Changes

Birthday Sadness

This weekend is my daughter's birthday. She is very excited and we have a full weekend fun things to do as a family. But I continue to sit here in sadness.

You see it is 7am in Vietnam. Shortly I would expect her birth mother will be getting up and starting her day. Not many around her will be aware that this is the day she gave birth and prepared to say goodbye to her newly born daughter. I cannot help to wonder how those few days where in the hospital. I wonder if she knew she would be adopted by an American.

I wish that I could tell her all about our daughter and how wonderful she is. I wish I could show her how beautiful she is, how funny she is and how incredibly determined she is. If I could only share those things with her then I would have some hope that she can come to some sort of peace with her decision. But I find complete sadness that I cannot share these things with her.

My daughter is too young to understand these things, but at some point I would expect my daughter will also experience this sadness around her birthday.

waiting it out

Well, we are close to 3 years waiting it out again.. Hopefully we will know more on the future of Vietnam adoptions in the next few months. I the mean time we will hold tight.

Early Stages of Talking About Adoption

Before I become and adoptive parent I read books and blog posts about talking with your kids about adoption and challenges that lay ahead. Making sure my daughter has high self esteem always has been a big focus for me and how I wanted to approach parenting. I think if you have a good foundation as a person you can handle life's challenges better.

But I never thought about early years in my daughter life and how she would come to understand adoption, birth, etc.

At this point, my daughter is three. I don't think she fully grasps that she is different or even what birth means. I have to wonder when this light bulb will go off and she will know she isn't my biological child. She is very clingy to me and want to be very close to me, which is great. We have had a huge break through with bonding in the past year. But it is heart breaking to me for her to be sadden by this.

I guess I always thought of conversation we would have at seven or teenage years. But I never thought of these early years and how she came to our family. Just basic understanding of being adopted.

We have the adoption books and we celebrate family day and talk about her birth mom. But I don't think she gets it at this point.

Last night I was hit by a ton of bricks. We where reading a adoption book we made for her with pictures of our family and her adoption day. When she said to me:

"I don't want you to leave me" I said what do you mean, she proceeded

"I don't want to go live with those nannies in Vietnam" "I don't want you to leave me there"

At that moment I realize she doesn't understand that we had never been apart from each other. And she thought we left her at the orphanage. We talked long about her birth mom and how we went through the process of adopting her and would never leave her.

This was heartbreaking, and I'm still trying to figure it all out in my head. Obviously we need to work on this and take some new approaches to the subject. Being a parent is so hard, and being an adoptive parents brings additional challenges to the table. I knew we would face challenges, and hope I can find the right path to answer these questions for her.

Fall

Fall is here and we are getting plenty of rain here in the bay area. It's a nice reason to get out some of those warmer clothes that have been hiding in the closet.

Dinker do is riding a two wheel bike now, with training wheels of course. She is loving having kids in the neighborhood to play with. She has her pumpkin costume all picked out and is ready for pumpkin day.

We are still waiting it out for #2, really don't want to wait until 2011 or later for Vietnam to reopen but at this point feel it might be the best thing for our family. It really is sad that there are children waiting for families right now as we speak. Shame on the people who abused the system.

Princess

My daughter somehow knows who the Disney princess are. I don't really know how that happened since we don't really watch T.V. I guess she is picking this up from daycare. So now it's all about princesses.

I decided she could pick out a toy for herself at target. After looking at the toys I realize that target has only a few types of toys, baby toy, baby dolls, barbie and 'boy toys'. She went straight to the princesses. I keep having this internal guilt for buying her a Cinderella doll, even though that's the one she wanted. I kept asking if she wanted the snow white doll. After all snow white has brown hair not blond. But no, she wanted the Cinderella doll.

I don't feel quite right about this, it's pretty complex. I don't want to only push the ethnic dolls on her but buying a skinny white doll for my beautiful dark VN toddler seems wrong. I mean really, who is Cinderella. I surely have never met anyone like her! And don't get me starting on Barbie. Now they have different kinds of Barbie. But really they are the after thought not really Barbie. I think it's great but again, seems like an after thought.

So, how do I balance miss skinny and ethnic dolls? Not sure I have figured this out and in the end she might only want the miss skinny anyway, which makes me sad.