The Worst Part is Not Knowing

As I mentioned before, Zoe's music class at school has been studying the musical, Annie. She hasn't been bothered by it, and has talked to me several times this week about how much she likes the songs. After seeing the first part of the movie, she said she thought Annie was lucky that her birth parents left a note saying they would come back for her. Now Zoe knows the whole story, including the fact that fake birth parents came for Annie, trying to extort money from Daddy Warbucks.

Still, yesterday she said she wished she were Annie. When I asked her why, she said, "You know." Usually when she says that, I do know -- it has something to do with her birth parents. But I couldn't quite figure out how. After all, Annie didn't find her birth parents, she got fake birth parents. I said that, and asked how that would make her want to be Annie.

Zoe said, "Don't you remember? After Annie came back, the president said they'd tried to find her birth parents but they had died a long time ago."

I'm still not getting it -- "You want your birth parents to be dead?"

"Nooooooo! I just don't KNOW if they are alive or dead! At least Annie KNOWS."

Ahhh. Now I get it. The not knowing has always been hard for Zoe. Zoe often shares that she worries about whether her birth parents are alive or dead. When I told her about the recent earthquake in China, I had to assure her it was no where near where we think her birth parents are -- while also telling her truthfully that I don't know for sure. And maybe there's a little more here, too, though Zoe didn't articulate it. At least there was a reason Annie's birth parents didn't try to find her, they were dead. Maybe Zoe would be more comfortable if there was a similarly good reason her birth parents haven't found her.

What will I . . .

. . . look like when I'm all grown up?

Zoe and Maya have each gone through stages where they're fascinated with, um, uh, my chestal area. You know, breasts. How many times have you been with your kids and suddenly you look down and there are two little hands right . . . THERE?! For a while there, I didn't think Zoe would ever potty-train, because when I asked her if she wanted to wear big girl panties like Mama, she asked, "And a BRA?!" It seemed there'd be no pottying in our house unless she had a matching set of lingerie!

The girls have often asked whether they'll have "breasts like Mama's" (I admit, I'm not sure if there's a tinge of envy or horror in the question -- though I am well-endowed, gravity has not been kind!). It's not just breasts, of course. It's looking at me, and wondering what their aging bodies will do. The difficulty of answering that question for adopted children struck me twice in two days this past week.

First, thanks to Facebook friends, I was reading a great story about a local all-Chinese-adoptee Girl Scout Troop:

[The Daisies] lined up eagerly beside the stairs to hear Mei Lin Saunders, a 15-year-old Girl Scout cadet from Carrollton, who had brought her old Brownie and Girl Scout vests festooned with pins and badges to show them how they, too, can progress through the ranks.

"What do you all have in common with Mei Lin?" Daisy Troop leader and mom Kimberly Powell asked the nearly two dozen girls. . . . "We're all Girl Scouts!" chirped one little voice, with the others murmuring agreement. The parents chuckled softly.

"Yes, and you're all adopted from China," Powell continued. This time the girls murmured "Ahh" and looked up at Mei Lin, who usually goes by the name Jamie, all the more intently. . . . They stared as if they couldn't get enough of her.

Mei Lin's mother, Susan Saunders, nodded, understanding what was going through all those little heads, as she looked proudly at her daughter. "They want to see what they will look like when they are grown up," whispered Saunders, watching from the kitchen.

And then I ran across this post at The Queen of Denial, thanks to Tonggu Mama's Sunday Linkage:

No one ever really talks about how adoption screws with your future. I mostly talk about how my past was affected by being surrendered. Or if I do talk about the future, it’s to wonder about medical history and genetic stuff. But lately, as I’ve thought a lot about aging, I realized there are a lot of things I’m missing from my view of the future such as something as simple as knowing more than one generation of your DNA. And that is something I think far too many people take for granted.

You see a lot of yourself in your family. Where you came from, where you are, and where you will be. I know where I am, and a good chunk of where I came from, but there are no clues laid out for me as to where I might be headed in the future. Most people look at their parents, their grandparents, and can see patterns of aging. It’s not an exact science. It’s kind of a look into the future. It may not be exact, but it’s a glimpse, a preview.

