After reading another of Jenna’s great posts, I admit this one had me really thinking. Honestly this young woman has such an exceptional way with words! I really feel she won’t be at a loss for those words when her daughter needs to hear from her heart, but I could see what she was trying to express.

I have no doubt that birthparents fear that day, the day when their old enough child is able to verbalize the question that perhaps they fear the most. WHY? Why did adoption happen, and what does it say about me (the child). The nature of maturing just demands that children try and find the answers that fit into how they understand their experience in the world. Kids will one day be grown, and preparing for their questions seems like it could save a birthparent additional grief when those questions eventually come.

On the flip side, I think that adoptive parents also can face their own day of reckoning involving the adoption decision and their part in it for their child. As much as grown children may want to hear why an adoption plan was made for them from their birthparents, they may also want to ask their adoptive parents why they participated. Even when children dearly love their adoptive family, I wonder if some small part of them will wonder about us, Why we did not just help mend what was wrong for their birthfamily? Why couldn’t we fix things so they never had to be adopted at all?

I know as an adoptive mother it has crossed my mind that someday I too will be subject of an inquisition of my own. My children might want to ask me why I did not do more to help their birthfamilies just raise them. They may not understand that I did not have all the information to make such a decision at that time, and that part of me might have also been a little afraid to.

I mean I understand that there was little I could do along those lines. I did not know their birthparents deepest thoughts about placement till well after each of my children had been with us a long while. Was it to long for us to face letting go though? How could I not let go, yet I expected their first parents to do just that? Why did we not just help them parent? Who knows how many questions of that nature might be headed my way, some day, and if I will be ready to hear them, let alone have a reasonable answer.

The facts remain that birthparents and adoptive parents enter into adoption for different reasons, so our answers may also conflict and that is yet another thing our kids must work out somehow. What ever our children’s birthparents might share with them about their adoption some day, might not blend with the reasons that we had for adopting them. This is not something that is ever easily explained, and I dread the questions waiting for me too.

Sometimes I too worry. I worry that my kids will somehow feel that their life was ruined, all because of me. I wonder if they see me as a strong guide and parent that they will expect that I could have, and should have, fixed everything for their birthfamilies. I am afraid they will see my motivations in adopting them as purely selfish and self serving. I fear the day that they might decide that I was wrong and that they suffered because of it. I can’t imagine how that might hurt, because I love them with everything that I am. They have become everything that is good about my life.

Yes I think about what my children will someday ask me about their adoption, what part I played, and I can only hope they will listen and understand.

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