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Ask a Widow: What Changes Do Remarriage and Adoption Bring?
I love getting mail in my dcwidow inbox. I hear from all sorts of people, including many widows in all sorts of situations. I try and answer all of them, and every once in awhile, I can offer a bit of advice. I mean, I have no training in mental health care, but it turns out that I’ve learned a bit from just walking the planet as a widow for 4 1/2 years. In any case, I recently got an email from a woman who had a somewhat similar story to mine. Her first husband, Doug, died when her son Aaron was just 2 months old. After a number of…
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We Will Not Look Away From You
The first weekend in May was extraordinarily monumental for our family. Or at least that was how it seemed in the weeks leading up to it. I’d looked forward to this weekend for months. We’d sent out invitations and picked out outfits and planned for lots of fun. Nana and Pop would be coming down, too. I was ready for two big events: our adoption party on Saturday, and Rite 13, the coming-of-age ceremony for Claire at our church, on Sunday. Saturday morning we got up early and my mind was already spinning. I needed to clean the bathrooms and order pizza and organize who would be at Austin’s baseball…
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When Auto-Fill Won’t Cut It
I’ve filled out so many forms in my life. That’s part of being an adult, I suppose. But the form-filling-out got way more intense when I became a widow. When Shawn died, I seemed to need a new form for every single account I had everywhere. Sure, that made sense at the bank, but it seemed crazy to me that I needed a needed to fill out a new form (declaring my newly widowed status) for the internet company, among many others. But the worst kinds of forms were the ones I didn’t have to totally re-do. The worst kinds of forms were the drop-down menus that I had to…
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Kids of His Own
About two years ago, when Chris and I first started talking on the phone during the early days of the pandemic, I worried about one thing above all others: What if he wanted kids of his own? He obviously knew that I had three kids already, but did he get what that truly meant? Did he understand how much work it was for me already? Did he know how I felt about the prospect of having more kids? I didn’t wait long to breach the topic with him. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something along the lines of, “just so you know, I don’t want…
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Benefits and Responsibilities
The first thing that happened in our Zoom adoption hearing was that Tommy accidentally knocked over the computer and sent it tumbling to the floor. We recovered the computer and apologized to the judge and everyone laughed. It was family court, after all. We’d been looking forward to our adoption date for months at that point. I say “our” adoption date, but really, I had nothing to do with it other than signing a paper saying that I agreed with Chris’s adoption of the kids. He was the one who had to do all the background checks and financial statements and letters of intent and interviews with the lawyer. Mostly,…
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When He Is Theirs, and They Are His
Most kids meet their dad at birth. But that doesn’t tell the whole story of our family, not really. One father saw them come into this world, and one father is with them now. This is the story of the kids and their second father. He did not see them take their first breaths or walk their first steps or go to their first days of kindergarten. He did not see toddler tantrums and diaper blowouts and spaghetti all over the high chair. They were not his then, and he was not theirs. When he first came in their lives, they were little, but not so little as to immediately…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
