Kim- Introduction
Sun, 01/18/2009 - 16:50
My name is Kim. I am a single foster/adoptive parent. I have adopted one child from a long term foster placement, S, and I am in the process of adopting her younger brother, MJ. His adoption will be finalized Jan 29. They are very bonded with me, but there will always be issues from the fact that they are adopted. They still call me Kim instead of mom.
Comments
Glad to have you here. We had the opposite situation. Our kids were so disillusioned about what a mom and dad were that they started calling us mom and dad right away. Part of our work with them is helping them understand what a mom and dad are. Actually had to deal with that today. Congrats on the finalization!
Welcome Kim. Ours was a long transition from our child's previous foster family to ours (where we fostered for 6 months). My kiddo started by calling me Matthew. After she started understanding that we weren't dumping her no matter what, she started calling me Matthew-Dad and that eventually just turned into Dad or Daddy.
Congrats on the upcoming finalisation. That is very exciting!
I've tried to transition the kids into calling me mom by saying they could call me KimMom or Kmom. I even signed some of their Christmas presents Kmom this year because I didn't want them to think they were from bmom. I think MJ will call me mom first because he is changing his name from D_ to M_J_ and he wants me to call him M. I told him I would if he calls me mom lol. He's having fun with it. If I say D or son, then he will say mom and I will come back with M lol. S says she is used to calling me Kim and just can't get used to anything else but she changed her name when she got adopted (to a shortened version of her name.) I tried to get her to start calling me mom then but MJ wouldn't as he wasn't 'dopted yet so I decided not to push it until they were both mine.
Either they will choose to call you Mom or not. Your choice to not push it is the right one. In any case, you shouldn't take it personally.