As of today I’m twenty two years and some odd months old. I’m still young, still in my prime years. I don’t have wrinkles and my energy levels are high and my hips still slimmed by a fast metabolism. I don’t know what the future of my body, my face, my skin, bring. I watch my adoptive parents as they are getting older and wonder a lot about my natural family. I wonder if they’re young still or if they are getting closer to being senior citizens. I wonder if my mom has wrinkles or if her skin is still taut. If she is still healthy or if she has developed a disease. The kind of things I really need to know about my future, I can only get from her. She is really the missing link I need to chain my past and future to the present.

While it doesn't replace actual contact with and information about birth families, this is a place where adult role models of Asian heritage can be important. If you needed yet another reason to make sure your children know Asians of all ages, this is it. How else will my girls figure out that they're not likely -- for good or ill -- to have breasts like Mama's?!

More scanning faces. . .

I posted Friday about my conversation with Zoe about her scanning Chinese faces, looking for her birth parents even here in America. Here's some more food for thought:

From an adoptee's perspective, a link to a previous post -- another story by Tai Dong Huai, the adult Chinese adoptee who writes fiction related to adoption (I posted her story, Backwards , last month). In Chinaman's Chance, her 13-year-old self thinks a Chinese woman her mother brought home might be her birth mother:

This is her , I think to myself. A billion-to-one shot, a near impossibility, yet here she stands. In our kitchen. As if hell just froze over.

"This is Mrs. Lim," my adoptive mom says. "Mrs. Lim, my daughter Leah."

Mrs. Lim's is as razor thin as I am. Her hair, like mine, is very dark brown, black by most light. My 13-year-old nose, uncustomarily long for an Asian girl, seems to be reflected in her middle-aged face.

* * *

I hear my mom on the front porch and I know my time with Mrs. Lim is almost through. My adoptive dad, were he here to give me advice in this situation, would probably say, "Go for it," or "Swing for the fences." So I do.

"Are you my mother?" I ask.

Mrs. Lim stares at me for a few long seconds, and I'm afraid at first that she doesn't understand. I'm sorry, I'm about to say. Stupid question. But she interrupts my thoughts as the front door opens.

"Your mother," she says, "just came in."

And thanks to Lori's link in the comments, scanning faces from a Chinese birth mother's perspective at Mortimer's Mom's blog:

This afternoon, I was at Reno-Depot (Canadian home depot, except green) with Dumpling, picking out paint for her attic playroom.

There was an Asian couple also trying to select paint, and I could tell the lady wanted to talk to me but was too shy.

* * *

They did turn out to be Chinese, . . .Then he told me his wife was having a hard time because she didn't speak either languages, but also because in Montreal there are really a lot of white families with chinese girls, and it's very hard on her.

At first I thought he meant she was opposed to international adoptions or something, but the rest of their story brought me to my knees, right there in the paint department. They have a six year old daughter. But they also have a 3 year old daughter. They lived in Shanghai at the time of their 2nd daughter's birth and were unable to keep her. They had to give her to an orphanage. 6 months afterwards, their papers came to allow them to travel to Canada. After he told me this, he told his wife what he had told me and she began to weep openly, while caressing my daughter's face.

* * *

The part that was the most thought provoking to me is this: I read Lost Daughters of China, I've thought about my daughter's birth family often, but this had never occured to me before: some of these parents will emigrate. Some of them will come to Canada and the US. They are confronted with happy families caring for Chinese children and must wonder if their own daughters are here in North America, if they made it, if they have families now....

How is it that in this entire process, I have never once given the thought to these parents ever leaving China? Why did I assume they ALL stayed there? I realise that the numbers who do emigrate are low, and the chances of any reunification for ANY of the daughters of China are astronomically small, but that woman today, she is looking for her daughter in the faces of every tiny Chinese girl with white parents....

Wow! Even knowing how little chance there is that my children's birth parents will/have emigrate/d (which, by the way, I told Zoe), that encounter still gives me chills. And thanks to Lorraine's comment, we know that there is little to separate American birth mothers and Chinese birth mothers on this front (and I'm looking forward to your blog post on the topic, Lorraine!).

Scanning faces and wondering . . .

We went out for dinner last night to our favorite Chinese restaurant, and Zoe asked me, "Do you ever look at Chinese people and wonder if they're my birth parents?"

