Adoption: to Tell or Not to Tell

Adoption - sometimes I am heady - almost intoxicated with the concept, other times neutral (although those are few and far between) and at others, panicked. I have told my daughter that she is adopted since the time she had the verbal skills to handle it. Even prior to her understanding it, I used the "a" word. What I would rather have done was pretend. Pretend she was ignited by the love between "daddy" and me, nurtured in my womb and birthed by us that rainy fall day. But I knew I would never get away with it. My own integrity would not let me. Her questions would pry the truth from the lie, and besides too many people knew.

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Maybe I could wait until she was 18, 21, 35, No way. I drive my vehicle with an 8-year-old upstart for whom I am doing a transportation favor and who has the audacity to interrogate me by wanting to know what I know about my daughter's real parents. Even she deems the only real acts of parentage to be conception and birth.

So I talk to adoptees, adoptive parents, I read, I ask and it seems that the more natural I am with the idea the more natural my children will be, all of who are adopted. So I use the word with a forced lilt to my inflection and too cheery a tone. They look at me as if I'm nuts. I realize I really have to change my attitude. I hear the story about one of the Marx brothers and how he told his girl about her adoption. I adapt it, it is a charming thing, going something like this: "daddy and I wanted a baby, we heard you were in Reno, we searched and searched, but the baby there was not you. We heard you were in Denver, we looked again but it was not you, then we looked in a tiny rural town and it was you!" There is the lilt and the forced cheer. This story brings a tear to my eye but leaves my daughter cold; she is two and demands I never tell her that story again. I don't.

At age four she wants to know how she was born. I tell her. She asks if she was born from my tummy. I tell her "no, from my prayers and my heart". Now she is really confused. She looks at me "How did I fit?" She asks me the same questions over and over, I give her the same answers over and over, she accepts it, kind'a.

That Father's Day a distant relative of her brother's makes it her business to tell both children that daddy is not their real daddy. We found out about it when our daughter asked to see her real father on 'Father's Day. Daddy was devastated. Her sense of "father" was wounded, and it took a year before she would love him as her daddy again. That someone would deliberately take her sense of "daddy" from her left us stunned. We wanted to run.

That Christmas, when she was five, there must have been a lot of emphasis on Jesus in Mary's tummy at pre-school as the questions kept coming from her and her brother. Whenever they were hurt or unwell they would curl up in a ball and try to snuggle their entire bodies on my tummy. Our son cried inconsolably (he was 4) when it finally dawned on him that he did not come from mummy's tummy and daddy's seed. Can we go back to pretending here? "Family" is so important to our son. I remember when we were at the local fair and I saw an angora goat, he looked comical draped in a mini curled mountain of his own hair that I laughed. My son scolded me and told me "Mummy don't laugh at him, he does not have his family with him." If he sees a bug he doesn't want it squished as he says "he is looking for his family" or "his family will miss him".

When our third baby came home it was a living lesson in adoption. Our son enjoyed the lesson, asking questions all the way, our daughter did not.

A friend came to spend the night, I heard her in the bathroom tell the two older children, midst the toothpaste and gurgles that he was not our real baby. Did the 8-year-old upstart spit in her drinking water? Our daughter cried, she ran into our room, we whispered that her friend did not know the story, he was our baby, he was real, and so were we, she just did not understand. That consoled, for now.

So, to tell, or not to tell. We have no option; they will be told. Better coming from us, in measured, loving tones, than from the upstarts of all ages who feel their obligation to make sure everyone knows who is real and who is not.

And, adoption is part of all of our family now, a very important part, we do not wish to hide the truth, we want to play the hand we were dealt, in truth and love. We are real, our family is real, our love is real, and our ability to deal with the truth is real. We cannot fake cheeriness about it; we have to feel the awe of it, believe the joy of it, and understand the complexities of it, in order to pass that on. The story telling begins in the heart of the parents, then the rest is easy.

Received a phone call today. A woman is pregnant, asked me to find an adoptive home for her child, I have already. Another story begins, another family flourishes and the intoxication of it sweeps me away again.