Many adoptive families celebrate the day they became a family. Some call it “Gotcha Day” (a phrase I really dislike for some reason), and some call it a “fami-versary.” Others call it something else.
There are also parents who don’t celebrate their child’s adoption. They don’t see it as something to have a party about because from the child’s point of view, the adoption was a scary, traumatic event, born from loss.
I see both sides because I view adoption as both a blessing and a tragedy. It’s tragic for a child to have to leave his or her biological family and culture. It’s also a grace and provision to receive a new family. Adoption is clearly a blessing for the adoptive parents, but it’s a tragedy for the birth family. Loss and gain. Sorrow and joy. Tragedy and blessing. All wrapped up in one.
So I’m not sure how we’ll handle this. Part of me doesn’t want to make the adoption into a celebratory event. Is it really something our children should automatically feel happy about? At the same time, I like to mark significant events — it creates memories and links the past, present, and future together. It creates a family narrative and acknowledges special people and circumstances that make a family unique.
Perhaps you can celebrate being a family without pretending adoption is just a bed of roses with candles on top?
What are your ideas about this? Do you celebrate becoming an adoptive family? If so, what do you call it and how do you acknowledge it? If not, why not?
Thank you! The phrase “Gotcha Day” REALLY bugs me, too. I haven’t heard of “famiversary” but that really is not better.
I understand what you’re saying. It reminds me of the people who go into international adoption with the purpose of rescuing a child. Perhaps the intentions are well-meaning, but they are really missing the reality of it.
However, you are creating a loving home and the entire family is getting expanded by this little person! That is a great thing. I think of is more as the fact that we are getting adopted by our son’s family as well. Once everyone gets old enough, we plan on visiting Ethiopia regularly. We also plan on staying in close contact with our son’s surviving relatives. I am so sad and feel the guilt of separating him from his biological family, but at the same time I feel like we are joining that family. We’re going to be a big international, transcultural bunch. And that is beautiful.
Great post. We call it “Mayna Day”. And, we don’t really celebrate other than a nice day with the 3 of us. Also, many kids aren’t on the best of moods that day due to implicit memories of the emotions they felt that day so it makes sense to play it low. Takes some reasurring and explaining to them why they may be feeling the way they are. For us, it is a day to talk about her story (though we do that all the time too) and just be together.
I’ve struggled with this too Zoe. I don’t have a solution. I think a lot about the negatives of adoption, but I also think a lot about the positives. One doesn’t negate the other, just as you suggested. I think that something can be done on that day you became a family to acknowledge the birth family and think about how you have grown as a new family. I write a yearly letter, usually around New Years. Maybe, instead we could write a letter as a family on this special day, a year in review. And write a letter or draw pictures for the birth family, now part of our extended family. I don’t know. I’m excited to hear what others have to say.
Great question, Zoe. I, too, loathe the term “Gotcha Day.” But we celebrated our first “Family Day” this year – the one-year anniversary of when we met and became a family. The day we met was certainly a joyful (and incredibly emotional) one for Riley and me. And it turns out our kids have happy memories of it as well. They can now recount how glad they were to *finally* see us in the flesh, after waiting and seeing pictures and hearing from their caregivers that a new family was coming.
Absolutely, there’s a long string of tragedy and losses that led to us becoming a family. And we never want to diminish that. In fact, it’s one reason we chose not to celebrate the day our case passed court (even though it’s the day we legally became a family), because that also represents the severing our our children’s legal connections to their birth family.
We are ever mindful of the sadness and sacrifice that led to our children joining our family. But on so many levels, the adoption – and becoming a family – has been a wonderful to blessing to all of us and is something that deserves to be commemorated and celebrated. And I think it’s possible to do that without “pretending adoption is a bed of roses.”
I’m glad to find I’m not the only one who is uncomfortable with the phrase “Gotcha Day”! It seems to focus so much on the parents and their feelings in the adoption, while ignoring what the children had to feel and process at that major transition time.
We do plan to celebrate a “Family Day”, or something similar. Our family underwent major changes that day – wonderful and difficult and amazing and horrifying all at the same time – and I don’t think I can let the day go by without commemorating it in some way! We plan to celebrate all aspects of our family, including those members we had to leave behind in Ethiopia. Just a few months into this, I can already see how much it helps our kiddos to talk openly about things. I think regularly marking the date that things changed so drastically for all of us will only help to work through the issues and strengthen our family connections!
