The Book of New Family Traditions (20 page)

Milestone Gifts

In the Chesto family, you get your own alarm clock at age ten, symbolizing that you have the maturity to rouse yourself in the morning and get ready for school without being nagged. Jeff Butler gives his boys
and
girls a Swiss Army knife at ten, proof they can take care of themselves and have good judgment in a crisis. The ritual includes going out to dinner alone with Dad, then picking out the exact right model of knife.

Milestone Trips

For families that love the outdoors, a birthday that signals maturity might be the time for the first white-river rafting trip with Mom and Dad. Or the first night for a sleep-away with friends in the family’s vacation cabin (with the parents staying a cell phone call away). Or the first time to try climbing to the summit of the closest challenging mountain. Upon completion of the physical challenge, a good gift might be a keepsake of the accomplishment, like a key chain inscribed with the date.

Half Birthdays

With children, the amount of change and growth that occurs in just six months can be astonishing. Celebrating half birthdays is a way to acknowledge and honor that growth.

Half a Cake

Patrice Kyger says her kids love that she notices how much they change in half a year. For their half birthdays, there are no gifts or parties, but her kids get half a cake (she freezes the rest) and one candle. And they get to pick the menu for dinner.

Half a Song

There are several ways to halve the classic birthday song. You can sing “Happy Half Birthday to You!” or you could try only singing every other word.

Half a Game

Doni Boyd’s kids were both born in January, so she always threw them a joint half-birthday party in July, making it as silly as possible. “We would put the picnic table half in our yard, and half in the neighbor’s yard,” she explains. “I would serve half a cake, and cut ice cream bars in half. Since it was summer, everybody would come half dressed.” To increase the fun, people brought only half a present (the board for a game, but not the game pieces, which would be saved for another time) and played half games. “Everybody loved the idea of letting the kids go hide, but no one would go seeking them!” says Doni.

Treats at Breakfast or Lunch

Since many family birthdays involve special dinners, confine the special treats to breakfast. Give the half-birthday child a cupcake or special muffin with one candle. Or send an extra-special dessert in your child’s lunchbox that day, with a very small birthday card.

A Stepmom Steps Up for Half Birthdays

Linda McKittrick understands the stepmother’s dilemma: You want to create traditions with your husband’s kids, but you run the risk of looking pushy and you can’t interfere with beloved existing traditions. But something like a half birthday, which isn’t a regular big deal, allows a chance to develop a new ritual and grow a new relationship.

When her stepdaughter was eleven, Linda moved in with J’s father. Before long, she was trying to think about ideas for rituals that would make the three of them feel like a family. One of her ideas was to celebrate J’s half birthday, but celebrate it each year in a different way. One year they hand-cranked ice cream, another year she took the girl to high tea with a girlfriend, all dressed up. “The important thing is to focus on the changing, ever-evolving her,” says Linda. “This year she turned twenty-five and a half and we celebrated by going to her favorite Indian restaurant. We brought a Zen card deck and just played with it, not to predict things but for her to zero in on her own intentions. It was quite revealing and she said it was her best half birthday yet.”

Star Birthdays

A star birthday, sometimes called a golden birthday, is when someone’s birthday date and age are the same, like being seven on June 7. It doesn’t always happen in childhood, but it is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and some families love to honor that rarity.

Stars Everywhere

Some feel the best decoration for this day is stars, and that there can’t be too many of them. Patrice Kyger decorates her whole house with shiny star garlands, wrapping them around picture frames, lamps, and furniture. She also buys star-shaped candles and sprinkles stars all over the birthday cake to celebrate a star birthday. You could also make this a day to go to the nearest planetarium for a “star show” or let the birthday kid stay up late and look at the stars outside your home.

Star Treatment

Give the birthday child the total movie-star treatment. For a girl, this could include a beauty makeover at the local beauty parlor or a special gift of age-appropriate beauty products. For a boy, get a costume for a spaceman or safari guide, and photograph him in heroic poses. Make a movie of the whole day, featuring your star. You could write a script in advance about the history of the birthday star’s life and success, “up from humble beginnings,” or you could have the star help write it. Make sure you include an on-camera interview with the star, about his or her tips on life. Ask for autographs often! (And get everyone in the family with a camera to play paparazzi.)

Star Gifts

Some families give the child with a star birthday the number of presents equivalent to their age. But if a ten-year-old is getting ten gifts, only one will be something big and the rest will be tokens and trinkets. Wrap each one, even the smallest, in the biggest boxes you have, and tape a big number on the side or top of each package. Save the best for last, so you build up to it as a climax.

Adoption Rituals

Growing up in a family where two of us were biological kids and two were adopted, I’m very sensitive to the less-than feelings that adopted children sometimes have. All four of us were loved and wanted, but in recent years, I’ve become more aware that it was harder for my adopted brother and sister to feel equal in the family equation, and that makes me very sad.

I think my parents, who adopted in the 1950s, were fairly typical in thinking that it would be wrong to hide the fact of their adoptions, but it would be odd to make a fuss about it: Best to just go forward as a family, seemed to sum up their plan. Now that I’ve spent years studying ritual, however, I can see the importance of creating rituals that acknowledge and celebrate the differentness of that relationship.

