There will be a time when the children will ask about their past and we will have to answer with the truth or something as close as we can to it. I’m saying “as close as we can” because we really don’t know the whole truth and never will, so we’ll tell them the part that we know and speculate about the unknown.
What we know: We love them and we went to Ethiopia to get them so they could become part of our family
What we don’t know: All the rest… and it’s a lot; who are their birth parents, why they were abandoned, what happened to their birth families, do they have brothers or sisters, and so on…
All these questions are always on my mind and I can only imagine how they will affect them.
So I’ve started thinking how I will approach the answers.
To a small child you can tell that his parents loved him so much that seeing that they couldn’t take care of him they decided that other family will do it for them.
To an older child you can start explaining that sometimes there are circumstances beyond our control and that the only way to save a child’s life is giving him or her up for adoption.
In the teenage years you could say to him that maybe his parents died or were so poor or young that couldn’t feed him and that the only solution to protect him was the adoption. Or that he’s not the only one, that there are thousands of orphans like him living with adoptive families, or in orphanages, or living in the streets and that the answers are so complex that we can only scratch the surface.
And I can think of many other ways to talk about the subject and try to find a solution to this puzzle.
But the explanation I prefer is one that will probably and hopefully will come over the years, when all of us sitting together as adults we’ll be able to discuss.
And this one is that we all come from different places, different parents and we didn’t have a chance to choose where to be born, or to be adopted or not, and it really doesn’t matter anymore, that in the end we are all the same.
Maybe this is too metaphysic for some people, but that’s the way I like to think about life. We are just travelers, learning things, enriching our soul with each experience no matter how good or bad it is. It’s kind of random where we end up, we really don’t have much control of a great part of our life, but we must try to make the better of it. It’s not about how well and clean your house is, how white are your teeth, how big is your bank account, how good a speller you are. Maybe with age comes the realization that all the things we considered important really aren’t, that is the same to be a prestigious doctor or a humble man that cleans restrooms.
It’s all about love and that’s it! It’s the only thing that will remain in your soul and in the people you love.
They will have to accept their past to be in peace in the same that we all do, since it doesn’t matter if you were adopted or not, either way you could be in some way damaged. We all have our wounds and at some point in our life we have to face them to be able to really live and love, and in that we are all the same.
I know that maybe this explanation is too hippie for some, but where is the truth really?, and I mean, the real truth, not the “everyday” truth? What are we here for? Where do we come from and where are we going?
Life is a journey and being adopted is part of theirs.

 
AliciA