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So, I’m sitting here cranking along writing a thought provoking post about the role of parenting with adult adopted children when Tropical Storm Ernesto blows through my little tiny subdivision and knocks out our electricity–for hours! Although everything was completely back to normal by later on that very evening, it has taken me this long to make my way back to the computer to recover my thoughts. Argh! I hate it when stuff like that happens!
Of course, this post won’t even come close to communicating the deep and profound thouhts of the first. At least that’s how it tends to work for me whenever I lose something that I am working on. Still, I’ll give it my best.
I tend to be a slave to the saying, “write what you know.” Mostly because whenever I have veered too far off the path of what I know, it has been a disaster. Thus, much of my writing about adoptive parenting centers around parenting school age children and younger. I figure it will be a journey and as my children get older I’ll continue to write about the challenges and joys of parenting children of their ages.
Here lately, my thoughts have turned to what my relationship will be like with my children when they are adults. Like most parents I want to continue to have a healthy, loving, close relationship with my adult children without me being overly involved or critical. That’s one of the things that I actually liked about my parents after I was an adult. For all of their flaws, they were the best parents an adult child could possibly want. At some point I crossed a line in their minds that clearly indicated to them: okay that’s it, our job is done here. And with that they let go–completely. They were always there when I needed advice or support, but it usually came in the form of them asking me what I really thought, or what I really wanted. After I was an adult their message was clear. You can handle your own life. Eventually, you will figure it all out. We have raised you that way. They were pretty much right.
I have many friends and colleagues whose relationships with their parents are very strained, primarily because of inteference (real and perceived) from them. The conflict and hostility that emerges sometimes reaches unbelievable levels. I wonder what things will be like for my own children after they become adults. Where my daughters are concerned, I wonder if they would be especially vulnerable to feeling resentful of any perceived intrusion into their lives by me simply because they are adopted. In other words, would the reality of adoption in some way give them a trump card to play, the adult equivalent of “you’re not my real mother” so don’t try to tell me how to run my life.
When I hear some of my friends griping about their very intense conflicts with their biological parents they sometimes sound as if they wished that their parents were not their parents. How does that play out when, in fact, you are not your adult child’s biological parent? Do they go there?