I wasn't completely surprised by the question. We hear often from adult adoptees about their scanning faces and wondering. But this is the first time Zoe had said anything that suggested she did that. I guess I would have thought of it more as something she'd do in China, but not here. Clearly, I was wrong about that.

So I responded, "It sounds like maybe you do that, look at Chinese people and wonder. . . ."

Zoe nodded, and said, "Especially if they're really Chinese. You know, like they don't really speak English."

Hmm, so she's thinking her birth family might have emigrated to America. She's said something like that before.

Well, another conversation peppered with many "I don't knows" from me. We talked a little about emigration, and why people might leave their country to go to another one, and the things that might prevent someone from doing that even if they really want to. And we talked about how hard it is for her to want to know her birth parents and to be wondering about them. And I told her that other adoptees wonder, just like she does, if people they see might be their birth parents (I wanted her to know she was normal!).

And then Zoe changed the subject: "Let's talk about ME!" she says (What have we been doing?!).

Me: "What about you?"

Zoe: "You know! How you MET me!"

Ah, yes, center-of-the-universe girl! That's what we're supposed to be talking about at our Chinese dinner -- the moment 2,920 days ago that we met each other for the first time!

Heart's Desire

The conversation started innocuously enough. We're driving in the car and Zoe was doing her fake-British accent (don't ask!), She asked what the difference was between Great Britain and England, and I explained that Great Britain included England, Wales, and Scotland. She remarked that she thought Scotland was funny since men wore skirts.

I explained about kilts, and said that men in Scotland pretty much wore kilts only for special occasions, like in China, a girl will wear a qi pao only on special occasions, not every day. That lead to questions from Maya about what qi paos are made of (silk).

And that led Zoe to say she wished our whole house was decorated in silk. Why, I asked? The answer was something along the lines of silkworms are cool, silk is so smooth and shiny and colorful. I took the practical road and explained some of the difficulties of taking care of silk. Zoe thought maybe we should invent a washing machine just to wash silk.

And then she changed tacks. "Well, it's not really my heart's desire to have silk all over the house. I want a mirror like the one Harry Potter saw his parents in (the girls watched their first Harry Potter movie last night). I would be able to see my birth parents in that mirror, because seeing them is my heart's desire."

"Yes, sweetie, I know that's your heart's desire. I hope one day you will see them. I know it's not the same thing, but every time you look in a mirror, you can see your birth parents when you look at your face. They made you, so they are in you."

"I KNOW," says Zoe. She's behind me in the car, but I can tell she's rolling her eyes, even though I can't see her. "You're right, it's not the same. I don't know which parts of my face came from which birth parent!"

I respond, "I can tell that makes you feel frustrated. How else does it make you feel?"

Zoe ponders that and says, "It's sad, but I think I've got an idea. I can marry Harry Potter and he can show me the mirror!"

Now she's going all practical on me. . . . . and fickle, too. Earlier in the day, both she and Maya were moving to Europe so they could each find a prince to marry so they could be princesses.

(But judging from Zoe's latest drawing of her birth parents, I can tell her exactly who they look like -- Yoko Ono and . . . Yoko Ono!)

Who do you look like?

Chinese School has started up again, and Thursday the girls met with a new tutor to help with their homework (to make it especially fun, two other girls from Chinese School are tutored at the same time!).

One of the homework exercises Zoe was working on involved writing the characters for family members. One question was, "Who do you look like, your mother or your father?" I overheard Zoe talking to the tutor about it. . . .

Zoe: "Well, I don't look like my mom."

Maya: "She looks like me!"

Tutor: (glancing over at me) "Just write 'Dad.'"

Zoe: "But I don't have a dad."

Tutor: "That's OK, just write the character for 'Dad.'"

Zoe shrugged and wrote.

Later, she told me that she wrote the character for mom, but she was thinking, "birth mom." She wrote mom instead of dad, because she figures she looks more like her birth mom than her birth dad because she's a girl. She also told me that the exercise made her feel "left out." Because she's sure everyone else in her class will know the answer since none of them are adopted.

You never know where it's going to come from, this reminder that you're adopted and your adoption is as closed as closed can be.

I look like my dad -- same blue eyes, same body style that translates for me into "Mississippi farm woman," perfectly built to pull a plow without the benefit of oxen. I went prematurely gray, just like he did. I bruise easily just like he does. I did not, however, inherit his mechanical ability, I'm sorry to say.

