“Write a book” she says.

Therapy is an absolutely wild ride, friends. Seriously. You just never know what is going to happen when you walk in those doors sometimes.

If you read my post from last night, you know that I was stressing out about it because I felt like there was just so much to talk about and work through. But it just isn’t realistic to cover that amount in a 2 hour period. When I walked in, she asked if “there was anything I wanted her to read”. I laughed and said heck no, we’re not just going to jump straight into that. Then we sat on the floor and colored because she could probably tell my anxiety or whatever was fighting against me. That helped because I usually just start blurting things out at that point.

One of the things that’s been on my mind a lot lately is my son. No, not the two that I parent, but my birth son. He’s 7, and, well….I don’t know.

I don’t write about it often because I honestly don’t know what to say about it, so I just don’t. I’ve written a few posts about him, but it always leaves me feeling so emotionally drained and vulnerable.

My two boys that I parent are almost 5 and 3. My 5 year old is very smart and emotionally aware of probably way too much.

Our adoption situation is probably a bit unique..but I guess everyone’s is to a certain extent. It’s a closed adoption on paper but really it’s considered to be “semi-open”. We see pictures of him and are in contact with his parents and can contact each other whenever we want, but there are no visits or anything like that.

I never know what to say to him

I guess all that is to say, my (almost) 5 year has some questions. My son knows he has a brother, he sees his pictures all the time, and he knows he doesn’t live with us. He doesn’t understand why he doesn’t live with us, and he misses him all the time. He doesn’t understand why his brother doesn’t come here, he doesn’t understand why we can’t just call him and talk to him and ask him “what he’s going to be for Halloween”.

I don’t know how to explain this to him. I don’t know how to offer him the information he deserves, while keeping it age appropriate and still respecting myself and my own boundaries. (Whatever you tell a child, they are likely to repeat to everyone around them.)

My kids love books. We get a lot of teaching and learning moments through books. However, there are absolutely NO books on adoption from OUR side of the triangle. Guys, it’s a freaking triangle. There are 3 SIDES. Why are we only ever telling the story from the adoptees and the adoptive families perspective?

It’s very frustrating and hurtful. For every child that has been adopted, well, that child has a birth family. Possibly birth siblings. And all of our feelings are valid and huge and should be part of the story. All I want to do is read my son a book from a child with a similar perspective. So he can have something to help him grasp and understand this very big part of his life. But that just does not exist.

So we talked about this in therapy, and I told her how I was talking about this with my husband, and my husbands response was “so you write one”.

Well, she loved that idea just a little too much. Somewhere along the way, this turned into tasking me with the huge job of writing a book from a perspective (my perspective) that just doesn’t seem to exist.

First of all, I don’t feel like I’m in any way qualified to share my opinion (in a form other than a blog, I guess). I’m not special, I’m not a great writer… but I think more honestly, I don’t want to.

I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to feel it. Over the weekend I started writing a mini adoption series for on here, but that lived and died in my drafts folder. It’s just so hard to work through, and every emotion I feel is felt and voiced through muted filters. When it comes to this topic…I feel like there is only so honest I can be about it.

I think I’m afraid to open up that emotional can of worms.

(Oh, and by the way, it didn’t rain.)