For a little while now my husband and I have been seriously discussing whether or not we will be closing our home once Sam's adoption is final. When I say closing our home, I mean not taking in any more children...even siblings to our boys. Before we would have told you we would do everything in our power to keep the siblings together...meaning we would always have a spot open if James or Sam had a sibling come into care, so they could grow up together. However, it was much easier to say and think that when only James lived in our home. That would have been easy...of course we would have taken his siblings in a heartbeat, but the fact is, his sibling never came into care...he stayed in the home with his birth mom. We had waited past the time frame they would check in on James' birth mom and then we waited several more months afterward before we opened our home for the second time and ended up with our precious little Sam. We wouldn't change that at all. We love both boys so incredibly much, and they are growing to love one another as well...in the way siblings do.
The dilemma is it is highly unlikely any of James' siblings will come into care, but there is a good possibility that Sam will have siblings come into care in the future. We don't want to create a situation where one boy has a blood sibling in the home...someone who looks so similar and shares the same history, and the other boy becomes the outcast. Of course I am not talking in the eyes of my husband and myself...I am talking only in the sibling relationships. We wonder what damage that would cause to the sibling relationships as the boys grow older. We wonder if one child will look at the two brothers who look similar and resent them because he cannot have that. We want our boys to love each other and treat each other as brothers do...whether they are blood related or not. This is hard to explain, and I don't know if my words are making sense to you.
In a way it reminds me of my dad (technically my step dad who adopted me, but I think of him as my dad) who when he married my mom ended up with three children whom he loved as his own. My parents talked about having kids together, but my dad choose not to because he was afraid his feelings for them would be different than his feelings for us, and he didn't want to create that environment in our home. In a way I think my husband and I are trying to protect the environment in our home through this difficult decision. We love our sons too much to add in unnecessary emotional pain if it can be avoided.
We cannot predict the future, obviously. Perhaps we are overreacting and everything would be fine if we took in a sibling. It may be that James and Sam choose to disassociate themselves from one another as they get older anyway...seeking out their birth families instead. Truth be told, they may very well do the same to my husband and myself. There is no way to know what the future holds, but in the meantime, we feel responsible to make decisions to protect our family and our home the best way we know how. And, in this situation, we have decided against taking in any siblings. Once Sam's adoption is final, we will be closing our home and moving forward in establishing our lives together without the involvement of the county or agency.
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