Zoe and Maya don't know. How must that feel, YOUR WHOLE LIFE, not knowing? I can't even imagine it. They live it every day, just waiting for that reminder.

What Happens When the Story Changes?

We all know how difficult it is in international adoption to piece together our child’s story. We rely on information provided at the time of the adoption by the sending country’s paperwork and representatives. We supplement it with information we learn from other parents about our child’s area or orphanage. If we’re lucky, we have photos and developmental updates from the orphanage, stories from the foster family. We hire services to take photos for us that we couldn’t take ourselves – finding locations, orphanages, etc, and to track down information like finding ads. We research on the internet – what was the weather like on the day my child was born? What did the night sky look like? We read and research to discover likely reasons why children are placed for adoption in that country, in that area. We take a homeland tour and visit orphanages and finding places, ask to see our child's file.

And we put together our child’s story, piece by piece, hoping we have enough pieces to make a clear picture. We sprinkle the story with “I don’t knows” and “This is my best guess.” But we think we’ve got a fairly accurate picture.

What happens when the story changes?

I’ve blogged before about parts of my children’s stories that I wonder about. Maya’s abandonment certificate says she was left in front of the women’s and children’s hospital. I think it’s possible she never left the hospital, that her birth parents walked out and left her there because they could not pay the bills for a preemie's care. Zoe’s story includes a note – a note said to have been left by her birth family. But two other families in our group got very similar notes, including the same kind of red paper. I’ve doubted its genuineness. But now someone who has reason to know suggests it might be genuine, because Zoe’s orphanage looks like one with an incentive program, where birth parents actually come into the orphanage to leave the children in exchange for money. If so, then the orphanage could have supplied the paper and pens. That explains the similarities in the 3 notes. That makes them genuine. And it makes the abandonment certificate a lie. Maybe the parts that mean so much to Zoe – the three layers of clothing, the little hat, the cardboard box – are all lies.

And then there’s the baby-stealing scandals, first reported in July and expanded upon by the L.A. Times articles. Although my children are not from the areas where it is reported that family planning officials confiscated babies, nor are they from the areas where news is just now starting to come out that the same thing has been happening, the scandals further shake my confidence in the information I’ve been given.

How to deal with all of this? If one knows FOR A FACT that the story has changed, I believe one MUST discuss it with the child. But how? Beth O’Malley says:

If your child is still little, then you are the one to make the emotional adjustment. But how do you handle new information when your child is eight or nine? What about conflicting information? Suddenly everything that you (and your child) believed to be true—is either only partially true or completely false. What can your child believe or trust about his story now? Here are some suggestions for handling situations about new or changing information:

• First of all, as the grownup, it’s your job to come to terms with whatever you learn. Deal with your emotions. Even as you read this article, plan on having a crisis occur at some point in your child’s life. Plan for it by expecting your child to seek information and also to question the accuracy of it all—especially if some of it has turned out to be incorrect.

• Predict and prepare accordingly. How might my child handle this? Is this potentially traumatic information? Will these ‘life facts’ have traumatic impact on my child? Follow your gut instincts and remember that you are the expert on your child.
• Separate your feelings from your child’s. Remember that your child has his/her own feelings and reactions. We parents should sort through ours so that we don’t project them onto our children. For example, our children might have anger about something that saddens us and we have to be ready to react to their feelings. Or, they might be much less impacted than we anticipate. We need to honor and validate their feelings and having sorted through our own first will make this much easier.

• Do your homework. Find out if the information you do have is absolutely accurate. What is the proof? If there is a possible nuance due to translation? If so, proceed cautiously and conservatively. Discuss the impact of translation and explain why new or changed information has emerged. Possible phrases to use are “According to the papers” or “Sometimes the words in one language don’t mean the same in another language….”

Expect all involved to go through a grieving process when new information emerges or previous information proves to be untrue. Your child has just ‘lost’ a chunk of their life foundation and a belief and a piece of identity they have had.

Excellent suggestions. But what if you don’t KNOW, but only SUSPECT that the information is false? Do you disclose?

