Discussions with eight-year-old Meg seem to be coming thick and fast lately.
Meg came into the room while I was watching an early episode (I think the first) of the recent PBS documentary Carrier. This is a ten-episode look at the lives of the men and women serving aboard a Navy aircraft carrier during a six-month deployment.
In this episode, one young sailor, about nineteen, reveals to his bunkmates that his girlfriend is pregnant, and that he learned this just a couple of weeks before shipping out. (Okay, I should have turned off the TV when Meg entered the room. I had this delusional hope that my husband would materialize and put her back to bed so I could keep watching.)
I usually feel that once the kids have heard the beginning of a conversation, scary movie, or something similar, it would be worse to turn it off and have them turn the situation over in their minds without resolution than to see how it ends and to talk about it. (Obviously horror movies or very inappropriate movies are an exception and are turned off immediately.)
As the young man talked about how they had no plans, how his girlfriend would be alone for six months until the carrier returned to home port (and for an unknown number of future deployments), and their financial situation, I repeated and clarified some of his concerns to Meg. I hoped the story of a real couple might humanize her birthparents’ decision for her, and show her that adoption is the result of the birthparents’ circumstances and not a rejection of the child.
As the camera veered off to portray another crew member, I said to Meg, “maybe they will choose to have their baby adopted by a family.” I think I may also have mentioned some things like wanting the baby to have parents who were together, had enough money for the things the baby would need, lived in a place with good schools, had grandparents around who could help out.
Meg nodded and seemed to indicate that she understood, and that perhaps her birthparents had thought some of those same things.
Then she said, “But if I had a baby, I think that I would keep it.”
“You will be a wonderful mother someday,” I said. “But some people haven’t had very good families themselves when they were kids, so they don’t know how to be good parents themselves.”
I hope she didn’t think I was making a judgment about the couple on the show or about their families. By this point I was speaking about adoption in general, about possible reasons a birth parent might relinquish a child.
Meg seemed to understand. Of course I can’t know for sure what she was really thinking, but she had a calm smile on her face that seemed older than her years. She kissed me goodnight and went to bed.
I didn’t get to watch the remaining episode to learn the outcome for the young couple portrayed here and their baby. You can order DVDs of the entire show by following this link to the PBS website.
Please see the following related blogs:
Abortion and Adoption: What Her Mom Did
What’s a Birth Father Got to do with It?
Book Review: Talking with Young Children about Adoption