We celebrated family day this year. I chose the day that I took her to live with me (in the guest house) rather than the day we met because the day we met was more stressful than anything else. We celebrated it by going out for Ethiopian food, reading through her lifebook and talking about her life before she came with me and our first few weeks together. It wasn’t an all out “woohoo, aren’t you glad you’re with ME” kind of day as much as an acknowledgment that a year as a family had passed. We remembered what had been before (she remembers almost nothing, so I retell stories for her) and just talk about being a family together.
I guess I should add that for me, celebrating–or commemorating is probably a better word for it, family day is a way of acknowledging that her life didn’t begin in this household–that she has a history that predates me and we need to remember that, too–hence, for us, the Ethiopian food. (A friend suggested that we should have had American food in honor of her new life, but Ethiopian food is more apt in my book, as it honors all of her life–the before AND the now.
wow, what thoughtful responses. Thanks Zoe for getting this conversation going. Like you I am up in the air as to how or if we are going to commemorate the building of our family. So much to think about..
Thanks to you all for sharing your ideas and experiences. That’s one of the greatest things about this process — wonderful people like you who walk this same road and wrestle with these questions and thoughts.
Zoe, we’ve only celebrated one of these, so I am no authority on this, by any means! We celebrated the anniversary of the day we came to the US (for us, May 22), not the day we met in Ethiopia. Our view was that we weren’t a family until we actually arrived at the airport, and Birtukan and Mulay met the whole family!! And Grandma, and our two best friends and all of their kids.
We celebrated with a big Ethiopian meal, including our two best friends families (between the three families we have bio kids, and adopted kids from Vietnam, China and Ethiopia, and now total 23 kids and 6 adults!!) and then a coffee ceremony. I think our two had fun sharing their food and customs with their friends (we’ve also celebrated Moon Festival with them). We talked about them coming home, and how strange and confusing it all must have seemed. Then we tell how as we walked through the airport, and saw that huge crowd waiting, and introduced Birtukan to her new siblings – she saw Peyton (her ‘twin’ sister), and the two girls flung their arms around each other and held on for dear life – a feeling which hasn’t changed between them to this day.
For us, we want to celebrate with them the joy we feel at having them as part of our family. And because our daughter, especially, has very real and fond memories of Ethiopia, we talk frequently of her home there, and her family there. We don’t gloss over the hard parts of becoming a family. But we also want to celebrate that we ARE now a family.
You are absolutely right about the tension. We are happy to have them in our family, we are saddened beyond words that they should even have to BE in our family. Yet we know that this is the best solution for an imperfect situation.
Patty
We celebrate, or acknowledge, 3 days…Violet Day and Blueberry Day (the day each girl and I were united forever) and Family Day (the day all three of us were together forever). Before Violet’s adoption, Blueberry Day and Family Day were the same day. Right now, both girls are in the celebration mode of it all. I know it won’t always be that way though. Last year, Violet asked if we could have a party for all her friends. We didn’t. Since Violet Day is July 5th, Violet likes to imagine that the fireworks are really for her in celebration of Violet Day. LOL!
I view Violet and Blueberry Day as more of a reflection on everything…what it means for each of them to have been adopted and what they’ve lost and gained in the process. It’s not necessarily a happy type of celebration in my mind, although I don’t think it has to be sad either. Really, to me, it’s all about what each girl is thinking about adoption and their first countries/families and anything else that day.
Family Day is more about us coming together as a family. I do see it more as a celebration of us as a family. Still, it’s just maybe a dinner with friends that get adoption or maybe just us talking about it and remembering that it’s the anniversary of Violet and me returning home to Blueberry.
That’s just what we do. Other than really hating the term “gotcha day” (although I just asked Violet and she doesn’t care because she doesn’t really understand what it means), I don’t know that there’s really a right or wrong way to acknowledge these anniversaries, just what’s right for your family.
We don’t celebrate that day for either of our boys. I actually would have to look up the days because i can only remember the month. Everyone does their own thing so I don’t pass any judgement, I’m just happy that we are a family and that’s pretty much it. We celebrate “family day” every Sunday. It’s the one day we are all together and other than that we refer to that day as “when we became a family” or when Michael became part of our family that’s really it.
We do celebrate our boys’ “Gotcha Day” though I’m honestly looking for a better term. The boys like to recount the story and flip through their photo books, their friends who were also adopted call it “Gotcha Day” and we’ve found a couple of children’s books at the library that refer to it by that name. So they feel like it’s their special thing – they’re on the inside of this one. They’ve even chosen it as their topic for school show-and-tell times.
So I don’t want to take the “occasion” away from them. But I appreciated reading your post and the comments to get some other ideas! I’d love to call it something else. Just don’t know WHAT yet.