Grace came home to us from an orphanage when she was ten months old, and is now nineteen. She agreed to have this discussion about adoption and has read what I am posting. I’m so grateful for her vulnerability in sharing these things publicly!
As I look back on how Grace processed adoption, I think she instinctively knew something was wrong in her life even when she was a toddler.
At eighteen months old, she became obsessed with a book where Dora the Explorer helps a baby bird find his mommy. She wanted to read it again and again, becoming agitated or even crying each time the bird was lost and rejoicing when the mama bird was found.
At first, I thought it was cute and nothing more, but then it became a pattern in Grace’s life. I discovered that many toddler books have the theme of a child losing his mother, and Grace became increasingly upset by these books. As she got older, she wanted nothing to do with them. This was before she was old enough to understand adoption at all.
Me: Do you remember any of this?
Grace: As a little kid, I remember reading the monkey book [a board book called Hug]. I remember crying every single time. Bobo [the monkey] lost his mama, and I did too.
Me: You eventually hated that book and would run away if I brought it out to read to your siblings. But also, you named your stuffed monkey Bobo. What are your earliest memories of understanding adoption?
Grace: I knew the word because we talked about it all the time. You never hid from us that we were adopted (not that you could!).
I think I first began to understand on the first day of kindergarten, because people came in with their parents, and all their parents looked like them, and my parents didn’t look like me. That’s when I realized that I wasn’t in a normal situation, that this didn’t happen to everybody.
