I’m curious what others think about a part of my post which you didn’t quote, Dawn, the part where she’s asked me to pretend to be J. so she can talk to me. I’m very clear on the fact that I will never pretend to speak for her birth mother, but at the same time, I don’t want to react in ways that she perceives as pushing away her attempts to start a conversation.

Here’s the part of her original post she’s talking about.

“Pretend you’re J., and you keeped me,” she said, right before she fell asleep. This is a tricky situation. Politica and I are very careful never to speak for her birth parents. We have always (in age appropriate ways) tried to show CG the multiple reasons her first parents might not have been able to care for a baby when CG was born, always saying we don’t know why. On a few other occasions CG has said “pretend I came from your belly,” and I have always said “no, I can’t. You grew inside J.” but tonight, she said, for the first time, “Pretend you’re J.” I pretend to be any number of other people or things (in the course of today, I’ve pretended to be a cat, her big sister, her little sister, her baby, her student, her teacher, her ballet teacher). Can I pretend to be J.? My instinct was no, I can’t, but I’m also aware that pretending is how she works things out. I don’t want to block her attempts to work out adoption issues, especially now when she is clearly on the cusp of getting her mind around the fact that being adopted means that someone didn’t keep her. She’s coming to terms with the loss she suffered in a way she never has, despite the fact that she’s long known the general facts of her story. Those facts are starting to be interpreted in a new way now.

Angela (who has a blog again! Hooray!!!) had some thoughts about using puppets that I think you guys might want to read.

My gut says … my gut says that I might be willing to pretend if I didn’t have to do any leading. I was thinking about this since Susan asked and thinking about working with the kids at shelter. Now let me be clear — we did NOT do play therapy there seeing as how we weren’t therapists. We did use some therapeutic techniques (the difference being that therapeutic techniques were focused on doing no harm and therapy in the hands of non-therapists can do A LOT of harm). So some of the kids at shelter wanted to talk about tough stuff and we wanted to give them safe space to do this but we didn’t want to do any leading both because we could pretty easily screw up future court cases and we could really screw up future grown-ups. What we did was follow the kids’ lead. If they said, “Pretend to be XYZ person” we would say, “Ok, what does XYZ person say?” Sometimes the kids wanted us to be mannequins, really. I remember one kid in particular would say, “You’re the daddy and when I come and say this you say that.” I’d go stand where she put me and when she came in and said this, I said that and she’d react. I was very passive.

I think this is the way I’d handle it with my own kids, too. I’d say, “Ok, I’ll be J. What do I say?” And I’d just echo whatever I was told. But since it wouldn’t be a shelter situation, I’d also feel free to stop and observe what was happening. “Wow, you’re really mad at/missing/happy with/imagining about …” Or I might just say, “You sure wish…” I think this is different than putting words in anyone’s mouth — it’s more about helping kids get to the next point in their feelings. I think sometimes kid us to hold their play with them because it’s too lonely (or just less fun) to do it alone.

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