Adoption is hard to understand because you don't know who your birth parents are and you don't know why they let you go and where they live and their phone number and address. Ex: You might be wondering about adoption and what adoption is, well adoption is when you get born and your first parents give you away. End of example.I think about my birth parents like every day. You too might be wondering about your first parents, too, just like me. If you do, here is some advice, some things that help me:
1. Talk about your feelings, like
- Talking to my mom about adoption so I can understand more about it.
- Thinking about my first parents in my dreams at night and then I can explain to my mom on the way to school the next morning so she knows.
- Explaining to my mom about how sad I am so she can understand how I feel.
- My mom telling me it's okay to be mad and sad about being adopted. I don't have to be happy about it all the time.
2. Go to live in China like a real Chinese girl, going to school and walking everywhere. You can even go visit your orphanage and see how they loved you and took care of you.
3. Even if you don't go live in China, you can learn about China so you can understand more about your China family and why they couldn't keep you.
4. Reading stories about adoption helps, and reading my own lifebook helps too. I liked making my own book about my first parents and my adoption, and writing about my feelings in it. You can use your imagination to draw pictures of your first parents.
5. I like being with kids like me, adopted kids and Chinese kids, because they might have the same feelings I have. But they might not, too.
[OMG -- I promise, every word is Zoe's! She wrote this out yesterday while waiting for her ballet class to start, and I had no idea she'd written it until she showed it to me today and asked if I could post it on the blog. Yes, she did it as a numbered list, I just reorganized it a bit and combined a few things for ease of reading. I'm in awe -- Zoe, Born Blogger!]
Zoe's perspective is very interesting. My daughter is 6 and was adopted at age 3. She is proud of the fact that she is Chinese, but flatly refuses to have anything to do with other children adopted from China or Chinese school. She seems to want to block that out of her life.
ReplyDeleteI read this to me and she said that "Zoe is right!" She said she likes to see her China friends too and loves to go to Chinese school so she can be with Chinese people. M also wants to go and live in China, she says she is going to live in Nanning when she is a grown-up and we are to live in Guilin (she moves us around a lot in China).
ReplyDeleteI wanted to mention to the other poster that our daughter, adopted at 2, was very much against seeing/hearing/or knowing anything about China and Chinese people for the first 9-12 months home--she refused any contact. She had to have therapy for awhile for PTSD and during her therapy she was able to express a lot of her anger at the lack of control in her life and also to learn more about why were foster family could not keep her (we also worked with her extensively); she started to want to see her China friends and then she really changed her entire perspective and now wants to learn Chinese again. She tells us all the time she will be our guide when we go back to China.
I am not saying your daughter is in the same place; I only bring it up as interesting as I think the process of letting go of China and regaining it is interesting and in each child's own time.
Good luck to everyone and thank you ZOE!
It should say "I read this to M (not me!)".
ReplyDeletevery well put. how old is Zoe again and how long has she been talking about birthparents etc? Glenys is 4 and she either isn't yet interested or the conversations are few and far between.
ReplyDeleteZoe is 7, and turns 8 in November. She tells me she's been thinking about her birth parents since she was 5, but she only started talking about it this summer. That was the impetus for starting this blog, in fact!
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