Open Adoption RoundTable #27: 10 Summers Ago…

The instructions for this edition of the Open Adoption RoundTable are to

Write about a first meeting.

We have been given free reign to, “interpret “first meeting” and make a connection to your adoption experience however you’d like. ”  (Although hasn’t Heather left me unsupervised on twitter enough times by now to know I should never be given free reign…ever)  Since I was under the influence of some pretty heavy post c-section medication during my first in person meeting with J&M and since the 10 year anniversary of our first phone call is this month that phone call meeting is the one I’m going to talk about.

I may have written about this before but how many of you have really read every post I’ve ever written? And my archives are so disorganized I can’t even begin to dig through them to find anything (although I did just get reminded that I’ve apparently been blogging here since 2007 wow)  So if you’ve heard this story,  I apologize…but I’ll let you in on a little secret I tend to apologize when I’m not really sorry when I’m sorry, I say I’m sorry. 😉

It was July 2001. I’ll admit M wasn’t the first potential adoptive mother I spoke to, but had I gone with my gut instead of letting others have a say she would have been.  (but thats a story for another day)

The conversation was awkward at first. For me it was because of my general hatred of phone calls, plus the anxiety of trying to impress this woman, plus having had recent bad experiences on similar calls.  I can only imagine the nerves on her end.  Despite the nerves we talked for hours.   HOURS.  Or maybe it just felt like hours, but i’m pretty sure it was actually hours.

I don’t even remember all that we talked about.  We talked about family, life experiences, likes and dislikes. Specifically I remember that we both had taken modeling classes at about the same age, 13 or 14, something like that at the same modeling school. (Not the same location, but the same brand).   It was weird, but even then at the age of 18 I felt like M was an older version of myself.  She is a social worker, and while I hadn’t settled on social work yet it was definitely on the short list, how could it have not been I was recruited to be a peer mediator in grade 5.  By the end of the call I was convinced that I wanted her to adopt me.  Since that wasn’t an option I decided that if I wasn’t going to be my son’s mom I wanted M to be his Mom.

Looking back I wish I’d known that Kidlet was going to be 2 weeks early and that J&M were going to have to rush to catch a flight and still not make it out west before the birth.  I wish I would have known that I’d end up having to have an emergency c-section and then spend a great deal of time medicated and recovering.  I wish I’d known that my first chance to visit them wouldn’t be until Kidlet was turning 5.  Had I known these things maybe there would have been some way for a face to face meeting prior to the birth.  But, thats not how things worked out.

Regardless I will always cherish my phone call meeting with M.

I can’t believe it’s already been ten years.

Click back over to Open Adoption RoundTable #27  to read about other first meetings in open adoption.