Abandonment

I’m a little P’Oed at Sam’s birthfamily. They have for all intents and purposes dropped out of this life. With his birthmother this isn’t completely unexpected but his grandmother is acting decidedly weird. Okay this is the type of individual who would send Halloween cards with long letters written to her pre-verbal grandchild. She’s never been particularly reliable i.e. she never visits without “planning to visit” a minimum for 3 times (and ALWAYS cancels last minute). But she has been pretty good about sending him little things. Calling. Keeping in touch. He knows her and he loves her and luckily he’s too little to realize she’s dropped him. All of a sudden this Christmas she just didn’t send him a Christmas present. She called mid-way through January to say she had a new job and was moving and didn’t have an address or a phone number but would contact us when she got settled. Okay … silence. She had promised him a hockey bag (an expensive one that we didn’t buy for him (as we did for Kamryn) because she said she wanted to get it for him for Christmas). So not only didn’t he get a Christmas present but he’s now also the poor neglected child whose sister gets cool things that he doesn’t. Oh and his beloved grandmother has disappeared and not left a forwarding address.

The danger of him getting attached and then the person he loves doing this to him is precisely the reason we were planning to say no when his birthmother asked if she could call and talk to him weekly. She spoke to him on the phone once last year and asked after that if she could call weekly (her request was a text message that we didn’t immediately respond to because we were discussing our response. We would have wanted to discuss this issue with her rather than text about it given she’d only ever spoken with him once but we never heard from her again on the subject. She never phoned again either – not once). Things have been uneven for years but have gone seriously downhill since his birthday last May. She just didn’t send anything. No card, no letter, nada. Later I found out she’d been arrested so that kind of explained it but she wasn’t in jail she was out on bail (she still is) so go figure. No explanation. No contact. At Christmas she made contact (via text message) to ask where to send his present because she’d lost the address again. We tried to find out where she was so that we could send her something. She never answered that inquiry. When we called her cell phone we ended up speaking to someone who knew her but explained that it wasn’t her cellphone anymore. Okay… That was the last we heard of her. I’ve given up. She never sent him anything but really he doesn’t know her at all and she means little to him – she’s just an abstract concept to his 6 year old mind.

I made a calendar for her (and for his grandmother). Cost $50 and a ton of time and effort. They are sitting gathering dust. I don’t have addresses to send anything. I do the Calendars each year for both kids’ birthfamilies. I won’t do another one for Sam ever again (his were really good this year too). Waste of money and effort. I’m just tired of all the work that goes into just tracking down his birthfamily. I’ve done it for Sam. So that when he’s older he can have a relationship with his family but they don’t care. It makes it really apparent what we got him away from. It makes me sad. I quit.