I know I'm past due for an NHL update. It's been a fairly eventful couple of weeks. I'm struggling with what to write about here and what to leave out.
I'll start by saying that things are good on the whole. Things are progressing, moving forward, feeling right. All of that is positive. We were hoping NHL would visit us here towards the end of June. We wanted her to see our house and our lives. We wanted her to have some time with our consultant one on one, and with all of us together. We hoped to time it over one of the big monthly meetings so she could meet some of the other folks in the service from all parts of the adoption constellation.
She was warming up to the idea and tentatively planning on a trip. Then a short while back she was in an accident. She's fine, the baby's fine but she was already wary of flying so far from her home before the baby is born. It adds a lot more stress to her life and we don't want to pressure her.
The trip was planned for about the time we can officially match. We're in this strange place now where we aren't truly matched but we're not seeing other people. There are many good reasons not to be matched until she's around 28 weeks but that doesn't mean we aren't relationship building.
One of the things that's been coming up a lot is the name game. This is also one of the things that's weighing heavy on my mind right now.
Back before we knew it was a girl, NHL had started sending us lists of boy names. I think the idea came from an initial conversation she had with our consultant. Now, I'm sure it's no surprise to anyone who's been reading for a while that our consultant has her own (sometimes peculiar) ways of doing things. One of the things she has a process for is naming the baby.
I'm not sure if all of you know how the process works in adoption situations. All adoptees have an original, unaltered birth certificate with all the information from their birth. This birth certificate is sealed upon finalization of the adoption. (As an aside, we're hoping to get a copy of this for our children before it's sealed so they'll have it). Then a new birth certificate is issued with some old information (time/doctor/witnesses) and some new information (adoptive parents). It can be really hard on some adoptees that have different names on their birth certificates.
I had a long discussion about this last week with a good friend who's an adoptee in reunion. She said she'd had 3 different names during her life (one set from her birth mother, one her foster parents and one from her adoptive parents). She said it didn't bother her to have had different names but she felt bad for her first mom who now had to call her by a different name after not knowing her for such a long time. It's funny because I think both her first name and current name fit her very well. Her adoptive mom was distraught when she found out they'd changed her name. They asked the agency if there had been a name given to her and the agency lied and said it was only "baby girl". Her parents have always seemed ahead of the curve in adoption issues so that wasn't a surprise they'd been concerned about these sorts of things from the beginning.
I believe that naming your child is an important part of claiming your child but it's also an incredibly charged and sensitive area, especially when trying to form a lasting bond through an open adoption. In a perfect world, our children will have the same name on both birth certificates and that name will be mutually agreed upon.
I think I might lose a lot of you here. I know this sounds strange but bear with me.
Our consultant likes to approach this by having the adoptive parents compose a list of three names and present them to the expectant mom/family. Then you work together to (hopefully) agree on a name that EVERYONE likes. She likes doing it this way because she had a couple of adoptions that nearly fell through because the first family hated the name the adoptive family planned on using.
So this is what she explained to us many months ago. This is also how she explained it to NHL. NHL loves the idea of being involved in the naming of this baby (and I really think she should) but it's been hard because she started sending us lists of names. Long lists of names.
I should digress and tell you I have very specific naming rules of my own. I think they might even deserve a post all to themselves. I think I'll do that post next but for now I want to focus on what all this brought up in me. Let's just say it wasn't exactly pretty.
It was easy enough when we didn't know the sex of the baby to not really engage about the names. I was secretly relieved when the baby was a girl because we had a fresh slate. I'm trying to learn how to navigate these boundaries. I'm trying to process what this all means to me and why it's so much harder to be confronted with this than all the other things I've given up along the way.
But when I get these lists of names its just so very hard. I do want NHL to be involved. I do want to be able to follow our rules and hers and to come up with something that will work for all of us. I want that to be in a way that's comfortable for me. I wasn't sure what that looked like.
I realized I really wanted the mister and I to have a nice solid list first. I wanted to spend some time, just the two of us enjoying this part of impending parenthood. I mean how awesome is it that we're making a list of names? It freakin' ROCKS! It's fun, fun, fun!
There's a lot to negotiate between the two of us. I really want our first child to have my last name. We're not going to be a family that all has the same last name and I have very strong reasons for wanting our first child to have my family name.
As much as we'd like to play the name game with NHL we needed a couple of rounds to ourselves. We've spent the last week or so thinking and ruminating. We have a short list that pleases us both. We're still not quite ready to share that yet. We're currently pinning that one on our "mean ol' consultant" who won't let us talk about names until we're matched.
It's so nice to be planning for the future, with a baby that might be ours (or maybe not and that's ok too). I can't imagine not including the NHL in these talks eventually but I can't handle doing that just yet.
I'm wondering how others have handled this situation. Did you find it as hard as I am? How did you include and/or honor your child's birth family in the process? If your child was given a name when they came to you (or when they were born), did you keep that name?
UP NEXT: The rules of the name game. Feel free to play along from home (or, perhaps a bit more likely for some of you, from work).