One Year Old and All Is Well

We've been a bit occupied here in the K. household. Free time, which constitutes the hours of 8:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m., has been occupied with pulling together an update package for William's birthmom. We plan to send it shortly after his first birthday on July 19th.

Although she only requested a pictorial update on each birthday, I want to do everything I humanly can to fill in the gaps for her and to reassure her that William is happy, thriving, and well-cared for. In short, I'm doing what I'd want someone else to do for me if I had just permanently handed over my baby to a family I didn't know. Considering the overwhelming emotional toll she has had to endure, something tells me that my best efforts will always fall short of satisfying her need for assurance.

Nonetheless, I've tried. There is first and foremost the very long letter. I stuck my poor parents with the gnarly task of translating all four, single-spaced pages. On them are details on everything imaginable. There are the mundane facts about his food preferences and sleeping habits to anecdotes about his peeing on the doctor and how the sound of flip flops slapping on the ground makes him laugh hysterically. Hopefully she'll read the letter and see glimpses of herself in the child he has become. Hopefully those connections will bring a smile to her face.

I've also compiled a photobook for her that currently has 55 pages of pictures. I'm not finished yet. (You can never have too many photos, right?) The pages will span the period from when she first held William at St. Lucy's all the way up to his first birthday party and baptism, to be celebrated on July 26th and 27th respectively. If I can get my act together in time, I'm also planning on including a short video.

Finally, we'll be sending over a set of questions we hope she will answer. While we did get responses from her to the first set of questions we sent last December, we have no answers for the second set we sent over soon before we traveled to Taiwan. She had made her last visit to St. Lucy's just a week before the questions arrived.

Needless to say, we really hope to get some responses this time. I fear that the answers may be harder to obtain as more time passes. While we really hope that William's birthmom will want to keep in contact with him throughout his life - if he also desires contact - we know this is something we can't necessarily expect.

For now, it's up to us to keep the trail of information "hot" on his behalf. We have what appears to be her address and phone number and it would be so easy and tempting to just pick up the phone and call her... but to do so would be to breach her privacy in a very serious way. We are then left with the tin can telephone route of contacting each other through St. Lucy's, then through our agency, which is better than nothing. At the end of the day, we have to be grateful that a) William still has a birthmother and b) unlike in many international adoption cases, we could probably contact her if the situation warranted it.

But I digress. St. Lucy's staff, if you're out there in cyberspace and reading this, please be on the lookout for a package from us. It comes with all of our fondest wishes, respect, and gratitude for William's birthmom, as well as a big hug and kiss for her from everyone's favorite one year-old-to-be.