On Failure, Forgiveness and Cutting Ourselves Some Slack

by Peg O'Neill, M.D.

gotcha dayDear Reader: This is a reprint of a previous post.

We forgot about “Gotcha Day.”  In the world of adoptive families, this is a significant faux-pas.  “Gotcha Day” is the celebration of bringing a non-biologic child into the family.  For us, it commemorates the day our family became whole; the day that my husband and I were given the gift of our precious child and entered the challenging world of raising multiple boys, with all the craziness, motion, joy and exhaustion.

For my older son, it was the day he became a sibling and began his journey as a big brother.  For my adoptive son, though he was just six months old when he joined our family forever, it is akin to a birthday – a momentous event, a beginning, a symbol of who he is, at least in part.  […]

On Failure, Forgiveness and Cutting Ourselves Some Slack

by Peg O'Neill, M.D.

We forgot about “Gotcha Day.”  In the world of adoptive families, this is a significant faux-pas.  “Gotcha Day” is the celebration of bringing a non-biologic child into the family.  For us, it commemorates the day our family became whole; the day that my husband and I were given the gift of our precious child and entered the challenging world of raising multiple boys, with all the craziness, motion, joy and exhaustion.  For my older son, it was the day he became a sibling and began his journey as a big brother.  For my adoptive son, though he was just six months old when he joined our family forever, it is akin to a birthday – a momentous event, a beginning, a symbol of who he is, at least in part.  Over the past six years, we have commemorated “Gotcha Day” with story-telling about how we prayed for him to become part of our family, how we came to know him, and the details of how he joined our family, including how good he was on the plane coming back from Guatemala.  We look at pictures, ooh and aah over how cute and funny he was.  We go out to dinner at his favorite restaurant, a mediocre pasta joint near our house. […]

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