I believe that I do have to tell my kids about my concerns. I don’t want them to find out on their own, even as adults. I’m quite convinced that they will, as adults, seek additional information. What would I say, then, about why I didn’t mention the birth parent note might be a fake? Or that the orphanage might have had an incentive program? Or that the abandonment certificate might be falsified?

When to tell? Depends on the child. But I think the Ten Commandments of Telling apply here, too, and that requires disclosing all of their story by age 12. Doubt is part of their story. It should be disclosed.

Ancestry and Adoption

OK, this is going to be a disjointed and tentative post, since I'm still trying to think through this issue. I'm also stymied on the research front, not finding much information about attitudes and feelings, not able to track down things I think I've read before.

On another list I'm on, an adoptive parent said he was talking to his wife about looking up his ancestry on Ancestry.com, and his 11-year-old adopted-from-China daughter asked, "Do I have ancestors?" Another adoptive parents answered that after assuring her children that they did have ancestors in China, even though they were unknown, she told her kids that her (the mom's) ancestry was their ancestry.

That "not knowing" thing would make the whole issue of ancestry difficult for adoptees, I'd think. How could it not? And I'm not sure that the adoptive parents' ancestry makes an adequate substitute. I wish I could find the source, but I remember reading somewhere that adoptees often don't feel deep connections to more distant family members, that of course they love and feel connected to parents and close relatives, but distant relatives feel. . . . distant. If so, then what exactly does the adoptive parents' ancestry mean to an adoptee?

And I'm wondering about general views about adoption and "ancestry." Merriam-Webster defines ancestry as: "line of descent: lineage; especially: honorable, noble, or aristocratic descent." I've blogged before that the Daughters of the American Revolution organization won't allow adoptees admission based on their adoptive parents' lineage. Do you think that comports with the general public's understanding of adoption and "ancestry?"

Say Abraham Lincoln is somewhere on my family tree (I first used George Washington as an example, until a good friend gave me a little history lesson, that George and Martha didn't have children, only Martha did from a previous marriage!) -- would people say about my adopted kids, "They're related to Abe Lincoln"?

And perhaps more importantly, how will my kids see themselves -- as relatives of Abe Lincoln, or not? (No, Abe Lincoln is not really in my family tree; in reality, the "honorable, noble or aristocratic descent" which I could pass on to my kids would involve an ancestor who abandoned his wife and children to get out of the state and avoid debtor prison, a cattle rustler, and a moonshiner!)

When I look at Ancestry.com, and search for "adoptee," I find articles for adoptees seeking birth parent information, as I expected (See here and here.). I suppose if adoptees are researching their adoptive parents' ancestry, they don't need special articles at Ancestry.com.

In the comment to a blog post about geneology research, an adoptee said, "When you’re adopted, those sites are not much help for anything except a bruised id. . . ." I can sure see how that would be the case. I'm assuming that adoptee was talking about the problem of not having birth family information. And I didn't find the blogger's response particularly satisfying:

No reason why you can’t do your adopted family’s genealogy. That’s what my aunt
does. She loves genealogy so she works on the same genealogy I do (when she isn’t frustrated by it).

I consider her as much family as great-great-great-grandfather Bubba, whom I never met. It’s not about biology. It’s about connections. I think of it as social networking with your dead relatives. Deadbook, anyone? Ba ding!

Hmm, is geneology not about biology? One adoptive parent opined that given infidelity, uncertainty, secret adoptions, and the like, most of our "ancestry" is a biological mystery, unless tested by DNA. But the "just research your adoptive parents' geneology" seems awfully dismissive.

So chime in, help me figure this out. Can anyone identify my missing source? Does anyone know of adult adoptees who've written about this? Does transracial and/or international adoption complicate this (do you see an adult adoptee from China saying, "I'm related to Abraham Lincoln!")? Please, comment!

"Adoption is Painful"

Food for thought from Lorraine at Birth Mother/First Mother Forum:

And most of all, this is for the young teen who left a comment recently at Birth Mother/First Mother Forum. She said she was crying inside because she doesn't know who she is. "I want to know if I have my dad's eyes and my mother's nose," she wrote. "Can anyone help me to start to search? My parents can't--actually won't...."

Breaks your heart, doesn't it?

