, and we are already planning our visits for next year. Initially, R waited to tell his amom about our finding each other until we had a chance to establish a relationship. He did tell both his amom and asis (his amom's biodaughter) before he flew out to meet his bfamily. Unfortunately, R's adad passed away shortly after we made contact and did not know of our reunion. Since R's trip out here last month, his amom, asis and I have been in email contact. They both have welcomed me warmly, and have been very kind and accepting. Amom told me that she had been looking for me for a very long time, and asis also stated that her mom had been searching for me ever since she could remember. We are still in the beginning stages of getting to know each other, but things are working out well and we are planning a multi-family reunion for next year, so we can all get to know one another even better. Perhaps things are working out well for us because R is a grown man with a family of his own, and there are no "ownership" issues, for lack of a better word. In fact, amom's first email to me had for the subject line: "R's other Mom" and I was deeply touched by that. She told R about me when he was young, she shared all the info about me that she had, and she helped him search for me. It feels really comfortable... like all of us are getting more family members. Amom came from a very small family, who are now deceased. My extended family is huge, and we're excited that it's getting even bigger. I've been searching around the forums for stories of successful relationships between all members of the triad, where the adoptee is now an adult and where the adoption had been from the closed era. I really haven't found any, though. Are we all blazing trails here? Charting unknown waters? Is there anybody out there who has experienced post-reunion bonding between both families from the closed era? Does anyone have some experiences to share? I never thought love could get so big... Peace, Susan :flowergift:
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Congratulations on all of your great reunions! I hope that I can share the same. It helps to know that there are adoption triads without a lot of issues. I have no idea where the reunion with my birth daughter will lead as we have just started contact after many years of not having any. I went from excitement to pure panic today thinking that maybe we are meeting too quickly, so your reunion stories have put my mind at ease.
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Thanks, ssshhh! I hope your reunion with your daughter, her new baby and afamily goes well. It's important for us to share the positive outcomes of reunion, and I'm glad you found a bit of comfort in reading these stories. Hopefully, we'll add more stories... who knows... perhaps we may find your story here as well. Good luck, ssshhh!Best wishes,Susan
Thanks for your post, Mil... Sharing the grandchildren is awesome, for sure!Congratulations on the pictures, too. Amom commented on the pictures taken in October of R with his nfamily... how happy we all looked. I'm looking forward to having pictures taken next year of all of us -- nfamily, afamily and the son we share.Love,Susan
Bonita, thanks for posting. I hadn't thought about this thread for a while. I think it's so good to share positive stories of reunion since it's so easy for us to dwell on the negatives of adoption. I still find myself "waiting for the shoe to drop" since my relationship with D and his family has been so positive. Part of me is afraid I'll screw things up by over analizing everything and looking for possible negatives.
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I jsut spent 25 minutes typing my little heart out about how much I love my bdaughter's parents and how great things are going an the site keeps requiring me to log in and I lost my entire post...anyway, I will try to get on her later, I'm super busy at work and have goofed off most of the morning already... peace, LSM
okay, so I've got access to the interweb once again! Hurrah! I'm using a loaner laptop and it's driving me crazy cuz all my passwords are on a spreadsheet since I don't have my own laptop (it's in the shop, needs a motherboard! Gah!) SO, I had typed my little heart out yesterday with my version of Big Love and then lost everything! Ugh! I probably won't recall the whole thing here, just a brief synopsis...I've got too much housework to do... So, here's why I will love LSs parents til the day I die...Those 2 ppl showed more compassion to me over the last 21 years than all of my friends and family members combined over the course of my lifetime. I aspire to be as compassionate as they have been. (For full details of my reunion so far, you'll have to read my journal on my page...it's up to date as of 1/5/08) Not only did they start from a young age telling LS what they knew of me, but they also made it a practice to include me in all their prayers. They shared every bit of info they had on me with LS, to include non-ID documents that included a statement I had written as part of the paperwork (I was only 17 at the time, typical selfish, know-it-all teenager so this surprised me even) about how I felt getting pregnant was a HUGE mistake for me but that I didn't consider the baby a mistake at all. LS has said that she drew great comfort and consolation from this. She has reassured me that she didn't have the abandonment issues many adoptees have and she attributes it mainly to these factors. (oh, let me also interject that after the first f2f I had with LS and my son, when her parents came to pick her up, her mom hopped out of the car and told us that she didn't want to interfere with our meeting, but that we were crazy if we thought she was going to miss the chance to hug me since she had been waiting 21 years to do just that. It was one of the bestest hugs I've ever had!) Anyway, LS did the search on her own, but with the full support of her family. I think it was wise of her to wait until she was nearly 