My grandfather passed away last weekend and I just returned from a very short in time but long in distance road trip. My grandparents live in rural; I mean very rural, small town middle America. They have lived there their whole lives. They know everyone in their small town and most likely we are related in some form or another. I met or was reintroduced to people I did not remember, whom I have not seen since I was a small child. Several of the introductions included this, "Oh you're the granddaughter with the boys who are adopted." Yep, we've been branded. I'm sure my grandparents probably mentioned to one or two people we were adopting and like talk in a small town, it spread like wildfire. It doesn't bother me that people associate my family with adoption; we are actually kind of proud of it. We hope we put to rest wrong information people sometimes have about adoption.
One misconception I heard a few times this weekend during my mingling was, "Oh those boys are so lucky to have you." I always and I mean always without fail like to correct this one. I respond, "No, we're the lucky ones." We are the lucky ones because they had unselfish birth mothers. We are the lucky ones because we get to be their parents. We are the lucky ones because without adoption we never would have experienced parenthood. We are the ones who were blessed with them. We are undeserving, but we were rewarded.
I have to say I had a proud daughter moment too. I was standing next to my mom this weekend when a former classmate of hers made the above comment to us. My mom corrected her before I could, she said, "No we're the lucky ones because we got to be grandparents". Yeah Mom! She gets it too.
5 comments:
What a wonderful post! You are the lucky ones:)
Great post - sorry to hear about your Grandfather! I hope you have a nice time visiting with everybody.
That is awesome!! Great post!!
Sorry about your grandfather~
You are an amazing mom Anna-----what a great family you have. But I have to add...Brian is lucky to have found YOU=)
Sorry to hear about your grandfather.
Love you ALL. Sarah
You handled the situation with much more grace than I could (or did). When out of nowhere a woman came up to me at the visitation and asked if big fat baby was adopted all I could say was , "no" and then thought how incredibly rude when she wandered off in search for you all because she didn't get the gossip she wanted from us. Then I looked over and saw how you were patiently answering all her questions. So yes, we are lucky to have the boys in our family, but I think they are VERY lucky to have you as their mom.
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