So last time I talked about sharing your child’s story with them. And I realized that I had not done as well with our son as I had thought. There are definitely some difficult details that I knew I needed to share, but it occurred to me after listening to a talk at support group that I had pretty much negated the existence of one of the birth parents.
I don’t think it did it intentionally, but instead avoided it because it was a difficult situation; to be fully transparent, I really did not know how to approach it without disparaging him. That’s one of the things they said in the talk: be honest, but avoid disparaging. Also, don’t embellish the story and make the family of origin sound amazing, for obvious reasons, because that will leave the child confused about why they were removed or placed for adoption.
All that to say, I was deeply convicted that I needed to rectify this situation; my son is 11 and closing in on the “knowing his full story by the time he is 12” milestone. I was incredibly thankful for the suggestion of tossing a pebble; after so much time of NOT discussing the birth dad, I knew it might come as a surprise to my son that I was bringing him up. Surprising, confusing, upsetting…I knew those were all possible, so I had just avoided it.
But I also knew there were going to be other questions coming my way due to circumstances in the birth mom’s current life, and I needed to lay some groundwork by getting the whole story out there. And even though it was still incredibly uncomfortable, I was thankful the speakers provided a great tool for me to utilize, even though I had not asked for it. And I know you’re not necessarily asking me what I said or how it went, but I want to share my experience to give you confidence to try tossing a pebble yourself.
I planned my pebble toss to be at a time when we were engaged in a jigsaw puzzle…so we were close together but not looking at each other; I find that helps when a difficult topic is being discussed. (I know that’s a little off topic but I wanted to mention it in case it helps someone else in a similar situation.)
To get the conversation (or what I hoped would be a conversation) started, I tossed out this pebble: “I wonder if you’ve ever thought about why you are so tall. Your mom is tiny so I wonder where you get your height.”
And my son responded, “Why do you say that?”
So I said, “Well, you know how we inherit our physical characteristics from our birth family and since your mom is not tall, I wonder why you would be so tall…and I wondered if you ever thought about that too.”
He was quick to say no, that he had not thought about that (which honestly made me think he HAD, in fact, thought about it…but since we had not discussed birth dad previously, I understood if he was taking his cues from me that it was a subject we didn’t talk about so he didn’t want to admit that he WAS thinking about him). But also…he didn’t change the subject, and he didn’t leave the room and he didn’t tense up… so I took that as a sign that he wanted more information but didn’t necessarily want to ask.
So I tiptoed into an area we’ve never ventured into and shared a bit of what I knew…and left it at that. He didn’t ask any questions and I didn’t offer any more information. We just kept working on our puzzle and then I started talking about something completely different.
Over the next few weeks, I had other opportunities to toss more pebbles and share more of the story. It seems to me (and it might just be my son, I realize) but by giving him small amounts of the story at a time, he has time to digest/process and then we share more. To give it all would be overwhelming and dysregulating, which is obviously something we try to avoid if at all possible.
Clearly your situation may be vastly different from mine. Maybe you’ve done a pretty good job of sharing most of the story but just have to give a few final details. Or maybe you have hardly shared a thing for one reason or another. But I want you all to know that it’s important to get your child’s story into their own hands so they can wrestle it through and begin to fully heal.
Sincerely,
Kris