21, and emotionally more mature than at 18. I think it has contributed greatly to our success thus far. I'm still waiting for my son to embrace the idea that LS is his sister. He is difficult to read, keeps things to himself. He doesn't think they have anything in common. But he's only 16 so there's plenty of time to grow their relationship. I keep reassuring him that he is still my boo, will always be the love of my life, and that nothing could replace the love I have for him in my heart. I hope he gets that! LS and I have spent a lot of time together...nearly every week since Xmas. It helps that she only lives 15minutes away. I'm so glad she moved back from college before she contacted me...I think I'd be crawling out of my skin if I was still waiting to meet her. I read these stories on here about ppl that exchange emails and phone calls for years without f2f and I think, my God, I'd never make it! I really never contemplated a reunion. It hit me broadside, never saw it coming. I would never have initiated it. I think I always thought I'd closed the door on that. I'm getting adjusted to the broad range of emotions I'm dealing with now...it's work, but I'm up for it. I feels such immense gratitude toward LSs parents for bringing her up to be such a wonderful young woman. I'm having a blast getting to know her. She went with me Sunday to a late gathering of aunts and uncles and cousins for Xmas gift exchanging and visiting. Most of them didn't know about her til we got there. It was like, who's that? oh, that's LSMs daughter...Oh, that's cool...wow, she looks just like this relative or that relative...and then the rest of the afternoon it was like she'd always been a part of it all... It was really interesting tho, cuz all these years, I've sorta felt like I didn't quite fit in with my family. I've always felt a little off...not quite one of them, ya know? Not quite on equal ground. Sunday, walking in there with my daughter, (my son was already there, spent the night at one of the aunt's house) I felt elevated. I felt complete. When it was time to go and I said, hey kids, are you ready to go? I just got all warm and fuzzy...I was in la-la land the rest of the night! It was such a high... (not that I'm claiming to be her mom, she already has one of those...I'm trying really hard to respect the boundaries...it's just that this maternal thing keeps getting in the way! lol) So, anyways, the point of all of this is that LSs mom and dad were so excited to meet my family and they can't wait til we have an opportunity to get together with all the aunt's and uncles and cousins on both sides and have a big family party...My family didn't grow by just one, it grew by leaps and bounds...I'm looking so forward to seeing where this goes! LSM
I just was reunited with my birth son on Sunday. I haven't seen him face to face. My family and I plan on traveling to meet him on Feb. 15. His AMom is so wonderful. When I first spoke to her on the phone she said,"we have been waiting for this call for a long time". They also have been searching for me for some years. I am so excited. He is 22 now. His Amom e-mailed me a picture of him. He looks so much like my younger son, it's amazing. God has truly shown me favor and given me another dose of his unfailing mercy and grace. Charmaine jabezfaith@sbcglobal.net
1st a quick update on how my family is growing...LS and I are spending so much time together, I have to keep pinching myself...it just doesn't seem like I did anything to deserve such a gift, but that's what God's grace is all about, isn't it? We IM at least every other day...and we see each other almost once a week or more...I'm so friggen happy! Also, she and I have devised a plan to get her and my son to spend some quality one on one time together to see if that will help him to feel more comfortable with the whole thing. She is going to drive him home from school one day a week. They are going to stop for lite meal and hopefully chat it up a bit, get to know each other without my influence...When I told him I had an appointment and she would get him home, he just shrugged and said OK...no protest, not freak out...fingers crossed, silent prayer, wish us luck! So, on to my survey...just wondering what part the geographical locality of reunited families has on the BIG LOVE...Does it make things easier/harder or not much affect at all? LS and I are only 15 minutes apart...so we have a lot in common concerning local hang-outs and venues and shopping and such...(we've even wondered out loud how many times we were in the same place at the same time without knowing it!) I think being so close, geographically, gives us a greater opportunity to be really casual when we get together. There's no urgency to our visits...it's like, we've got all the time in the world to muddle thru the details...Although, we've shared soooo much already. Also, we were able, in the beginning, to meet on neutral ground, at locations we were both familiar with... Just wondered how others reunions were affected by this... LSM
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Charmaine, welcome to the rollercoaster of reunion! LSM, I think there are many variables that affect reunion. I think that proximity can indeed be helpful. There's not as much pressure to pack so much into a single f2f. All our times together have been in home of one or another of us: mine, D's, my daughter's. My dad and I did go out to dinner with D's parents. (Ironically, D's dad was the pastor of the congregation where I grew up. He invited me to preach and lead worship and then several of us went out to eat. We went to the restaurant where my family often ate on Sundays when I was growing up.)D still hasn't met any of my siblings although he lived next door to my sister for about 6 months. (Her schedule was such that he never saw her, although he and my BIL had an uncomfortable relationship... I don't think he's in a hurry to "meet" him as Uncle L. My kids have assured him that they wouldn't want to live next door to him either!)
