Drowning In Awareness

My oldest daughter is nearly ten.  She's smart.  She's observant.  Her memory for certain things is a solid steel trap.  And she's drowning in awareness about her own (adoption) story.

My oldest daughter has been in our family for three and a half years.  Prior, she spent six years in an orphanage.  She has ongoing contact with her birth family and has met them in her birth country.  And she's drowning in awareness about her own (adoption) story.

The last few months have been hard for my big girl because she has begun to let go of the illusions and the more easily palatable way that she had framed her own story.  She has come face to face with her feelings of loss, anger, and sadness about the adoption and its why and how.  She's drowning in awareness.

Our family is trying to keep her afloat by giving her every opportunity to talk about her thoughts and feelings.  She's working on a life book and has a trauma-informed therapist to support her as well.  As her mother, I find myself in a precarious position of being a listener, the middle man between her and her birth mother on many occasions, and someone who wants to help her find peace about it all at some point in the future.

While speaking with her, I am often reminded of the sentence that was presented to us over and over again when we were preparing for our adoptions, "Your parents couldn't take care of any child."  This sentence is presumably intended to let our adoptive kids know that what happened to them was not their fault and to make them feel more comfortable with their complicated histories.

In seven years as an adoptive parent, I have never uttered that sentence to any of my children because it simply isn't true for them or for the great majority of children finding themselves in overseas state care nowadays because they were born with special needs.  My other two children's birth parents were successfully parenting their firstborns when the children who now call me mama arrived.  Our big girl's biological parents are making a wonderful life for their two sons, one of whom is only 18 months younger than the girl with limb differences who was born to them first.

If I said, "Your birth parents couldn't take care of any child" to my oldest daughter, she would roll her eyes at me and respond, "Well, they're obviously doing a great job with my little brothers."  In fact, she has said these words to me because she is drowning in awareness.  She is not going to fall for platitudes or cliche explanations.  So what do I say to her?

Right now, I am trying to help her separate the people from the decision, "Your birth parents are not bad people, but they made a poor choice.  They were uninformed and misinformed and they did not do their research.  They were scared and overwhelmed.  They were under pressure from extended family, from doctors, and from society as a whole.  They regret their decision and they understand in hindsight that they could and should have parented you.  They love you and we love you and you can love all of us."

I know that understanding these things does not change the impact her first family's decision had on my daughter's life, but I hope that it will help her - eventually - to reemerge from her drowning, to see clearly the issues surrounding her adoption, positive and negative, and to work toward acceptance.