Mother's Day

For a few weeks I tried to decide whether or not to send VeeGee's birthmother a Mother's Day card. It could go either way, right, in terms of hurt feelings or insensitivity? And I don't want to gratuitously hurt her feelings. In the end I didn't send anything. It wasn't so much a choice, but really a case of life getting too busy. That, and, well, Hallmark doesn't make a card that says, "Thanks for the baby - still picking up those pieces - Happy Mother's Day!"

I don't know if the events of Mother's Day make me glad or not relative to that decision. The bad me is glad.

When the grandparents arrived an hour late for the Mothers' Day brunch I'd prepared in g-mother and my mother's honor, they announced to K (I was in the kitchen RE-heating brunch), that bmom had called to wish Happy Day, and to inform them that she plans to come to town for the weekend of VeeGee's birthday. News to us. In fact, we haven't heard from bmom (other than an Easter card for VeeGee) in quite some time (and only then an e-mail to me sending Easter pictures).

I'm having a really hard time with this. It feels like this is a forever situation, in that we will always be looking over our shoulder for bmom to -poof- appear at holiday time - as if we're just supposed to drop everything in order to include her. It's not that we want to prevent VeeGee from seeing and having a relationship with her bmom, it's just that we can't always be in this kind of limbo. Are we supposed to assume that she assumes that grandparents will give us the message and that that should be assumed to be enough "notice?" The other thing that bothers me about this is that, by letting (if we actually do allow it) her just show up on whim to see VeeGee, we're signalling that it's okay to behave this way not just to us, but, more importantly, to VeeGee.

We've thought of a number options. One is to have a big birthday party - so big that bmom's presence won't have to be THE focus of everything. It wouldn't be out of character to do this (there were, no exaggeration, 120 people at her party last year). But, finances being what they are, I don't know if that's the smartest option. Another thing we considered is going camping. But it may be too warm by that time (late June), and I don't like the idea of pinning all our hopes on a dry weekend. And then there's the option to just ignore this all. Go about the weekend as we normally would (whatever that might mean) and not count on her showing up (it's happened!). If she does pop into town, particularly if she still hasn't called us directly, we'll just do what we had to do at Christmas and be very narrow in our availability.

Now, if you haven't read here before and are thinking at this point that I'm a bitch, please read some old posts. This isn't a simple case of regular old adoption, not that it's ever simple, and we're kind of making this up as we go along. My hope always is to be a good, non-angry/resentful, mom to VeeGee. And part of that is being generous and kind to her birthmother. I don't forget that. But I'm also not willing to sacrifice our hard earned family to the whims of someone who ceded all of her rights through neglect and passivity.