She asked us to keep this confidential--but I think she thought we could reach her by email. We have no way to reach her because when someone posts a comment, we can not respond to her or him because we do not have access to his or her email address. So I'll leave her name off here, and no one will ever connect it to the young writer, whom I hope has come back to find this. We are thinking about you and we send you all the love we can through the air. And we wish from the bottom of our hearts that we could reach across the nether and somehow find your first mother for you.

But what can we say to stop the hurt, what can we realistically do to fix the problem? Though we have the power of the word and the communication offered by the Internet, we can't go in and shake up those adoptive parents, like we would like to, and tell them how much their daughter is in pain, and how much they could help by simply opening up the conversation.

No Family History

Zoe and Maya had their eyes checked on Monday, whittling away one more item on our "Back to School" list:

Uniform shoes? Check!

New lunchboxes? Check!

Any family history of eye disease? Um. No check.

Nearly every adoptive parent has had to do it, and as they become adults, adoptees have to do it -- fill out that pesky medical history form. How easy to do it for myself -- cancer on my mother's side, stroke and heart disease on my father's side. If I don't know an answer, I can ask my parents.

Not so with Zoe and Maya. Difficult pregnancy? No idea. Premature birth? Only guesses. Prenatal exposure to chemicals? Family history of breast cancer? Has that mole been there since birth? No answers.

Still, it was fun at the eye doctors -- they're all Chinese there, and they twittered and fussed over the girls like crazy (I actually picked this eye group because they're all Chinese, an easy way for Zoe and Maya to see sucessful Chinese role models). Zoe was in full drama queen mode, cringing and crying over each indignity. Bright lights, puffs of air, eye drops -- oh, the cruelty! Maya stomped over the quivering body of her big sister to clamber up on the stool to face all dangers. Bright lights, puffs of air, eye drops -- let 'em come! (Did I mention the two polar extremes on the temperament thing?!)

Even though I filled out the forms saying family history unknown, the assistants asked me the same question, first for Zoe (don't they even look at the forms? why do they make us fill them out if they are never going to look at the form?!). I say, "We don't have any information about their biological parents." Oh, of course, is the reaction. And then damned if they don't ask me the very same question when it's Maya's turn. I just looked at her and raised an eyebrow, and at least she had the decency to do the "I could have had a V8" thing!

As I've mentioned before, one of the reasons I chose China for adoption was that I wouldn't have to deal with birth parents. In my insecurity, it was my way of ensuring that my child was MINE alone. But when your child becomes real to you, when you feel her pain at missing her birth parents, when you can envision her future of trying to fill in that form at the doctor's office as a teen or young adult, you are ashamed.

On a happy note, Maya doesn't need glasses, and Zoe's vision has improved a bit leading to a new prescription and some snazzy new glasses! Maya is a little disappointed to be the only one in the family with no glasses . . . . Except for Baby Joy, Zoe's perennial favorite doll (a transracial adoption, as you can see)!

Adoption Voices: Adoptive Parents for Open Records

Have you heard of Adoption Voices, the social network for adoption? It's kind of like Facebook, but all adoption, all the time. There are groups and blogs and forums and who knows what all -- I just found out about it, so haven't really explored.

Margie of Third Mom and Komapseumnida (I told Margie that every time I see the name of her new blog I think of Mae West ("Come up and see me sometime!"), though I have no idea how it's actually pronounced in Korean!) has started a group at Adoption Voices: Adoptive Parents for Open Records. If you believe as I do, and as Margie does, that "an adopted person's right to their original birth certificate. . . . is a human and civil right," then please join the group.

Adoption Joy/Adoption Pain

As usual, Margie at Third Mom nails it:

I live adoption two ways. I live it through my own adoption journey: the story of how my husband and I decided to adopt, how we chose to adopt from Korea, our homestudy, the legal process we followed, the waiting, the arrivals, and parenting. That journey is one that is marked by sadness and joy, sometimes for reasons that really have nothing to do with adoption itself, like infertility. But given the outcome - my two incredible kids - adoption has been and is a joyful experience for me, one that has completed me, rather than causing division and separation.

As a parent always feels what their children feel, I also live adoption through my children's experiences. When adoption brings them pain, there's no question that I feel it. I try to understand the pain adoption has brought my children's parents, too. But in both cases, I feel this pain second-hand, maybe even third-hand in the case of my children's parents, because I have no access to them and can't even hear them tell their own stories. No matter the degree, the point is that I can talk about what I
think they are feeling, write about it, and even experience it - but never the same way they do, never in the context of a personal experience.

