Hello! I had posted this in r/relationships but they removed it and told me it belonged here instead. I'm not a big reddit user but I'm glad to have found this group.My wife and I met our son about ten years ago when he was fifteen and placed in our care. He was supposed to have been a short term placement but his biological parents decided they weren't interested in getting him back. I'm ashamed to admit this now, but I was initially very reluctant to extend his placement with us. I had miscarried a biological child a few years prior and didn't want to "replace" that child, my son has vision and hearing impairments that intimidated me, and he comes from a deeply conservative religious background that I didn't think would be compatible with our values.Thank God my wife always gets her way, because the three of us couldn't possibly click better as a family. My son and I are the same person - if we looked even remotely alike I would swear I had given birth to him. He calls us his mothers and we call him our son. Because of the complications with his family and custody we weren't able to legally adopt him before he turned 18, but after he technically aged out of the system he stayed with us and we sent him to college. We are very close. He comes home frequently, we FaceTime and meet for coffee. He is my baby. Adult adoption never really came up because we didn't feel we needed a piece of paper to prove that. We still don't NEED the paper to prove that we're family, but recently we've had some issues with members of his biological family and my wife and I would like to make it legally clear that he is our child, not theirs. We also know that our son is still deeply hurt by their abandonment and I think an adult adoption would offer him some tangible security that we won't do the same thing. My wife and I have no question we want to adopt him and we're as certain as we can be that he would like to be adopted, we just don't know how to bring it up with him. We've been joking that it feels like a marriage proposal. We have a family history of irreverent humor towards our situation (this year my son had a throw pillow made for us for mothers' day, embroidered with "one mom's trash is another mom's treasure"), so we are leaning towards the idea of actually "proposing" to him. We've been reading cringeworthy proposal and prom-posal stories and we think it might be really fun to get both our extended families together and publicly embarrass our child in a way that only mothers can to "officially" initiate him into the family.My only hesitation is that this might be too important of a thing to goof around about. I don't want him to think that we don't take this seriously or that it doesn't matter to us. Is a "mom-posal" too silly for this situation? Or would it make it more special to treat it like a big celebration? Am I way overthinking this? Thank you for reading all of this. After the replies we got we're definitely going to talk to him first (probably today) but I'd still like to hear from other people who have been through something similar. via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2xliLaC
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