We Just Want You To Know...Our Adoption Journey

Being an adoptive mom, I was dreading the time I had to begin disclosing her adoption to her.  I learnt from another mom that she started practicing her disclosure when she bathed or changed her baby.  What a fantastic idea! My baby girl was then about 9 months old and I decided to try it out.  Boy was it a disaster!  First of all, the vocabulary:  birth mom, forever mommy, put up for adoption vs give up for adoption, etc, just couldn't flow smoothly.  I was saying it all wrong!  How challenging was it to use positive words!  When I did finally feel comfortable with the sentences I was saying, I wrote them down.  And the list started to grow. And became more refined. For my daughter, I wanted to cement my love for her with my words to affirm that though we are an adoptive family, we ARE a family; just brought together differently.  So that was when the idea of publishing a book struck. At adoptive parents support groups, we are all...

(here's another blog I had written sometime ago and forgot to publish....too funny not to!) Bumped into some old friends a couple of Sundays ago and they commented that we now finally have kids and didn't we get married some time ago, how come the kids are so young?  And were they conceived naturally... blah de blah.  No, I wasn't offended at all cos it's the truth, we have been married coming 14.5 yrs now and our kids are just 5.5 & 1 yo.  I replied that we are adoptive parents (I seldom like to say that our kids are adopted, rather prefer to say they we are adoptive parents).  I then realised I had told her without asking the permission of my 5.5 yo.  Luckily she wasn't within earshot... but I took the opportunity to ask for permission when we went to the ladies and it went like this: Me: "Jie, can I tell Aunty G that we are an adoptive family?" #1:  "No, mommy." Me:  "Why not?" #1:  "Because it's a secret!"...