LSM: I sure wish there was not so much distance between us, but it seems that we are making good progress anyway. If we lived closer, you'd better believe that we'd be seeing much more of each other, that's for sure. On another note... I have been corresponding via email with R's amom (G) and asis (K, who is amom's ndaughter), and things are going great. In fact, G had a dozen roses delivered to me on R's 37th birthday last week -- I was so touched by this rare act of kindness. The card that accompanied the roses said: "Today I celebrate you as I celebrate R's birthday." R's sister, K, is a truly wonderful person and I am enjoying so much getting to know her. There are some weeks where I correspond with K more than R! I can't wait for the children I raised to meet her -- she just feels so much like a member of our family, and she and I haven't even met F2F yet! I embrace K as one of my children, just like G and I share the grandchildren. The love just keeps getting bigger and bigger! Peace, Susan
Susan, That's so great to hear! I've been off the boards for a while and letting our reunion simmer a little. I was getting far too much anxiety from some o fthe nightmare stories...I don't even watch the news anymore, I'm just so sensitive to heartbreak and such... It's nice to hear that it's going so well for you. I was having a conversation with LS's mom a couple weeks ago (our first conversation mono e mono) and I mentioned my anxiety and how I stopped visiting the boards and she said she thought one of the reasons there are less happy ending stories is that for the reunions that are going well, the reunioners are busy enough to not to need to dwell and so not as many happy endings end up getting broadcast...but with the sad reunions, there's a lot of dwelling and so they vent on the boards and so there are more sad stories... For those of you with a sad story, I sincerely hope and pray that you will find some peace. It tears me up inside to hear about the injustices. It always amazes me just how ugly humanity can be... As an update, things are going pretty well...I think cold weather has most of us retreated to the comfort of our cozy homes. I'm hoping that as it warms up, we will be able to become more active. My son and LS went to a recruiting event at her college. It turned out to be quite the lame affair according to both accounts...but there was a silver lining...my son came home determined to not have to go to the community college. He has a new motivation to get his grades up and get into a better school! lol He's even joined the track team at school! I'm hoping it doesn't fizzle out too soon and that he's able to stick with it... LS's sweetheart is coming home from school today so I'm figuring I won't see much of her over the next couple of weeks...but now that we are all in this together, I no longer have those pangs of fear that she is regretting finding me! lol Take care and God Bless! LSM
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I have experienced a similar situation. My son is 27 years old, and we just reunited in December. Since that time, we have spent Christmas and New Years together, and I have flown out to NJ to meet his a-family. They are very nice people and I love them for the love and caring they gave to my son. I too feel like my family has grown. I love his family, I love his sisters, I love his parents. He loves to tell people he has two moms, and I call his amom his mom but I'm his mom too and he calls us both mom-it is weird but great. However I have been learning some things about his aparents that worry me, this is from my son's fiancee, who does not like them much so I am just hanging back and trying to assess the situation without making snap judgments. I met them and loved them but they have made some worrisome choices regarding my son (but of course who hasn't made errors in judgment when you are parenting). They are older, in fact they are as old as my own parents, so there is a bit of a generation gap there. I do love them and we are as we like to say one big dysfunctional family. My kids call his sisters their aunts, so we are like a big crazy family too-it is crazy..
What a wonderful thread! This is my first time wondering through here and everything I've read feels warm and supportive. I'm a bmom who was found Oct 07by my 37 yo son, P. We've emailed bunches, spoken a few times and met f2f for a few hours over Thanksgiving. In March, P and his wife had a daughter. He called as they went to the hospital and a couple of hours after she was born, to let me know the news. I definitely feel in the loop. Now I'm feeling scared again. I'm going to visit them and stay with them (YIKES!) and I don't even know what he'd call me in introductions. I am working at staying in the here and the now, breathing deeply, resting, eating well. You all know the drill. Wish me luck and I'll report back after the trip. You may hear from me again before I leave next week if all those good for me things don't feel like they're working to stave off the terrors.