Adoption Stories

I have been celebrating on the inside a bit this week. Conleigh has twice taken a 2 hour nap and three times slept basically through the night, waking up at a little before 7 and going back to sleep until 7:30ish. Small stuff, I know but I have just gotten a sense that she is finally letting go of some stuff. What, I don't know but she just seems to be "looser." She is seems to be loving more freely, giving affection more freely, smiling more freely, and as those first sentences indicate, is sleeping more freely. Watching kids who are enveloped by traumatic early days slowly unfurl their hearts as they inch and wigggle and shoot out into their true selves is one of the biggest blessings of adoption.

It also leaves me thinking about the differences in my kids' pasts. To be honest, we talk about some aspect of Haiti probably almost every day. Sometimes it's something that I have said deliberately. For example, we had mangos for lunch today and Kenson wanted where they came from. I told him they grew on trees and he quickly looked outside, anxious to see a mango tree in Nebraska. I replied that they didn't grow in Nebraska but that they grew in Haiti. Sometimes, it's my kids bringing up some tidbit of their life in Haiti. And that is where things diverge. I have one child who remembers vividly her life in Haiti, who has felt the transition to our home very deeply in terms of letting go of her friends and caretakers. And I have one child who remembers very little about Haiti. While they came home at about the same age, their stories are just different. For Kenson, not remembering becomes a desperate search to remember. He often makes up stories about Haiti, trying to make sense of his forgotten past. The mango tree story from lunch continued with him telling me that he ate mangos at his orphanage in Haiti. Possible, but highly unlikely. He has told me that his Mama Juislene spanked him, that his orphanage had a slide (just like Conleigh's), and that his Mama Juislene and Papa Jameson were at the orphanage with him. Two of those are completely untrue, and the remainder, while possible, are again highly unliekly. For now, I usually let him imagine, knowing that imagined memories are one way for him to fill the holes. If there is something he says that is glaringly wrong, I will gently state the truth. Which can be hard, especially when you have to gently explain that his Papa Jameson never came to the orphanage or even saw him after he was born. In typical 3 year old fashion, his response to that was "why?" Wish I had a good answer for that...