Lil' Bit and I have a bedtime routine which is basically a story told in the dark with me lying next to her and then a song. A hug and kiss later, I slip out to let her fall asleep by herself.
Somewhere along the line, the routine evolved into my telling one of three stories:
The story of her adoption, from my perspective, beginning with my desire to have a daughter and the homestudy process and ending with the second day we were together. This story always includes the part where we could not communicate bathroom needs and she ended up wetting herself in my lap. After we indulge in hysterical laughter, we end the story with a hearty "and we all lived happily ever after".
The story of her adoption, told from her perspective, beginning with her living with her foster family and waiting for a family. The story ends after she wets my lap and includes the "happily ever after ending."
The last story is about a family of monkeys playing in the jungle in China. A little girl money gets distracted by a butterfly and wanders off from her family. Upon realizing she was lost, the little girl monkey finds a family of humans to help her. The people decide to take her to an orphanage where "the orphanage director will know what to do." The director realizes that he would not be able to find a family for the monkey so he cuts off her tail and shaves off her fur and passes her off as a little girl to an unsuspecting family from America.
Each night, Lil's Bit gets to choose which of the stories she would like to her and, loving all of them, she chooses a different on each time. She has heard them so many times that she can retell them and is now in the habit of telling at least part of the story, if not the whole story. She has added details which I have kept when retelling them back to her the next time. One detail she has added is that when she has her accident on my lap, she was thinking to herself "Oh no, now my new mommy is going to leave me here in China." followed by me saying "That's OK, we'll just clean in up."
This detail is important to her.. and me as well. For her, it shows that she can make mistakes and I will always lover her anyway. For me it tell me that even on day one, she wanted me to keep her.
Last night, we were telling the monkey version and she insisted on being the story teller. Out of the blue, she added a new element tot he story. She added that after the little girl monkey was adopted, her monkey family came looking for her and upon being told that she was with a new family, they were happy she was safe.
Lil' Bit was proud of this new part of the story and went out of her way to point it out to me. It seemed to bring her happiness to add it.
I am not usually one to over analyze these things but sometimes, the thoughts that come out of her make me wonder what else is going on there. I try to let her take the lead in discussion about her birth and foster families... letting her set the pace. She knows that she had a birth mother and that we know nothing about her. She seems to understand that she had a foster family and that they were not her birth parents. She knows that her foster family took very good care of her but that they were only taking care of her until her forever family came to get her (she didn't understand this at first and I never wanted her to think that we took her from her first family).
But, this new wrinkle in the monkey story makes me wonder if she has been thinking of her birth mother lately. Does she fantasize that her birth mother went back and looked for her but is OK with the adoption?
I try not to overwhelm her or jump on her when she says something that makes me wonder so I plan to bring this up slowly over time.
One of the difficult things about being an adoptive parent when you really have no history to fall back on is not having answers.. other than "I don't know". I will never know why her birth mother left her. I can speculate on many possibilities based on what we know about China. But, we will never know for sure. Maybe her birth mother left her, hoping that she would find the right family. Maybe her birth mother didn't care how things worked out. Maybe her birth mother didn't have anything to do with it and has been desperately looking for her ever since.
The only thing I can do is support Lil' Bit as she wanders through this field of questions and fantasies.
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