[Continued from HERE.]

So many of the information gaps that can niggle and glare at an adoptee aren’t, at first, the biggest topics like “Who gave birth to me?” “Why didn’t they keep me?” nor are the gaps felt only in the lack of heritage, medical history and other nuts-and-bolts details. Sometimes the gaps can be felt just in the ‘normal’ stories that non-adoptees have that adoptees don’t. I think this is more noticeable in families with a biological/adopted mélange and/or families that have children that were adopted at different ages, but it is a glaring gap for any closed-adoption adoptee.

“Scrapbooking” is the industry-wide recommended answer to the missing stories issue. I don’t know if there is really “an answer” but I do think this activity can be a substantially positive step. “Lifebooks” are what we apparently now call what used to be called ‘Babybooks” back in the day.

(Oops… A moment and please forgive me, but I really, really NEED to go on this tangent, and can’t resist. Two questions: first of all, have we lost some of our verbs somewhere along the line in American English? Or perhaps we have run out of them for all the various activities that we do? Are we just too lazy to use the age-old verb/adverb combo, for instance, “Making a scrapbook,” or “Creating a lifebook?” Are “scrapbooking” and others like it really new verbs that add to our world? And when did this happen? When did we stop “playing games” and start “gaming”? Just “wondering.” Oops, no… that’s a correct ‘-ing’ word.

My second question: is anyone else out there completely amused and befuddled by our obsession with semantics? Lifebook? Babybook? I mean, every child is a baby at one point or another. Baby books didn’t end their pages when the kid graduated to ‘toddler’ status. Even adoptees … we were babies, too! Are transitions like this just good marketing? Are they PC? Are they a waste of energy? Should one stick to “Babybooks” for non-adoptees and while bestowing “Lifebooks” on adoptees? Should it be the action of doing it (even if the pseudo-verbiage is “Babybooking” or “Lifebooking”) that gets the attention or could that energy be better spent somewhere else? You can say it doesn’t take much energy, but I am witnessing again and again the battles of verbiage and semantics in the adoption world … Anyone else nostalgic for the days when we weren’t so hypersensitive about every word that comes our way that isn’t completely sanitized? I crave murk and turbidity some days … sigh…

OK, tangent over… REALLY!)

So, back to the ever-illusive point.

I think the idea of putting together the fragments of information that may be available for a child from the mysterious era of an adoptee’s life between conception and entering into their adoptive family is brilliant. The idea of being proactive about the gaps in that information in these tributes to the child is, to me, a good one as well, albeit a bit tricky. While many sites offering ideas for scrap/life/baby books exist, here is the article I found most practical in how to go about taking scanty information and turning it into a foundation to which an adoptee can feel somehow linked while at the same time serving the purpose of being a starting point for openness about adoption in the family.

From my perspective, I would caution adoptive parents about going into too much detail about the actual adoption process, ie the endlessly frustrating wait, intrusive interviews, legalities, etc. These kinds of details can be supplied later and are really more about you than about your child. Great to share, but I know I was very sensitive to anything I did that might frustrate and cause pain to my parents when I was young (I decided it was my personal fault that we had trouble paying all the bills sometimes when I would hear my parents in heated debate on the topic). I think if I had learned when I was very young what a difficult time my parents went through to get me, I would have felt worse, not better. All of those details came up as I became older, and so were not lost in any way, but by then I could have a non-guilty take on the experience for my parents without taking personal responsibility.

For older adoptees who have actively participated in their adoption process, of course including this kind of information is important, but try to go for the positive side and focus not on the adoptive parent experience us much as on that of the adoptee. The parent experience, while important, seems to me in these kinds of books to be about supplying context and be in the name of sharing. That does not necessarily require details.

[Continued…]