Another Anniversary
We passed another anniversary this week. While it is the anniversary of Maggie's journey to us, it is not an anniversary we share with Maggie. This week marked the second anniversary of Maggie' s entrance into Suixi Social Welfare Institute.
I always feel sad on the anniversary of when my girls entered their respective orphanages. For both of my girls, it was about 1 month after their birthdays. It is common for babies to be abandoned in China about a month after they were born. I have heard this is cultural: The belief is babies are strong enough after 1 month to be left.
While the anniversary of Maggie's journey marks a beginning, it also marks an end. It was the last day her birthparents held her. There is such a large part of me that wonders, how they could walk away from such a beautiful little girl? There is a large part of me that feels sorry for them. I assume that something must have been so bad that they had no choice but to let go. But you know, after both of my girls were in my arms for a second-if that long- I knew I could never do it. I could never leave them. Never. And these people held them for a month. Wow. How did they do it?
These days as the girls get older, I wonder, what on earth are my girls going to make of their life's journey? Will they be mad? Will they be sad? Will they be glad it all worked out? Will they think they would have been better off in an orphange than in the US with a bi-racial family? (Right or wrong: some adult Korean adoptees have made this last statement.)
And as the girls grow and the questions start to come, we can only hope we answer them well. La Nina has already started asking. I will not share with the world what she asks, but suffice to say, she gets it. Her questions are getting tougher every day, and she is understanding more of her life path everyday. So far, we can answer all the questions. We can reassure her and help her by breaking the story down into age appropriate sound bites.
But the annivesary of their entrance into the orphanage marks the last chance we had to answer the toughest question of all: why? Why on this day did my birth parents walk away? Why? I don't dread this question, I know it will come. I struggle with it myself. Unfortunately, their birth parents are the only people who can answer that question, and on this anniversary, they disappeared from their lives probably forever. We can speculate, postulate, estimate, guess, theorize, conjecture and presume, but in reality, we have no idea why those four people had to leave these two incredible kids.
In the end, La Nina and Maggie will have to live with the unanswered questions that this anniversary marks. They will have to make peace with the unknowns. They will have to decide if they are mad, sad, glad or a little of everything when it comes to their history. We can't decide for them. In the end, we may have chosen to welcome them into our lives, but a whole bunch of adults accepted the invitations on their behalf.
I always feel sad on the anniversary of when my girls entered their respective orphanages. For both of my girls, it was about 1 month after their birthdays. It is common for babies to be abandoned in China about a month after they were born. I have heard this is cultural: The belief is babies are strong enough after 1 month to be left.
While the anniversary of Maggie's journey marks a beginning, it also marks an end. It was the last day her birthparents held her. There is such a large part of me that wonders, how they could walk away from such a beautiful little girl? There is a large part of me that feels sorry for them. I assume that something must have been so bad that they had no choice but to let go. But you know, after both of my girls were in my arms for a second-if that long- I knew I could never do it. I could never leave them. Never. And these people held them for a month. Wow. How did they do it?
These days as the girls get older, I wonder, what on earth are my girls going to make of their life's journey? Will they be mad? Will they be sad? Will they be glad it all worked out? Will they think they would have been better off in an orphange than in the US with a bi-racial family? (Right or wrong: some adult Korean adoptees have made this last statement.)
And as the girls grow and the questions start to come, we can only hope we answer them well. La Nina has already started asking. I will not share with the world what she asks, but suffice to say, she gets it. Her questions are getting tougher every day, and she is understanding more of her life path everyday. So far, we can answer all the questions. We can reassure her and help her by breaking the story down into age appropriate sound bites.
But the annivesary of their entrance into the orphanage marks the last chance we had to answer the toughest question of all: why? Why on this day did my birth parents walk away? Why? I don't dread this question, I know it will come. I struggle with it myself. Unfortunately, their birth parents are the only people who can answer that question, and on this anniversary, they disappeared from their lives probably forever. We can speculate, postulate, estimate, guess, theorize, conjecture and presume, but in reality, we have no idea why those four people had to leave these two incredible kids.
In the end, La Nina and Maggie will have to live with the unanswered questions that this anniversary marks. They will have to make peace with the unknowns. They will have to decide if they are mad, sad, glad or a little of everything when it comes to their history. We can't decide for them. In the end, we may have chosen to welcome them into our lives, but a whole bunch of adults accepted the invitations on their behalf.
posted by One Lucky Mom @ 8:55 PM
1 Comments:
At 12:59 PM ,
Donna said...
I didn't know it was relatively common for birthparents to wait until their baby was a month old before leaving them. (Gwen was a month old when found) I always wondered how many times they changed their mind over that month. Did they try not to get too attached? Was the baby nursed?
We'll gently guide our daughter to understand that she's still very "whole" even though the people who provided the sperm and egg will never be known to her. We don't plan to spend alot of time on the subject because I think we can make it a bigger deal than it should be. We want her to always be comfortable talking frankly to us about it but hope that it's something she'll never want to dwell on. We think we can accomplish this by helping her gain some perspective on how other children live and the joys and hardships they face.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home