Click here to read the whole thing.

The Note

This note has always been a bit pesky for me. Zoe's orphanage director said it was found with her. Getting such a note is amazing, consequential, meaningful -- if you believe what the orphanage director said.

But these notes are rare. And all three families getting children from Guiping SWI got notes, and no one else in our travel group with children from other orphanages in the same province got notes. And all of the notes were on red paper. And all of them were said to have no more than the date of birth. We looked at each other's notes, and the handwriting seemed different to us on each note, but what do we know about reading Chinese?!

I don't have any specific reason to disbelieve, beyond what I've already told you. And I don't think there were evil motives on the part of the director -- I sort of think they discovered that such notes made adoptive families happy, so they decided to make even more adoptive families happy by making more notes.

But I don't know, so I've always told Zoe exactly the truth -- "Mr. Gan gave me this note and said it was found with you. I don't know who wrote the note. Mr. Gan says he thinks it was someone from your birth family."

I learned something new about these notes from Jane Liedtke at the OCDF Great Wolf Lodge weekend -- she said that oftentimes adoptive parents were not given the original of notes left with a child, but were instead given a hand-transcribed copy. The SWI workers don't think these notes are as significant as we do, it seems, and don't get why adoptive families would be interested in the original! They figure we just want the information, not this small paper connection to birth family!

That information made me wonder if there might have been an actual note, and maybe the reason all of ours were similar is that a worker transcribed them all. So maybe it isn't all made up . . . .

Maybe because of my doubts I haven't concentrated very much on the note. I accepted that it said nothing more than Zoe's date of birth -- 2000-11-6. But when Zoe was looking at it last week she noticed something I didn't see, and asked, "What's the 3 for?" 3? What 3? That's the number 3 and not some Chinese character? "What's the 3 for?" Good question!

I took it to Chinese Camp today and asked a teacher to translate it for me, and the 3 is the TIME of birth -- 3 a.m. NO ONE told me that in China.

Somehow, this information makes me more inclined to believe the note is genuine. It always struck me as odd that there was no time of birth, since the reason this information is usually left is so that these children can have an accurate horoscope done for purposes of marriage, etc. You can't get an accurate horoscope without the TIME of birth.

So now I'm thinking this note is from Zoe's birth family, and that we now have an additional piece of the puzzle that is her life before we met -- that she was born in the wee hours before dawn.

But who knows for sure . . . .

An Answer to "It's Not FAIR"

Mei-Ling kindly responds to Zoe's video ruminations about Mei-Ling's reunion trip:

“I know about a girl named Mei-Ling who went to Taiwan to visit her birthparents. It’s not fair that she can meet her birthparents and I can’t.”

You’re right, Zoe.

It isn’t fair.

You might never find the answers. I really, really wish you could. Instead of spending what might become a lifetime of wondering… searching… speculating… I wish you could have the answers.

I will keep praying for you.

Because there’s thousands of other girls out there who were adopted from China, who also might be wondering, speculating, who also might be saying “Why me? Why do adoptees like Mei-Ling get to see their birthparents and I don’t? It’s not fair!”

Click here to read more of Mei-Ling's response. And if the video is inaudible, here's where I blogged before about Zoe's reaction to Mei-Ling's upcoming reunion.

Happy Birthday To Me!!!!

Yep, today's my birthday -- something I'm trying to ignore since I'm getting so old (midlife crisis, anyone? I'm thinking of going back to coloring my hair . . . )! Still, any birthday that starts with your kids singing you "Happy Birthday" is a good one!

So is this pure narcissism, or is there some adoption connection to this post? Actually, yes!

Think about what you, who's not adopted, know about your birth. You know the day, maybe the time (9:05 a.m.), the town you were born in, the hospital where you were born, the family story about your birth (rush to the hospital? dad passing out in the waiting room or passing out cigars? 72 hours of the most painful labor any woman has endured?). You know your birth weight. You have a newborn picture of you in the hospital bassinet with "Baby Girl ____________" or "Baby Boy ____________ " above you. You know your mom held you. You know your mom loved you the minute she saw you, because she told you so. You know you look like your dad. You have your birth certificate with your parents' names, and all the vital stats about your birth.

