Searching For on the OWN Channel= Puffy Alien Eyes

I got sucked into the show Searching For last night and watched 3 hours of it in a row.  I'm a big bawl baby and watching reunion shows pretty much turns me into a hot mess!  I went to bed at midnight, not good, and when I woke up my eyes were almost swollen shut!  I actually had to put ice on them for a couple minutes and eye cream just to look normal to come to work. 

One thing I struggle with is what we will tell AJ as he gets older about his mom and what if he wants to track down his mom when he's an adult.  I see so many reunion shows about adopted kids searching for their birth moms and over and over it's said how unselfish the birth mom was by choosing adoption.  And I agree, in these shows when a mother, be it a teen mother or just a woman that is not able to parent another baby chooses to place the baby for adoption, I do think that takes a lot of courage and strength.  But that's not what AJ's mom did.  She put him in harms way by overdosing right in front of him and even contemplated giving him and his brother pills too.  After he was placed in our care, she still fought every week to get him back and bring him to drug rehab with her....3 different times even though she knew she was still using.  Where I live, if you have young children, the rehab programs are night and day better than if you are just a single woman trying to get a bed in a rehab program.  It was pretty apparent to the social workers and myself that a main focus for getting AJ back wasn't to parent but to get into a better program.  And I will never tell him that part.  But I'm just saying, our story is different than those I'm watching. 

I do believe she wanted to love him and have him back but she chose drugs and alcohol.  Only after 19 months of fighting the state did she decide to relinquish her rights.  She's never wrote him a single birthday card and the first present she got him was this past Christmas and she got it at a toy drive by Salvation Army.  Yet she has no problem asking us for money to go buy a case of Coke so in the past 2 years she could have bought him a $2 toy from Walmart. 

I just wonder what the future will look like for him and how, especially when he's a teenager and an adult, what kind of emotional turmoil he will go through.  We feel like when he's in 5th or 6th grade we can tell him she used drugs and alcohol and that's what made her sick.  Before that, we'll just say that she was sick and needed to take care of herself and she knew we loved him so much that she asked us to be his parents and we are so thankful to be his mom and dad.  Our latest dilemma is what do we tell him when we show him pictures of his baby sister.  I thought we would just say that it was his sister, my husband said we should just say it his cousin, but I don't like that either because that's a lie. AJ's aunt has the sister and she's really nice and we are keeping the communication lines open at this point. Any suggestions out there on how to go about the sibling pictures?