Those of you who know me, know that I am a straight up crazy cat lady, through and through. I talk to my cats, I sing about my cats, 80% of the pictures on my phone are of my cats... I love them probably too much. Both of our cats came from the Columbia County Humane Society as 2-3 year olds, and that is something I think about more than I should. I wonder about what they spent their first years doing, who they lived with, if they had kittens (Chester wasn’t neutered until he was in the shelter). Sven’s origins are more known but Chester was a stray so we know nothing about his past. We don’t even really know his age. I often think about his kitten hood and wish I had little kitten pictures of him because I bet Chester was the cuuutest kitten! (Sven was probably a more awkward looking kitten)
Ok, why am I rambling about my cats? Did you miss the part about me being a crazy cat lady?! It's also a lighthearted intro to kind of a heavy topic. We recently had a phone call with our case manager at WACAP, and she told us more about the types of children they see in the India program. Many of the children have been abandoned by their families or surrender to orphanages. For these kids, there is nothing known about their birth family. Some of them don’t have names or known birthdays when they arrive at the orphanage. The staff can estimate the child’s age by different means, but it is an estimate. I knew a lot of this conceptually when we started thinking about adoption, but when I thought about it from the mindset that this could be true for our child, it affected me in a different way. It is sort of how we don’t know about the cats’ past lives, but on a much bigger scale. Sven hasn’t asked lately about his birth family, but I am sure this is a question we will someday get from our child.
There is some comfort in knowing. Think about all the things you know about your birth story, about traits or diseases that run in your family, about how you have your mom’s smile or your dad’s wide feet. Remember that favorite, silly baby picture that somehow re-emerges at every birthday? We cherish these details about ourselves and our past. But what if you didn’t have the privilege of knowing anything about your first few years or the family that you were born to? This may be the reality for our child. And when they get older they may yearn for information that we can’t give them because we won’t have it to give. This is one of he topics Catholic Charities had us cover as part of the education during our home study. We better understand more about the grief and loss that our child may feel, about a family they didn’t get a chance to know. Our child will have lost the most important person in their life before we even get to meet them. They have lost their mother: the person that carried them for nine months and gave them life.
This is something that we obviously aren’t going to know exactly how to handle until we get to know our child. Maybe even then we will struggle to know what to say or do to help them. However, I do know that we are going to do our best to support them at every stage. And even though we are so excited to bring home a child from India who needs a loving family, we know that the best thing for that child would be to have their birth family able to provide all the things they need. Unfortunately, this isn’t an option for our child, so we plan to make our family a close second.
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