Open Adoption Bloggers Roundtable 27: The First Time

The Open Adoption Roundtable is a series of occasional writing prompts about open adoption. It’s designed to showcase of the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community. You don’t need to be listed at Open Adoption Bloggers to participate or even be in a traditional open adoption. If you’re thinking about openness in adoption, you have a place at the table. The prompts are meant to be starting points–please feel free to adapt or expand on them.

Write a response at your blog–linking back here so your readers can browse other participating blogs–and link to your post in the comments here. Using a previously published post is fine; I’d appreciate it if you’d add a link back to the roundtable. If you don’t blog, you can always leave your thoughts directly in the comments.

For this session’s Roundtable, Heather asks about this:

I’m still thinking quite a bit about memories and the different ways we preserve them for the generations following us. I thought we’d try a memory-oriented prompt for this round. Feel free to interpret “first meeting” and make a connection to your adoption experience however you’d like.

Write about a first meeting.

There have been a lot of “first meetings” in our adoption. The first time we met M and S, the first time we met her cradle care family (and the last), the first time we met M’s parents.

This is about the first time we met A.

We had been told that A looked “like the Gerber baby”. Her mother was gorgeous (we hadn’t meet her father before then), so I kind of figured that she’d be cute. I was completely unprepared for how beautiful she was. Long and slender and really beautiful (I might put a protected post up later with a baby picture). Not a whole lot of babies start out looking like much, but she looked exactly like a baby doll.

M insisted on being there to put her into my arms. I can’t imagine how brutal that was for her – it was only 2 hours after she and S had signed their TPR papers in court. It was amazing and terrifying for me. I figured I’d drop her. I smiled at her, and she stared at me with her huge dark brown eyes. We said hello to each other, and I gave her to Mr. Evil. She snuggled into his arms and fell asleep.