Skip to main content

Jane's 4th Birthday Party Pre-Event Anxiety

Here are all the things I'm worried about tomorrow:

  • Forgetting some food or serving item (100% chance that'll happen despite my lists, oh well).
  • The half-brother, age 13, who was uninvited after the girls cried and told me stories of him hurting them, coming anyway. If his grandpa (all the kids' maternal grandfather) brings him, despite our request not to...what do we do? Tonight I coached the girls that they can say, "NO!" loudly if he tries to pick them up or touch them and then say, "I'm going to get my mom!" (Sadly, Jane said, "sometimes he hurted me...but he still loves me!" Leading to a message from me about not letting people, even those who loves us, hurt us. Oy.
  • Grandma dragging out the good-bye and making an already emotional day even more difficult. Like the fear about forgetting a party item I'm 100% sure this will happen. There's no prevention; just degrees of coping afterwards.
  • It being cold and wet and a miserable day at the park. I already know it'll likely be too cold for the splashpad for sure; I'm just hoping for being able to do the playground.
  • This is the first party where I've tried to combine "our" people and "their" people. I invited some of our new neighbors I've just met to a party with people who can't hold down jobs or stay sober or even keep custody of their children all the time. Good God, what was I thinking? All of the nice neighbors from the nice suburb will be meeting people who don't even have a family tree. I've learned not to ask about relationships when meeting these people because they're all baby-mama, third husband, step-half-sister combos that leave my mouth hanging open as I try to unravel it. 
  • Birth mom or dad showing up. That's always a fear when we're out in public and especially this kind of event where word could've gotten back about where we're meeting.
I will never, ever do this again. By the time Kate's birthday rolls around next March they will be adopted and we will do our usual birthdays at our house and invite just the two grandmas. After hours and hours of talking and observing and listening to how the girls talk about family members, they are the only two we've decided to bring with us, so to speak.

That is as Open as this adoption is going to get. I can't do this much anxiety before every family event.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Family Visit Success!

Last weekend we did a family visit that was a return to how we'd first begun doing them. Theo and I drove the girls down and stayed and hung out with the family the whole time. The visit was just 1.5 hours long. Aunt made the lovely suggestion that good-byes would happen in the house and not at the car. She even coached grandma to do them quickly. So, we did a quick but sincere good-bye then left. No drama with grandma climbing over seats or Jane wailing from her car seat. And it all worked! Girls were cheerful and chatty on the way home! No nightmares for Jane that night! Kate was even okay--one day of extreme clinginess but then she returned to usual level of attachment-bonding cling! I'm so incredibly relieved! Because what would I have done if this hadn't worked?? I could not bear the thought of telling them we were stopping visits completely not least of all because I truly don't believe that would be the right path, long term. But now I don't have to f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Halloween Hell

 Tomorrow the kids will do a daytime Trunk or Treat event with Grandma. I suggested the outing about two months ago, chose the event, coordinated a meeting place with her, bought the kids costumes, prepped them for it, and now it's happening. I did it all. And I am dreading it with every fiber in my being. All this week my mood has been sliding downhill the closer it gets.  I hate meet ups with Grandma. There was a time when I hated them less, now I hate them with visceral dread. Why? Because I don't want Grandma to know where the girls are in school.  It was a huge mistake to tell her our home address and last name. A few weeks after we did that I got a phone call from a relative telling me about Grandma sneaking her son back into other grandchildren's lives. The relative warned me to "look in the back seat of her car" in case she was hiding him in there when she came to visit us. Needless to say, she was never invited to our house again.  So, what do I do? Yes, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Turning Two in a Tutu

Kate turns two this week! After sixteen years of boys I'm going a little over the top with the pink and fluff but I just can't hold back. And with pictures like these, even minute of planning and prep was worth it! She loves to play dress up and have tea parties with her stuffed animals. She's so adorable! Jane and James are 3 and a half so I decided we needed to celebrate their half birthdays, too. Any excuse for a cupcake!
Post a Comment
Read more