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Beauty was born in March 2007 and spent less than forty-eight hours with her first mom, M., before entering the care of her foster mother. M. was nineteen when Beauty was born; she worked long days to help support her aging parents. She was illiterate and had just over a year (total) of formal education. Beauty’s birth father, F., denied involvement with M. We do not have contact with M. or F. Beauty’s foster mother, R., cared for her for the first nine months of her life. (We do have contact with her, however.)
Like most international adoptions, ours is a closed adoption with a distance of many miles separating our families. While we most definitely plan to visit Guatemala when the kids are older, we don’t have much information on Beauty’s birth mom outside of what the agency was able to compile for us. When Beauty is old enough to find M., we will do whatever necessary to locate her if she is amicable to a meeting. We agreed upon this when deciding to adopt: when Beauty is mature enough to make the decision to meet M., we will do whatever we can to help. However, should she decide she does not want to locate M.–which I doubt will be the case, but there is a chance–we would never push her in any direction where she would be uncomfortable.
The topic of the day is how to acknowledge a first mom’s role in a closed international adoption where the child has no tangible memories of his/her own. I feel it’s vital for Beauty to know she has family outside of the one the she sees on the regular. The first manner in which we started to discuss adoption with Beauty happened soon after she arrived home; we started with pictures of M. While she’s too young to grasp the subtleties, Beauty can pick out her first mom from a host of pictures. We want her to know how deeply loved she is in two separate countries, and we don’t want her to grow up thinking M. is a complete mystery. Beauty doesn’t grasp things at an age appropriate level due to her delays, but she can, and frequently does, name people she knows upon seeing them in photographs. Our agency supplied us with several pictures, one of which has M. holding Beauty. Right now, like most two year olds, she’s more fascinated with her appearance in the pictures than M.’s (or any of our family, really) but I know that will one day change.
It’s not a lot, I know. But for a closed adoption separated by more miles than the kids can grasp, it’s a start. It’s a baseline understanding that while Bear grew in mommy’s tummy, Beauty didn’t grow in a cabbage patch. It’s the first road to developing her understanding that she is so incredibly loved and has another family–a family we all consider to be ours–in Guatemala.
