We celebrate our kids a ton in our home. Adoption day, gotcha day, and my newly invented break even days are all celebrated along with birthdays of course. We recently celebrated Tripp’s “break even” day, which was the day the scales had tipped and he had been out of foster care longer than he was in it. Jon will celebrate his break even day in 2023. We also celebrate adoption day—the two days our sons were legally ours.
Our adoptions were complicated. Tripp’s adoption was massively complicated. The make your head spin and need a flow chart kind of complicated. But yes, we celebrate. And, if you think celebrate is the wrong word, I get where you’re coming from, but it’s the word we’re going to use for now as it works for our family.
We celebrate the day we met our children for the first time. That is our gotcha day. We brought Tripp home at 8 days old and Jon at 5 days. Even though we wouldn’t adopt until much later, we fell in love with the boys at first sight.
We didn’t start fostering with the intent to adopt. Adoption was always in the “someday” plan. Adoption from foster care is crazy and a bit surreal. You take a 30 hour class and complete a homestudy. You also must complete a mountain of paperwork and what feels like about 102 signatures. The whole training and the goal of foster care is reunification so we anticipated and supported any child entering our home to one day leave at the expense of our hearts. For our six other children, they one day were able to reunify. For our two sons, the road to termination was bumpy. Ryan and I always supported the current goal of the case, even if doing that was hard and emotional.
Once termination was reached, it’s a whole other road getting to adoption day. In some cases, court policies and laws actually delay permanency which is so detrimental to the child. (That’s a whole other blog post.) Sometimes, things like a global pandemic will delay cases. Adopting from foster care is so long and hard. Sometimes it felt so impossible.
(Side Note: If you want to solely adopt…do not foster first. Either foster children past termination or adopt in another venue. Foster parents should support reunification until the court says it’s not possible.)
Getting to adoption day is a journey. It’s an emotionally taxing, exhausting, sometimes nearly impossible journey. That is why we celebrate adoption day. Adoption day is the end of the journey.
Gotcha day is the start of the journey. Sometimes the journey is reunification which in most cases is so appropriate and exciting. In Tripp and Jon’s cases, gotcha day signified the start of the journey to one day being a family.
We have two gotcha days. August 25th and October 19th. No matter where life takes us or how old they get, I will always pause on those days and remember the significance of starting the long journeys to adoption day.
Adoption is always complicated.
Those days also remind me of what my boys have lost. So, yes we celebrate the day our journey started, but I also understand that those days also mark significant loss in both of their lives. It was the day they lost their connections to their birth families. It was the day that they experienced more loss as infants than anyone should ever have to at all. Even if they are unaware of it now, those days do signify pain and heartbreak. My children were born into an absolutely chaotic and unfair world. So, as they grow, I understand that celebration may just be acknowledging or nothing at all. We really lack a word in the English language for the inbetween.
We celebrate gotcha days in a low-key way. We eat cookies and read their special books I wrote to them after adoption. We spend time together as a family. It’s not big and crazy, just acknowledging that our journey did have a beginning.
I also understand if that term in some cases can be offensive. Those stories and cases are heartbreaking. In our case, it works for now. My kids are both toddlers, so right now everything we do is parent lead. My kids know they are adopted…but do they understand what that really means? Probably not. One day, when they are old enough, we will take their lead. One thing that is important to understand is that adoption can be all of the following simultaneously: beautiful, tragic, complicated, joyful, heartbreaking, a gift.
So yes, even if it is complicated, we do celebrate our boys gotcha days.
Koko