Reply to adoptees, would you spend holidays with your biofamily?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Hi, OP.  Adult adoptee in reunion here, though my circumstances as an international adoptee are different than yours, with language barrier and cultural issues thrown in for fun!

You obviously have two issues here: respecting your adoptive mom's wishes to spend Christmas with her only and your bio brother's discomfort/hostility with you.  I'm sorry your a-mom is gone; I will be devastated when my a-mom dies. I can completely understand your appeasing your a-mom's desire for Christmas with her when she was alive.  However, your mom is gone and you're not choosing your b-mom over her as that's a false dichotomy due to her death.  I wish your mom hadn't put you in that position, but it is what it is and I understand you.  Not only am I an adoptee, but I'm also an adoptive mom.  If my children are so lucky as to reunite with their birth families, I'll put aside any territorial feelings (if I have them to begin with) and encourage them to spend holidays together if so desired.  And anyway, no one is guaranteed Christmas together, what with marriage and in-laws.

As for your bio brother...that's a tough one.  We adoptees are in a difficult position- do we have the right to disrupt another family?  Reunion affects more than just the adoptee and the birth parent.  Just thinking rhetorically here.  I see that your b-mom has already said she's willing to alienate her son in order to have you present.  I wonder if any of your other b-siblings could talk to the holdout brother and see if he'd come around to the idea of your presence.

All of my birth siblings have been gracious and welcoming, but my oldest brother is definitely not particularly interested in maintaining a relationship (so different from your story in that he's not hostile, just uninterested).  My birth mom has asked that I call her Mom, but I've been hesitant for many reasons, one of which is being unsure of how my siblings will respond.  I recognize she isn't my mom in the same way she is theirs, even though we're full siblings, and I respect their feelings on it.  To be perfectly fair, though, I haven't asked them yet about their feelings, as there's a very difficult language barrier.  All that to say is that I empathize with you, even if our stories are different.[/quote]

Thanks, pp. OP here. You've definitely got a great understanding of fundamental conflicts, which, even with the differences in culture and language, are universal.

As for my holdout sibling, there almost isn't anyone in the family who hasn't tried to play peacemaker on this one. Even his spouse has tried. No one thinks he's being reasonable. I think that's become part of the problem. My gut says he needs a way to save face and get out of this hole into which he's boxed himself. But, as I asked another pp, perhaps I'm just not sensitive enough to the sibling position here? Maybe there's something about how sibs respond in these situations that I'm just missing?

And as for my mom, I have been doing a lot of work around my own grief at her death. It's possible that what I'm feeling as betrayal is just denial - as in, I don't allow myself to move on this way out of grief, which I justify based on what I think her feelings might be now. Not that she wasn't working through hard feelings about the reunion when she died - she absolutely was - but I heard a line today about how the terrible thing about death is that the dead never change, but the living do. Maybe I've frozen her in-place and am using that static vision of her as an excuse not to face my own new reality. I'm processing it, needless to say.[/quote]

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