These days, many parents of adopted children celebrate the anniversary of the day they adopted a child as well as his or her birthday. If their child was born in another country or region, they take pains to create rituals that incorporate the food and songs and culture of that place. If they can locate other adoptive parents with children from that same culture, they’ll create occasions for the adopted children to get to know peers, others of their generation from that place. And someday, they may plan a “heritage trip” with the child to her or his native land. This all seems right to me.

Raising one’s own child is fraught enough with challenges, and there can be additional ones related to adoption. But thoughtful parents can create a whole body of rituals and ceremonies as needed to keep these wanted children feeling loved and fully known. You can’t always know what episodes and moments will arise that call out for ritual’s magic touch, but you can become sensitive to the need for ritual and ceremony in your own clan. There is so much emotion inherent in adoption, and ritual is about recognizing, celebrating, and channeling that powerful energy in a good direction.

Open Adoption Ceremony

There has been a trend in recent decades toward more transparency in adoption, and in open adoption cases, the biological mother continues to be a presence in the life of her child. Mostly, this is a win-win situation for everyone. And it is just one example of the extra layers of complexity in twenty-first-century family life: further proof that we all need expertise in ritual creating now.

Families in this situation must invent new rituals of connection, figuring out how the biological mother and the adoptive family interact and marking all the usual big occasions. But even in the case of very open adoptions, it isn’t at all usual to have a ceremony marking the adoption in a public place. Women who are forced to give up a child are understandably not keen to publicly act out this difficult milestone, and in many cases, the logistics wouldn’t work. Often, the adopting family picks up a child in another state or country and brings them home.

I’m not suggesting everyone should do this, or would want to, but I wanted to include the example of Gail Simpson’s open adoption ceremony. It’s one of the most courageous and powerful ceremonies I know about, and it was written and enacted with dignity by all the parties involved. There are many ritual occasions during which there is more than one central emotion operating, and Gail managed to honor both the sweet and the bitter in this one.

This was actually the second open adoption for Gail Simpson and her husband, but in this case, the young college student whose baby they were adopting had lived with the family during the final months of her pregnancy. There was a real bond there and mutual trust, and the young woman agreed she was up for the gesture of literally placing her infant daughter in the arms of her new family in front of a church congregation. Gail created the ceremony that took place at her church, working hard to make it supportive of everyone involved: When it came time for the young mother to speak her piece, a member of the congregation who had given up a baby years earlier stood next to her to speak with her.

To give a voice to the tiny baby being adopted, anyone in the congregation who was adopted was asked to say these words, which are addressed to both the adopting and biological parents:

I bring you together in this mysterious intersection of nature and nurture which is adoption. I am the music to which you will dance of love and loss for a lifetime. Dance well. My melody is the sweet yearning for life. Teach me the language of love from which to compose my lyrics.

You can read the entire ceremony in Appendix 2 at the back of the book. Both Simpson girls are young women now, and though their relationships with their birth mothers have waxed and waned over the years, the mothers continue to stay in touch.

Homecoming Day

The Hoddinott family celebrates the adoption days of two children born in Korea but is sensitive to the feelings of a biological daughter. “To us, it’s a way to keep the door open, to allow them to ask questions and hear their stories over and over,” says Julie Hoddinott. “It’s obvious they’re adopted because they don’t look like us, and it’s important to acknowledge their histories.” The family has a special dessert on Homecoming Day, but it’s important to Julie that the cake be shared by all. On each boy’s Homecoming Day, she shows the video taken the day he arrived from Korea, and the family looks at baby pictures from that time.

Like some others who adopt these days, Maria Michele Must has blogged extensively about her adoption journey, but her experience included especially extensive preplanning and wise use of available technology. Obviously, this sort of thing isn’t always possible, but Marla was able to introduce herself to the child many months ahead by using Skype, the free Internet videoconferencing tool. The little girl was with a foster family in China that had a computer and was willing to participate. Also, Marla was able to visit the foster family shortly before picking up Sasha Jade: She brought a tape recorder and got some comforting words translated into Chinese. So the foster parents were able to record a tape that said things to the child such as, “it is okay to be happy with your new mommy and brother and sister. We want to hear how you are doing.” Marla says playing this tape over and over for Sasha Jade in the early days was very helpful, adding, “I didn’t want her to think anybody had disappeared.” Hearing those familiar voices would make those caretakers feel present. Besides, although Marla and her kids had been studying Mandarin for some time, they weren’t any more fluent in Chinese than Sasha Jade was in English in those early days.

Forever Family Day

There are many different names given to the day when a family takes an adopted child home. Some families call it “Gotcha Day”; others use “Airplane Day” because they brought their child home on a plane. Marla Michele Must and her two biological kids decided that June 21, 2010, will always be called “Forever Family Day,” and they will celebrate each year. That’s the day they all got to pick up a toddler named “Tian Tian” in China, who is now called Sasha Jade and lives in Michigan.

Marla and her family did many thoughtful things to make the transition easier for the girl. She even mailed a blanket to the girl months before they came to get her, so it would be a comfort object when she moved to the United States. And the three of them put together ten photo books in the course of six months, so their new sister could get to know them.