Penny For Your Thoughts

Every now and again Little Miss gets a faraway look in her eyes and she will go very quiet. Her whole demeanour will move inwards and she will be very hard to communicate with. It's quite a shock as it can (and often does) come out of nowhere with little or no warning. It's such a change as she is normally such a happy, cheery little girl.

I wish she would talk to me and tell me what is going on inside, but I'm fairly sure she doesn't know either. It may have been something she has seen or heard that has sparked a repressed memory or simply she has thought about something and has retreated into herself.

I wish I could hold her hand and take her inside her head and hunt out those bits of memory that are causing her pain and take them away, but for better or worse they are part of her and forgetting painful memories is probably just as damaging as burying them.

As much as we would like to change it we need to be ready to discuss some very painful memories with her (Mister Man is unlikely to remember any truly painful things given his age) and deal with them in a comforting but honest way, all of this without vilifying the birth family who allowed these things to happen. The connection with the birth family and the anxiety of separation from them will only become more detrimental to her mental health if we don't deal with this properly.

So, penny for her thoughts? I'm not sure I actually want to know it will just make me angry but I will give everything I have to make those thoughts hurt her less and to fill her head with happy thoughts and happy memories so that when she goes inside her head it's not the dark but the light that she is lost in; and maybe we'll get a little smile.

Birth Family

This is a hard post to write. Whenever you think about adoption it's never too far from the conversation, like a shadow casting over everything you do. It's in the colour of their hair and the way they talk. They had another family before us.

Years ago it was thought to be better for the child to not know about their birth family (or even to know they were adopted) but it was soon realised that keeping details to yourself about adoption and a childs heritage was detrimental to a childs mental health.

These days a childs status as adopted is not kept from them but embraced. They are told about their birth family and given as much information as is age appropriate about why they have been adopted.

It's a tricky thing for us adopters to manage because on one hand we are super-happy about having the children living with us, completing our longed-for family, but we have to appreciate that for them this is anything but happy and is, in fact, very scary. They can be angry and they can be hurt and it is likely that, regardless of what has happened to them, they will not understand why they can't just go and live with their birth family.

And what of the birth family? For all our joy the flipside of the coin is that a family has been torn apart. I cannot put into words how that must feel. For all that the reasons for it are very often sound (and in the case of Mister Man and Little Miss it most certainly is) there are still people for who our joy is someone elses utter misery and that hurts me.

It is hard to empathise, knowing what we know, with the birth family but we have to try for the childrens sake because in order to help the children become the best version of themselves we have to understand all of them, however much we wish we didn't.