Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Our marriage had so many great moments during the years before I began to fall apart. One theme that was pretty constant was my attempting, and often succeeding, in making Ceecee’s dreams come true. There have been many small ones and a few big ones.
One that happened recently had nothing to do with me. Well, not on the surface anyway. Ceecee had put a baby up for adoption long ago and had set it up to be an open adoption. She had always kept in touch with the lawyer and made sure he had her current address and contact information at all times.
The parents were supposed to have agreed that whenever the child asked about her biological parents, she would be told and that it would be her choice to initiate contact, if she wanted to. Ceecee often talked about her and wondered when that contact would occur.
When the time came that the girl would be turning sixteen, we believed that maybe it would be soon, but nothing happened. Again, around and following her 18th birthday, we anticipated that we would hear something. No contact was made again.
We knew what her adopted name was and had made small attempts to see if there were any public records or a Facebook page that would allow us to simply see how she seemed to be growing up, but there was never anything that we found that told us anything. Our oldest daughter had tried to find her more than once, but everything had proven to be false trails.
Then, one day recently, Angie called and said that she thought this time she had really found her on Facebook. Ceecee wasn’t allowed to initiate contact, but there was nothing preventing Angie from messaging her. She sent a friend request, which was accepted.
About this time, Ceecee came up to me one evening, held out her phone and said, “Look at this.” She was showing me a picture and I said, “Why are you showing me a picture of Kasey?” (Kasey is our middle daughter.) Ceecee said, “That’s not Kasey.” I looked again and just said, “Wow!” The family resemblance was uncanny. There was no doubt she was a sister.
Finally, it got to where everything was out in the open and Ceecee and her long ago adopted daughter got to speak on the phone briefly the other night. It’s just been one more amazing highlight in this magical time of our lives. While I had no direct impact on this taking place, we’ve talked about how much different this might be if we hadn’t worked our marriage out.
They would still be biological mother and daughter, regardless. The fact that Ceecee is now stable, happy, and in a good place is so much better than the alternative, though. This isn’t going to change anyone’s life, but we anticipate visits and the building of some amount of relationship as time goes by. I can’t be happier to be a part of it