Day 29: Micro bonding

These days I'm thinking a lot about bonding. Because we've started at bonding level zero with a two year-old, I actually think it's most helpful to focus on what I'm calling micro bonding. I don't know if that term has ever been applied in this context. The quick research I've done shows that micro bonding is used in industries such as haircare, engineering, and manufacturing. Now I'm extending it to the world of adoption.

You've heard of micro brewing? Micro brewing is producing only a limited amount of beer. A micro brewery's output is smaller than a regular brewery's output. You might have heard of micro blogging. Micro blogging is distributing very short updates through some type of technology platform. A micro blog's output is smaller than a regular blog's output. And so with micro bonding, the principle is the same--reduced-sized compared to the original.

Now, you might argue that any kind of bonding is still in fact bonding and why make the distinction. I agree it is, but when you're building an adoptive relationship, it's a matter of baby steps, not big ones. You've gotta have reasonable stuff to shoot for and celebrate, and most often, it's on the micro level. A micro bonding goal is not to have your child call you Daddy or Mommy exclusively, but to do it for, an afternoon. It's not for you to translate every foreign word he says, but to know what his facial expression means, now. It's when, in this moment, he opens his arms to his parent rather than reaching for a stranger. In micro bonding, the small stuff is the big stuff, these giant leaps toward eachother.