Today my oldest daughter Danika received a thank you note in the mail. The note was about a gift she recently sent to her niece for her first birthday. Yup my girl is not quite ten and already an aunt. Danika’s biological older sister A had a baby girl last February. We have seen the baby a few times, she is a little cutie. She looks something like my daughter did at that age, only chunkier. It is a bit of a worry some situation to me. While I have seen no evidence that this teen mom is not doing a good job, with a little more direction from her grand parents, and some additional maturity, she probably could have been doing even better.

Well just as I am getting used to the challenges of this birthfamily situation (I am kinda hoping my daughter will wait a lot longer to become a mom herself !), I start to read a bit more of the message inside the card. Ok, I even had to sit down for a minute for it. Birth grandma writes next to the thank you message that middle bio-brother V is also now a proud father of a newborn baby girl. V is just sixteen.

Recently I was talking of other challenging things involved with open adoption relationships and I am finding this is another of those. Oh the bio-brother’s new baby is also very adorable (Dani and I went online to view her hospital pitcture and stats) but gosh, “WAY too young” kept running through my head. It is hard in an open adoption when you are beginning to see a birth family pattern of behavior repeat itself, and of course you might wonder if it will just keep on repeating.

I asked my daughter what she thought of the news and she told me, “Well the baby is sweet, but mom I think V is not done growing up himself.” True, so very true. I think being raised in a different environment will have some lasting effect on my daughter. Her birth siblings are being raised by older grand parents, and with a whole lot less structure in their home than is in ours. Hopefully this additional direction from us is enough that she will not follow her biological siblings down this road of early parenting. Again not to say that this early parenthood can’t be done, but it certainly can be less than ideal.

When we first brought our oldest daughter home some of the possibility of this very scenario was in the back of my mind. I knew the history and that the future might mean some hard to explain situation for our child. Now I am faced with the actuality. So far she seems to understand that some of the early parenting choices of her birth siblings might not be what she wants for her own future, and that is a positive.

So I suppose I get to make yet another trip to the baby section of the store for a gift now. This will be my third trip in a weeks time! I am starting to feel like I will never see daylight. . . in more ways than one.

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