A woman wanders dreamily
around a walk-in closet, moving from its silk pashmina wing to its antique
brooch wing to its silver bracelet wing. She looks at the photo of a young boy
and then walks to one of the closet’s many mirrors and practices several
versions of her speech.
“Hello, Michael,” she says to the mirror. “I’m Amanda. But if you want … you can call me mom.”
This is a commercial by Inspired Closets, just inspiring the shit out of everyone with an inspirational commercial about a rich woman who is immediately taking her impending adoption from 0–60 by suggesting her incipient son call her mom at their first meeting. I know everyone’s story varies and everyone’s adoption journey looks different and what works for one family might not work for another.
But—girl—did you even take the class? Because we took the class. And in the class, if a prospective parent had wanted to discuss the exact phrasing for suggesting a child could call her mom if he wanted on the day they first met, the facilitator probably would have tactfully told her to slow her roll.
In any adoption story, there is trauma and there is loss. The child is processing moving to a new home, and will probably be scared or apprehensive. You really just have to be conscious of this stuff and meet the kid where they are. He might not even want to talk to you. So maybe your first meeting might not be the time to bring all this up. I mean, it’s not like an arranged wedding where you meet your spouse for the first time when it’s already basically a done deal; Amanda doesn’t even know Michael yet and there are many hoops of fostering and finalization to jump through. You two might not be a match. You don’t know!
Here's how Steve and I handled it: Sometime after our son moved in, we referred to each other in conversation as “Dad” and “Daddy” and he just picked up on it that that’s what we wanted him to call us. We didn’t want to pressure him. That first meeting, he was much more concerned with our wifi password than anything emotional.
Every family is different, of course, and maybe this fictional woman’s request to “call me mom” would work out. But what I’ve learned in adoption and in parenting is that the moments you think might be big and dramatic might be smaller than that—still beautiful, but maybe not backed by a choir of angels and a dramatic slant of sunlight breaking through the clouds. I learned years ago that parenthood might not look like I pictured it, but it would still be amazing.
Anyway, what a goofy idea to sell closets through adoption. It’s not that deep; it’s a place to put your clothes. I picture the pitch meeting and wonder if the client and the agency were both, like, crying from how heartwarming this all is. I just think it’s dopey.
