Telling your child their story

There’s this little song that I made up that I’ve been singing to our 3 ½ year old since he was born. It’s to a made up tune and it goes a little something like this: “mommy loves you, daddy loves you, Jesus loves you little boy,” and it carries on into the next verse listing his brothers names and his birth mom’s name. Depending on the day, Frankie’s song can go on and on, I just keep singing the same tune and listing different names and family members and friends. I hope it feels like he’s being wrapped in a giant hug, being squeezed by everyone who’s crazy about him. I hope it’s been a reminder that from the start his story began with love from his first mom and has woven us all together today.

I’ve had people ask me about our son, “when will you tell him he’s adopted?” My answer is: always. From the start I’ve been singing it over him, and I hope as he grows I’ll continue to weave his unique story into every part of his life and heart so it feels both special and as normal to him as oatmeal for breakfast.

But how do we tell him? We talk a lot about his first mom and the happiest day we met them both. We talk about the place where he was born and the joy we felt when we brought him home. We have pictures in his room of his first mom and use her name in everyday ordinary ways. We have a photo book (I used Chatbooks, which is a really easy way to tell a story using pictures that is age appropriate for young children) and we look at pictures from the hospital and early days together as a family. I know as he grows, so will his questions and curiosity and his need for his story.

I plan to always answer honestly. Here are the things I hope he always hears:

You are special.

Your story is special. It’s beautiful and unique, and it’s all yours. I’ll always delight in unraveling his story from the beginning. That he was perfectly made from the very start. That his start was in Florida with a beautiful woman he can always call mama too. How she loves him and he will always also be her son. How the world became a better place from the moment he entered it.

Your birth mom is incredible.

We speak highly of his first mom in our home. We honor her with our words and always want him to know we value her. We praise qualities in him that seem like they came straight from her. We take pictures and videos of him to share with her when he does something new or just cute. We tell him we’re sharing them and imagine together how proud she will be.

You can ask us anything.

This feels like it will grow in importance as our son grows, and having older children I know it’s true. If they feel comfortable talking to you about little, trivial things, they’ll continue to come to you with harder, bigger ones. I want him to always feel safe asking us hard questions, or even just saying hard things and knowing we are a soft place to land. He won’t hurt us, he isn’t betraying us. He gets to ask and seek and learn.

Here’s what I promise never to do:

Sugarcoat his story.

I do believe that God has always known that our stories would intertwine and connect and forever be woven together. I also know in that holy equation, I’m the one who’s gaining everything. A child, a sibling for my older children, the chance to be mama to a bright-eyed boy with a wide smile. His joining our family is tinged with loss and grief; his own and his beautiful first mama’s. So when we’re talking about story, I’ll be careful about the way I tell him. Not, “you were always meant to be ours”. Even though gosh, I can’t imagine a world in which he wasn’t. But, “your first mama, she carried you, planned for your life and chose our family to raise you”, and “God always knew we’d be a family”, and I’ll leave a wide berth for the questions and sadness and grief that those statements bring.

Pretend to have all of the answers.

I may never know what foods his first mama craved when she was pregnant with him. Or the ways he kept her up at night with his kicks and flips toward the end. I may never be able to tell him the exact details of how his birth unfolded. I want to. I want to so I can delight him at bedtime with the story of when he entered the world one hot July day. But, there are things I don’t know today, and I love him and respect his first mama too much to conjecture. They’re things that are sacred, they’re the details I dream about his first mama sharing with him one day when they’re face to face. The treasured, holy space between them holding details that only they are privy to. Until that day, I won’t guess just to fill in the blanks.

Wrap it up with a pretty bow.

Sometimes the answers or my lack thereof will just be hard. Adoption is beautiful and it’s broken. It’s hard and it’s holy. The most sacred beauty and the deepest loss. As much as the eternal optimist in me wants to always focus on the positives, there are some things that are just impossibly hard. I think the best thing I can do for our son is sit with him in the hard spaces, and hold space for his questions and that grief that may come. To be a truth teller but not force a smile or spin a happy tale.

In the hard, good, beautiful and holy, we are family.

Frankie you are so loved by so many and I will never stop singing your song.