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| For Marybeth Cehlar, now in her thirties, that opportunity came when she was seven… Cehlar: And my father kept teasing me about my Irish nose, you know, saying I had a cute Irish nose. And I got really mad at him and I’m like…I’m not Irish! Stop saying that! So they took me downstairs and in the filing cabinet they had a folder of all the things that they had kept from the place where I was adopted from; it was in New York. So they pulled out all the letters that we’d gotten and all the information and then they showed me that my biological father was Irish and my biological mother was English, Irish, and German. Rather than being upset, Cehlar said her parents framed the information in such a way that she felt special, but it didn’t end there… Cehlar: I remember being kind of excited about it because they kept telling me that they chose me. I was special. And I remember going to school the next day and telling all my friends because I thought it was really cool. And then another group of girls heard about it. Since we had had a foster child [at school] the year before who didn’t stay very long, they were telling me that it was the same thing and someone was going to take me away from my parents. So I went home, absolutely upset and crying, and my mom had to say, “No, we stood in front of a judge; it’s all legal. No one’s ever going to take you away from us.” Fisher says stories like that also demonstrate that the conversation within a family about adoption needs to be an ongoing dialogue, not a one time event. She says as children get older their questions and need for information will change…but she stresses that the adoption should also be framed as a positive event, and that parents should work to understand what exactly the child wants to know, and not overwhelm them with too much information… Fisher: You know those old jokes where the kid asks, “Where did I come from?” and the parents tell him everything there is to know about sex and impregnation and the birds and the bees, and then they finish, and the kid says, “I just wanted to know if it was New York or Philadelphia?” I think this is the way it is. What you want is for the child to be able to tell you their fantasies and their thoughts. And often, they are so anxious to do it right and to prevent anxiety in their kid, that they wind up overloading them with information, based on their own anxieties and their own fantasies. That’s not the way to go. The way to go is you sit and say, “Well, what do you think?” One little boy said to his mother, “Was I in your tummy?” and she said, “No, you were in this other lady’s tummy and we were waiting for you to come out, because she had met us and she knew we were going to be your mommy.” And he said, “How fast did you go, mommy, to get me? How fast did you go in your car?” That is what he was concerned with. It was clear that his idea of how much he was loved and cherished was how fast they went in the car. So the mother said, “We went very fast. We went sixty miles an hour.” And he leaped out of the bathtub and said, “How fast was that?” and began running! “Was it this fast, was it faster?” They had a wonderful time talking about how fast they went. That was his metaphor for being cared about, and nobody could have anticipated that. |
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