(another break from my narrative today -- Back on topic tomorrow...)

The New York Times has a new blog linked from their Opinion page: "Relative Choices: Adoption and the American Family - A new blog by adoptive parents and children.
In the first post, journalist Jeff Gammage tracks down the man who found his daughter on a street in China."

I read through the first article today and was really moved by it. Then I read through all the comments which I found even more interesting, most of them were of the "What a great story/It made me cry" variety, but there were some other very opinionated viewpoints put forward as well. It's funny, some of the contrasting viewpoints that always come up around adoption. There was the obligitory, "Why do people adopt from other countries when there are so many kids right here in America's foster care system in need of homes?" And of course the great retort to this, "I don't ask parents of biological kids why they procreated instead of adopting kids from the foster care system so you should just shut up!" (I'm paraphrasing here a bit). But even more interesting to me were the comments by adoptive parents and adoptees themselves who questioned the value of pursuing information about a child's roots.

Tina and I have been talking about this lately in regards to Kai and Shen. We have fragments of information about both their pasts, but there are huge "blank spots". As to their lives in the S.W.I.'s, we have lots of photos, and were able to visit both of them. Consequently both boys have lots of pictures and video of themselves there, so they have a connection to at least a bit of this part of their lives. For Kai, who has been home longer, his past has taken on a bit of a fairy tale quality in his mind. He talks of when he was "Baby Kai in China". He talks about his nanny, Chin-yen, who took care of him, but he has never asked about his birth-mother, or how he came to the S.W.I. Now obviously this is because we have not talked about this with him yet, and I must admit I'm a bit stumped still as to how this conversation will start.

Chronologically (as best as we know) Kai is almost five years old. One would think a child this age would start to have questions about where they came from and some information, even if it's just the acknowledgment of more blank spaces would have come up by now, but it hasn't. He's only been with us two years, and he has some pretty big developmental "blank spots" he's dealing with.

So how to discuss birth families is currently on our list of things we're actively working on. It's pretty clear though, that the information we'll be able to give Kai and Shen will only be of a general nature at this point, as that is all we have. We have some pretty big regrets right now about questions we failed to ask when we were in China to adopt Shen. Looking back now I keep asking myself, "why didn't we ask this?" or "why didn't we go here?" In reality though we were dealing with so much on that trip it's amazing what we did accomplish. One thing we did come away with from this last trip however, was the realization that traveling to China is not that big of a deal. As my regrets over unasked questions mounted, I realized that the simple answer to the problem is to just go back and ask the questions. And that the easiest way to help the boys form a connection to their birth country is to let them visit there as much as possible, and that is what we hope to do.

In the meantime we have also established email contact with Kai's S.W.I. and hope to do so with Shen's as well. There is also snail-mail for sending photos and we can maintain contact this way too. And we continue to look at photos and videos with the boys and talk about what we do know. And I may also be a bit guilty of indulging their imaginations and fantasies of what might have been...

Last weekend Kai needed a nap. We had been out running errands and Shen fell asleep in the car. I carried him in and laid him out on the couch. Kai was fussing and complaining and we told him it was nap time. He began to whine and cry, "I don't need a naaap!!!" Unfortunately for him, it's a standing house rule: You Cannot Cry Your Way Out of a Nap. I took him to their bedroom and offered to read him a story, but he continued to cry even louder, so I laid down on the bed with him and held him. I offered to tell him a story "from my head", but he refused and kept crying. How about a Little Red Squirrel Story (a favorite Baba tale) "No", he cried. "How about The Story of Kai, Shen and the Dragon?" "Noooo!" again. "How about a Baby-Kai in China Story?" he suddenly went quiet, "yes" he said. So I quietly whispered to him about how when he was a little baby he lived in Baoding, and his nanny Chin-yen loved and took care of him. Now that's really all I have to work with, so I picked up a fragment Kai had woven himself when we were in Xi'an. We had seen a street vendor selling giant caged crickets. Kai was fascinated by them and said that one of them was his friend when he was a baby. So I told him how when he lived in China he had a little pet cricket he had caught and held in his hands. He was fascinated by this and asked me a string of questions about the cricket before falling asleep. After his nap he told an expanded version of the story to Tina, so it looks like for now anyway, a little imaginary cricket is helping to fill one of Kai's blank spots.