Dear diary
OmegaDotter has been gifted over the past year or so with many, many notebooks. Each of them has been christened “my diary”, with great plans to write in it every day, and then, usually the day after, *poof* goes the idea, floating away with the wind.
Recently she dug up one of those notebooks and started actually writing in it. Every day. She has been writing at bed time, after I read (or she reads), and after we play the Feeling Game. She stashes it under her pillow, and earnestly tells me that “it’s secret!”
Yesterday, she decided to make me read her entry. It was about how Buffy died.
Tonight, she made me read her latest entry.
It started out:
Dear Diary - I relly miss my birth mom.”
She told the story of how “I became separated from her”, how her birth mother had not been able to keep her, because in China you can’t have more than one child. (Okay, I have told her the whole “one child if a boy, two if the first is a girl”, but I guess it hasn’t sunk in yet.) And how her birth mother kept her for a week, then left her by the side of the “rode”, and a policeman picked her up and took her to the “orfinije”.
There was a little drawing underneath, a framed picture with “I ♥ my birth mom”, sort of scrapbooking style.
So I climbed into bed with her and snuggled and talked about how it was okay to miss her birth mom, and it was okay to talk about it. That we would be taking her to China for a visit when she was 10 or 11, and maybe we’d try to take her there every few years.
Our little lawyer immediately tried to negotiate the visit for 8 or 9 instead. Ahem.
Then she wanted to print out posters with her picture on them, with the Chinese for “lost girl” on it, to take with us. At which point…sigh. How to explain to her that something like that could get her birth parents in trouble? Or that it probably wouldn’t do much good, because, face it, where she was found is a city, a big city with 1.34 million in the urban area?
I suggested we could write a letter to the orphanage.
Then she made me read another entry she had written, about a dream about Kai, where I had taken his bones and made him come alive again.
Deep waters. Each of these entries has dealt with “loss” in some form or another. I told her I thought that writing down what she was feeling in her diary was a good idea, and that she could always talk to me or OmegaDad about her feelings. And I told her that it was her diary, and I wouldn’t read it unless she wanted me to, and that she didn’t have to let me read it if she didn’t want to.
I must point out that there was a great deal of (normal, accustomed) squirming and twisting on her part, and some teasing on my part, wherein I told her that her birthmother would make her do her chores and her homework. Plus some tickling, and, interspersed in the midst of it all, her trying to put her ankles behind her head.
(Once upon a time, I was able to do that. I was able to put both ankles behind my head. I told her ages ago. She has tried to do it ever since.)
But still. Deep.
posted in Adoption, OmegaDotter, Parenting | 8 Comments
