Love and School

My oldest started Kindergarten earlier this month. It’s awesome! My youngest started Pre-K and that is awesome too! I love back to school. It’s so great to see the girls make new friends, experience new things, and to see how they integrate our home life into their school life (and vice versa).

I’ve preceded the start of each school year with a letter to the classroom teacher (and this year the guidance counselor too) which outlines our family makeup for them. My hope is that this letter will help the teachers and staff understand adoption, adoption language, and how adoption is for us. I do this in order to spare my kids the dumbfounded look of adults who don’t get adoption (or differences in family make up in general).

When I write the letter each year I have a line from the poem Black is Brown is Tan by Arnold Adoff, “This is the way it is for us, this is the way we are” running through my head. Basically, I like to spell it out as simple and clear as possible for the reader. I don’t give back story, nitty-gritty details, or write anything that my kids don’t already know themselves. I give labels to all the family members, what role the family members each have in my child’s life, and what open adoption means, and doesn’t mean for my family. I try to stick to “This is the way it is for us, this is the way we are” as this is also the motto I have for my family in general.

My girls talk about their birth families as they talk about everyone else in their life, integrated into their wondrous universe, which they are the masters of. But sometimes, I am taken aback by my girls’ depth of thinking about our big crazy open adoption family. This happened late last week. My oldest daughter had created an “All about me” project which was displayed for Parents Night in her classroom.  It was adorable, and pronounced her age, eye color, hair color, favorite color (blue!) and then for the last page it said “One important thing you should know about me is ________________.” My oldest wrote “i HV BUTHi”. I looked at the illustration she had drawn above the writing and it gave me no clue about the meaning. So I asked my oldest what it said, and she told me, “I have a brother”. My heart stuck in my throat, I turned to hug my sweet girl, and looked up to see her teacher beaming at me with a huge smile.  Thank god, I thought, this is a safe place where it is ok for us to be just the way we are.

The Questions are Coming……..DUCK and PRAY that You Say the Right Thing

“Mom, if you are JJ’s birth mom then how come you are his regular mom too?” Bruiser asked this evening between dips of his Chips Ahoy into
a small glass of milk.   It is questions like this that every once in a while randomly come out of our 5 year old twins’ mouths.  Are you ever fully prepared to respond to these types of questions?  As adoptive parents, we hope to be ready with an arsenal of appropriate, sensitive and
truthful answers.   My husband and I seem to be doing ok with the questions and appropriate answers…at least I think we are.  We address the questions in a reassuring manner, in a way that will make our children feel unconditional love, in a way that they will not question their place in the family, in a way that will assure them that their birth mom, lovingly made the choice to place them to afford them the best life possible.

But, I never know how my responses are perceived by my twins.  Today’s question was answered with a spiritual/ religious response of “G-d has a plan for everyone………..the plan was to have me be the mom of JJ, Bruiser and Princess.”  The answer was accepted and conversation quickly turned to potty talk that seems to dominate our kid’s vocabulary these days.

It seems as though the complexity of the questions are increasing but that is to be expected.  It is frightening as a parent to fear the unknown……….what is the next question? Will I answer it with ease? What if my child doesn’t accept my answer?  What if I don’t have a good answer?    My common sense tells me that these fears are universal to every parent……..the questions may be difficult, they may be different but all parents have the fear.  I will continue to give it my best shot and appreciate that my children are coming to me to get their information.
Our family is close, we communicate well and love each other………the questions will come, the discussions will endure, the dialogue will continue
but that comes hand in hand with a child growing up.