They Had a Life Before Gotcha Day

There have been several posts on my news feed about school assignments that are common where they ask for a baby picture and ask questions for which we as adopted parents often do not have answers.  These moments are painful - for them and for us! I know for me they are a reminder that no matter how much I love my children, that love cannot take away the fact that they are adopted.  As hard as we try to make being adopted a very special thing in our family (to the point that Callie used to cry that she was not adopted and hated being biological! Oops! Guess we went overboard at first!), being adopted still means there are missing pieces to the puzzle of their lives. And these assignments pour salt in that wound.

So what do we do with them? As is the case with just about any adoption related discussion, I do not think there is a one-size-fits-all answer.  I think it depends on your child and how he feels about being adopted.  How comfortable is he with that discussion?  But no matter how you decide to handle it, can I encourage you to not send a message that I fear many of us do without even knowing it? Please be careful to not send the message that his life began on Gotcha Day!

I love the Gotcha Day celebrations.  I think celebrating the day our children became a part of our family is something special and definitely worth celebrating!  However, that is not when my children's lives began! They were born somewhere to someone.  Depending on when they came to us they may have had weeks, months or years of life before we even knew about them.  Can I tell you that Gotcha Day doesn't erase that! It sounds absurd, I know.  But how many times when our children ask us something, or an assignment asks us something, do we revert back to something we "know" or something we feel comfortable talking about, which doesn't usually include all the missing pieces that we don't have from their life before us.

I had not really thought of it this way until we adopted a teenager.  She would get angry when we would talk about anything that happened before she came.  We had to have a conversation about the fact that even though I hated that it took 15 years for us to find her, we did have a life before she was in our family. This was hard for her to understand until I asked her if she would be happy if I told her she could not talk about anything during the first 15 years of her life because it made me too sad that I missed it?  I was asking her the question, but really, I heard my voice asking me, "So do you not want to talk about anything that happened for the past 15 years if you are not comfortable talking about her birth mom?"  Ouch!

So what do we do with the school assignments with the questions for which we don't have answers, or the dinner conversations with other kids that are about first words or first foods?  I am not saying I have the answer, but I don't think the answer is to pretend like it didn't happen because it's too painful for us to not have answers! I don't think we need to always revert to Gotcha Day as their beginning just because it's when they began with us.  They did have first words even if we don't know what they are! They did take a first step even if we don't know when it happened! They were a baby even if we don't have a picture!  And while I would love to e-mail every teacher from now until they graduate and tell them that adopted kids have a very hard time with these assignments and it's very insensitive to assign them, that's not the real world.  I cannot follow my adopted children around their entire lives telling people they are adopted so please do not ask them anything about their life before Gotcha Day.

When we talk about those things in our family, we talk about what "could have been" the first word or the first food.  We look at pictures of babies and see if we can find some that look similar and laugh about if they would have that kind of hair or were that chubby. For Toben we have babies who are being carried on their backs and talk about how he probably rode like that on his mamma's back. Is it painful sometimes to not have answers? Yes! But does it change the reality to not talk about it? No! And maybe it's the realist in me, but I would rather them learn to handle the unknowns in their life while they are with me and we can do it together! And what I always want to communicate to them is that their life is perfectly planned and orchestrated by God, their days were numbered before even one came to be - even the days before I entered their lives, even the days before Gotcha Day!