Dear 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.
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.
But this year, being the lousy parents that we sometimes are, we forgot. “Gotcha Day” arrived during a month when the craziness of our usual crazy lives was amplified ten-fold; a sudden staffing upheaval in my practice rendered me working more than usual; my pediatric boards, required every ten years, with the stated goal of keeping clinicians current but really just designed to reduce even the most experienced doc to a pathetic pile of raw nerves, loomed. Throw in a little unexpected business travel for my husband, heaped on top of all the other usual stuff that at baseline requires herculean efforts to balance, and the perfect storm for forgetting something important was created.
So we sort of had a few good excuses for forgetting “Gotcha Day.”
Tell that to a six-year old. My husband was the one who suddenly, the day after, remembered, announcing our transgression with an appropriate degree of horror and shame. Our son, who like most first-graders is more focused on his birthday and didn’t even know the exact date of “Gotcha Day,” immediately felt the sting of parental neglect. The fact that his older brother reminded him that he only had a birthday and didn’t even have a “Gotcha Day” (in the score-keeping that siblings often engage, this has somehow rendered him a neglected child), did not help. There was a bit of indignation on the younger neglected child’s end, and a lot of apologizing on our part. I felt horrible guilt, and wondered whether I forgot this year because of the unusually-large number of balls I was juggling, or simply because of a peri-menopausal memory lapse.
Whatever the reason, whatever the excuse, we screwed up. Caught up in the craziness of our work lives, we overlooked an important event in the part of our lives that is most precious to us, that of our family. We couldn’t take it back. There was no opportunity to rewind. So we acknowledged our mistake, apologized, and moved on. Fortunately, we were forgiven. We rescheduled “Gotcha Day” to the following weekend, and we had a great time at the mediocre pasta joint. We told some stories about the beginning of our whole family, about the entrance of our nearly-toothless six-year-old into our lives when he was a tiny baby. I’m pretty sure that this was a good “Gotcha Day.” I’m pretty sure that my child will not require therapy down the road for this mistake, though I’m equally confident that we will be reminded of our lapse periodically by both of our kids.
Children love to remind their parents, who are supposed to be on the ball and run the show, of when they have epically failed. My pre-adolescent already has a small arsenal of zingers, which he chooses to pull out, usually jokingly, at various opportune moments: “Remember the time, Mom, when I was two and you closed the car door on my finger?” Or, “Remember the time, Mom, when I had a fever for a week and you told me I just had a virus and then you finally took me to the doctor and I had pneumonia?” And so on. Now my younger one has some ammunition, too.
This is probably not the first time we have erred, and it probably won’t be the last. Though we try our best, we sometimes fail in our parenting duties. How we handle our failures can help teach our kids how to handle theirs. Admitting your mistake, asking forgiveness, moving on, and trying to do better the next time is what we ask of our children when they fail. We shouldn’t expect less of ourselves.