Tell Me a Real Adoption Story! by Betty Jean Lifton, herself an adoptee, psychologist and adoption counselor, is written from the perspective of a child.
A child promises to go to bed if his mother tells him an adoption story. The frazzled mother tries a story about a fisherman finding an abandoned baby, but the child will have none of it. She then tells a story about a king and queen who long for a child and find one in an orange grove.
The child presses to know where the baby came from. The mother says she doesn’t know, but it’s not important, because “what’s important is that the baby reached out its arms to the King and Queen, and they knew it wanted to belong to them.”
The child persists in asking where the baby came from. The tired mother says, “I don’t know.” Finally, the child demands a REAL adoption story—“a story about me”. So the mother tells how she and the child’s father wanted a child, and sought help from doctors and lawyers, friends and strangers and adoption workers. Finally they met someone who knew someone who was about to have a baby. The mother tells how she and her husband felt lucky to have met the birthmother, and how they all cried at the hospital because they all knew the birthmother would miss her child. The birthmother said she loved the child and would never forget. The new family sent pictures to the birthmother for a while, and then lost touch. The child wants an updated picture of her. The mother promises to try to get one, and the child decides to draw pictures for “my other mother and daddy”.
The book also features paintings by fine artist (click here for other adoption books with great art) Claire Nivola.
Lifton includes a letter to adoptive parents suggesting that parents learn all they can about their child’s past. She suggests ways to adapt the story for open and closed adoptions, domestic and international adoptions.
“If a child’s real story is allowed to grow over the years,” Lifton says, “it will give him or her a sense of reality and strengthen the bond between you.”
Please see these related blogs:
Reading and Thinking about Birthmothers