How wonderful to have that information! What a comforting foundation! It is so naturally a part of my life I rarely think about it at all. But what would it be like not to have that information? That's hard to imagine. Would it mean nothing to me, to have that piece of my history missing? Would it feel like an empty space in me?

Now think about what your adopted child knows about his or her birth. . . .

Is today really my REAL birthday?

Today is the day we celebrate Maya's 5th birthday! She has been so excited about turning 5; last night when I was trying to get the girls ready for bed, I told Maya she needed to go to sleep quickly because she'd be waking up in the morning as a 5-year-old. She closed her eyes and laid down on the floor and said, "I'm asleep!" I said, "So you want to skip your night-time video and go straight to bed?" (I pretty much knew the answer to that one!) No, Maya said, "I'll just fall asleep watching the video and you can carry me to bed!" (She didn't, and then the girls stayed awake in their beds for 2 hours, too wound up to sleep!) Today at her school we'll have pizza and cupcakes and juice (and apple slices, since mama wants to offer something healthy!). What a joyous day!

Then this morning at breakfast, Maya asked, "Is today really my REAL birthday?" Hmm, how to answer? We don't really know her REAL birthday. She was estimated to be born today and found three days later (we're luckier than many -- it's likely that her birthday is really right around the 15th, probably only off by a few days, since you can pretty much gauge age by umbilical cord when they're that little. Kids found when they are older can't even know if they are in the ballpark.)

TELL THE TRUTH. Isn't that what I advocated in an earlier post? OK. But how about figuring out exactly what she's asking? "What do you mean, Maya? Are you asking if this is like Saturday when we celebrated with Uncle Phillip and the boys since they wouldn't be in town today?" Maya: "Yes! Is today my REAL birthday?" Mama: "Today is really your OFFICIAL birthday!"

It's the truth. Not the whole truth, but the truth. And, I think, truth enough for today.

Fiction or Non-Fiction

My mom gave Zoe a spiral notebook yesterday, and last night Zoe asks if I could help her write a story in it. "Well, what do you want the story to be about?" I ask. "I don't know," is her response. "Do you want it to be fiction or non-fiction?" They learned the difference in first grade and Zoe loves that she knows the difference.

Zoe says, "I want it to be about my birthparents, but I don't know what to write since I don't know their names or where they live or what they look like. So that makes it hard to write non-fiction." "I can see how that makes it hard. How does that make you feel?" "FRUSTRATED!"

(I almost expected to hear a "damnit!" after that word -- a close family member who will remain nameless has a tendency to say "damnit," and Zoe picked up on it when she was around 3, and I'm trying to explain to her why she can't say it without saying this beloved family member was saying a bad word. At one point I say, " So-and-So says this word when she's frustrated." Zoe looks me dead in the eye, and says completely dead-pan, "I'm frustrated. Damnit." So much for explanations! Next I said flatly, "It's a bad word -- you can't say it EVER!" But I digress . . .)

She doesn't want to talk any more about her feelings. She's hunched over, the perfect posture of cold shoulder. I suggest, "We could make a list of what we do know about your birthparents. We know they lived in China, for example." "That won't work," Zoe says in disgust, "the list will be too short." She doesn't even want to try. She doesn't like my suggestion that she could write a fiction story, using her imagination to write about her birthparents.

Finally, she decides the story will be titled, "The Year I Was Born," and she's going to tell it in pictures instead of words. She draws a baby and a dragon -- "I was born in the year of the Dragon." She says she doesn't know how to draw a person holding a baby "like this," with her arms in an oval in front of her -- her birthmother carrying her. She's definitely losing interest in this topic.

She's off to other things, and the story goes unfinished. . . .

UPDATE: In the comments, Sue suggests an approach I like a lot:

Well,maybe it's too subtle for a 7-year-old, but there is something
in-between fiction and non-fiction that could be the basis for a story someday.
You could start out making a list of things you know, some things that could be
true (birth family members probably have similar appearance, abilities, etc.),
and then some things you wish were true that could become the fictional part of
the story. It might show that there is more known than you think. For example,
both my kinds can curl their tongues, so we know that someone in their
birthfamily must be able to do that too (as I think that is inherited). Trivial
detail, but it is something we know to be true, even though we don't know their
birthparents.