Backstory
Recently Madison’s been asking about her birth dad. (I know, I know, he didn’t give birth to her so he’s not her birth dad. I should say first dad but that’s not quite right so then I think bio dad but Madison says birth dad or birth daddy or birth father so we’ll go with that. Ok, let’s start again.)
Recently Madison’s been asking about her birth dad. She wanted to know if he was dead. He’s not dead but he’s not here either. So we talked about that. We talked about why he isn’t here. It’s hard to find 4-year old language to talk about why he isn’t here when I only have part of the story and the parts of the story I have aren’t the kind of stuff you share with a 4-year old. So I leave it with, “He hasn’t made very good choices and one of those not good choices is that we haven’t gotten to meet him.” That’s when she asked if he’s dead.
She wanted to know what he looked like so I told her what I know. I told her that I wish I’d gotten to meet him or had a picture of him. I know his vital statistics — the kind of stuff you’d get off a driver’s license. I told her that I don’t really know what he looks like but Pennie does and she can ask Pennie. I don’t know if she will — she’s shy about this stuff. But this time I think she got that he’s white because she asked if that’s why her skin isn’t as dark as Pennie’s. (Smart kid, eh?) And I said yes, that’s the reason. Then we compared our skin some because she wanted to do that and then I told her his nickname and it’s a funny nickname so we laughed about it a little bit.
This means this talk was also our first sex talk because it’s when she learned that it takes a man and a woman to make a baby. I mean, I brought all of this up because I think I said, “It takes a man and a woman to make a baby and that’s why you have a birth mommy and a birth daddy.” (We have talked about birth daddy/birth father before.) She said, “Is Daddy my birth daddy?” And I said no. We have talked about this before but see, I don’t think kids always get this stuff all at once. For example Noah was listening in and even though we have told him all of this before, he still acted surprised about some of it. He hears the story once and gets one part. He hears the story again and gets another part. It takes repetition.
I also think a kid’s natural magical thinking can change the story so it’s important to tell it over and over again. Like Madison asking if Brett is her birth daddy. I’m sure she wants Brett to be her birth daddy, even more so now that her mad 4-year old love affair with her dad is rearing it’s developmentally appropriate head. Maybe she’s imagining that he is. Maybe this imagining is so compelling that she forgot the real story. So we talk about it. This time she is obviously listening harder because she thinks about his skin color in relation to her own skin color.
We’ve been talking a lot about adoption lately anyway after quite a bit of down time. Like recently I had a non-adoption related meeting with someone who happens to be adopted and so in the course of our non-adoption related meeting we talked about it. (Because really I’d rather talk about adoption and hear people’s adoption stories than I might want to talk about, say, tupperware or exercise regimes or new home buying or a myriad of other topics.) So when I got in the car when Brett and Madison came to pick me up and Madison said, “Who’s that?” pointing to the woman I’d been meeting with, I said, “That’s [insert name here] and she’s adopted like you. Do you remember what that means? It means she has a birth mommy and a birth daddy like you.”
I bring up other people’s adoptions because:
1. I want her to know that adoption is something that a lot of people experience.
2. I want her to know that adoption is not something that’s only a kid-thing (that adults are also adopted people).
Madison is also suddenly very interested in L’s story (AmFam’s L) likely because she’s seen L a few times at the park unexpectedly and she’s been reminded that L is also adopted. She is intrigued that L doesn’t know who her birth mommy is because L was in China and was in an orphanage. I told her that some children who are adopted have spent time in orphanges and others have not. I’ve reiterated that she has not. (I think that as she begins to hear other adoption stories that she might get confused that adoption is done only one way so I think it’s important to tell her these other ways but at the same time remind her of her own story.)
There haven’t been any great big emotional adoption stuff going on for her lately — it’s mostly been these kinds of factual, casual conversations but with more interest in the fact than she’s had in the past. It’s interesting to me though that now that she’s nailed down who Pennie is, she’s branched out to think about her bio dad. Doesn’t this seem to fall right in line with a non-adopted kids’ developmental process? All mommy-mommy-mommy and then at around four looking out and seeing this whole other world around them?
I think it’s Madison’s developmental stage. Alena asked about S, her biodad, for the first time at about that age. Unfortunately, that was when S was having some, um, difficulties - the result being that he’s in jail and we can’t contact him for a nice long while to come. So we had to talk to her about why S was where he was and why he needed to be there.
I think I remember you mentioning that Pennie’s not in contact with him at all. Does she have any pictures of him? I know that helped Alena a lot; just being able to see him, I mean.
[...] the internet Posted by cynthia under Uncategorized something must be in the air about birth fathers. we too call wendell’s birthfather just that. he hasn’t met him yet (though we have- [...]
I’ve always thought of “birth dad” to mean that he’s her dad by birth (i.e. by virtue of her birth into his family tree), as opposed to her dad by adoption. Like saying you’re a US citizen by birth, as opposed to by naturalization. So it works for me. But I’m not the one being labeled that, so what do I know?
It’s interesting to read this. We also have limited information and no contact with our son’s biological father. He is just now discovering, and verbalizing, the differences he sees in our skin tones. I have been thinking ahead of how to intruduce the concept of his biological father. We mention him, but as my son just turned three, he’s not really developmentally there to wonder where he came from, or to even really understand what we’ve told him about adoption. I make use of each question he asks, and introduce things where I can. In a situation like this, there are so many complex concepts rolled up at once: genetics, adoption, sex, race…I keep reminding myself that I can’t explain all of that at once, that it will take time, and he will get it bit by bit. It’s the getting the process started that we haven’t really done, but perhaps in the next year it will start to unfold more? When did these discussions begin with Madison? I guess having an open adoption means that the dialogue had to be facilitated very early as you spent time with Pennie, which is not the case in our situation. I’d be interested to know when most children really start to get curious about their birth and adoption stories?
When I was 4, I thought that a minor explosion happened in the living room of our house and that when the smoke cleared, there I was, standing in the living room, fully clothed, exactly as I was at that moment, and that something similar happened in order for my parents to exist also (fully formed adults, my parents, no other purpose in life, etc). This construct worked for me for some time.
Kohana, Madison was about 27-months when she definitely GOT that Pennie was her birth mother and that she was born FROM Pennie. Definitely part of this was having Pennie around and then part of it was that there were two people in our life who were pregnant and Madison was curious about that. She started talking about her own skin color and our skin color around three but it’s only recently that she’s really talked a lot about how she is brown because Pennie is brown and she has curly hair because Pennie has curly hair, etc. I think these are all pieces to the same puzzle and she sometimes gets one part of it without seeing how it connects to the other but it’s really coming together now.