One more thing
Tonight after everyone left and Madison went to get her jammies on, she came back and climbed up on the arm of the couch.
“I don’t want to be Madison,” she said. “I want to be someone else.”
“Like who?” I was thinking she’s going to say Laura or Wanda, which is her recently added alter ego.
“Like … Emmalina,” she said then slid down the arm of the couch to land face down on the cushions next to me. “Or Pennie,” she finished, her voice muffled in the couch.
I pulled her into my lap.
“So why don’t you want to be Madison?”
“I don’t know. Because I don’t want to be pregnant.”
See, now she wants to be Pennie, she doesn’t want to be Madison, she rounds out with pregnant. I think she’s saying, “I don’t really want to be adopted right now at this minute — too complicated.” So I say, “Sometimes it’s really hard to have a birth mommy AND a mommy mommy.”
“I wish Pennie could STAY,” she answers.
“It would be fun if she could just LIVE here,” I agree.
We sit with that for awhile. She’s cuddling and looking gloomy. I’m wishing I could make it all easier. Then Noah interrupts with, “Hey, do you think Jon understands Garfield?” And that breaks the spell.
I think open adoption makes things better but it’s not a cure-all; it’s still adoption.
My girly. She is so sweet.
The muffled “Pennie” was no accident — this is hard for her to talk about. She stumbled over “pregnant” because she knew it wasn’t quite what she wanted to say. She is sometimes shy about telling me these things and I wonder if she already has this idea that I’ll be somehow hurt by her switching allegiance. I guess I thought that openness would stop her from feeling like she has divided loyalties but I’m not sure if it does. Or maybe she muffles it because it is such a painful thing to say; I’m not sure.
It’s why I am so explicit about how much I enjoy Pennie and how happy it makes me to see Madison having fun with her. When I was a kid I worried that my grandmothers were jealous of each other. I was afraid of bringing one up in the presence of the other because I didn’t want to make either one feel bad. If one of them had said, “I love to hear about the fun you have over at your other Grandmother’s!” It would’ve gone a long way. That’s why I say it now.
Maybe it’s working because muffled or not, she does talk to me about it.
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