“Oh, my, look at all these beautiful babies,” says my eight-year-old daughter Meg, in high-heeled dress-up shoes and a feather boa. “I want THIS beautiful baby,” she coos, swooping her five-year-old sister into her arms.
You’ve got to be kidding me, I think. We’ve told you over and over that we decided to adopt you before we ever saw you. You know perfectly well about the 6 a.m. phone call when Mrs. S’s voice said, “you have a daughter”. You’ve seen the video of yourself that the workers sent us from Korea after you’d had your visa medical check at the American Embassy. You have photos of the room where you were born and of a social worker who worked with your birthmother. You have photos of yourself with your foster family and on the day we met you. I’m pretty sure you were the only baby at the agency office that morning, but I wouldn’t have noticed any besides you, not if there were a hundred of them.
So where on earth did you get the idea that we went baby-shopping? It’s such a stereotype! Buying babies! Looking for what—a cute one who doesn’t cry much?
The script we try to give our kids is this: their birthparents made a loving plan to give them a better life, conscientious social workers worked to ensure a healthy home and just the right match, adoptive parents wished for a child since long before they were born and can’t imagine their lives without them or with any other kid. NOT: adoptive parents cherry-pick the perfect kid, and buy him.
So where is Meg getting this? I vaguely recall from Talking with Young Children about Adoption that children’s play scenarios help them make sense of their lives. Are my kids emotionally warped? Do they feel they must excel so that they can continue to be “chosen”?
“You do know, “ I said to Meg, “that we had already agreed to adopt you before we ever went to Korea, right? “
“We’re playing a GAME, Mom. Sheesh!” (Rolls her eyes and turns back to her ”baby”.
A writer in Adoptive Families magazine, who is both an adoptee and an adoptive parent, recalled that during her own childhood she had envisioned her parents going down the ruffle-bedecked aisles of the supermarket and giving each other a knowing smile when they reached their daughter’s bassinet, then picking her up to go to the checkout.
The author said her mom laughed when she told her the story, but then was horrified. In telling her daughter she was her chosen child, “she feared she had sent the message that choosing me was something like selecting a nice, ripe melon.”
The author reassured her mother (and me, her reader) that the fantasy had been comforting to her, proving that her parents had chosen her and cherished her, had known she was the child they were meant to have.
So I guess I should relax. Kids try out different scenarios in their play, right? It helps them process alternate scenarios? After all, my daughter went around after Hurricane Katrina pushing a doll stroller of belongings and explaining that she needed to stay with us because her house had washed away. She didn’t seem upset in the slightest, just exploring how it might have been.
I still hate the stereotype, though.
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