What is a Lifebook?
A lifebook is about your child. It
begins with her birth and tells her pre-adoption story. It talks
about her birthparents, orphanage, birth country, reasons for
adoption, and her daily life before she met you. A lifebook
offers a parent and child an opportunity to work on the child?s
story together, with the parent supplying facts and photographs,
and the child supplying her feelings, words or drawings. It is a
treasury of information, and an important piece of your child?s
identity. A lifebook?s synergy works to tie an adoptee?s ?before
and after? together, and becomes a book-in-process as your child
matures and adds more of her own thoughts to her early life
narrative.
Real-Life Stories
Finding the positive spin on an
abandonment or adoption story is not what is most important to
our kids or to their self-esteem. What we can do to help them
feel good is to give them the truth, and allow them to feel and
process anger, loss and grief. We can help our kids understand
the cultural context of their abandonment, or the harsh personal
choices a birthparent may have felt forced to make, but the
intellectual or factual approach will not banish the need for an
adoptee to feel the personal pain of rejection.
We can use our children's stories as
tools to help them understand their emotions, their lives and
how they ended up half-way around the world. Talking about their
reality shows our kids that we accept them and their feelings,
that we can deal with hard truths, and that we will walk next to
them and support them so they can learn to deal with the hard
truths, too.
My daughter was never excited about
my positive take on her early-life story. When I finally got
?real?, and went to her feelings about her reality, was when she
let herself truly love me. We all can spin happy endings to our
children?s adoption stories, but sometimes getting to happy
means first going back to sad, and dealing with loss. I've
learned that truth doesn't need to be sugar-coated; it needs to
be acknowledged, felt, dealt with, processed and revisited. The
miraculous by-product of honesty and empathy is a parent-child
bond built on the firm foundation of trust, and a relationship
that is stronger for weathering the difficult issues together.
Building Foundations?Building
Identity
Without a foundation to build upon,
a structure crumbles. Helping a child develop an identity that
includes the past, the present and the future is integral for an
adopted child to feel whole. Creating an honest life narrative
helps provide a sense of history, or life structure, for adopted
children. Our internationally adopted sons and daughters come to
us encoded with information that we can backtrack, react to and
connect with. Everyone has a story, but the facts of an
internationally adopted child?s babyhood are not as important as
how she feels about her early life, how she interprets
pre-adoptive events, and how she views her place in the world.
Resilience, a trait that allows a
person to view and react to adversity as a challenge rather than
as a trauma, plays a large part in how a child defines herself
through ?past identity?. A child who suffered a harsh orphanage
experience had a difficult start in life, but can be taught by a
parent to be re-defined by her bravery and courageously strong
survival skills. Lifebooks can provide a written and
photographic testament to our children?s faith, hope and
strength!
Avoid Lifebook FREEZE
It?s very easy to become immobilized
by the importance of creating a lifebook for your child. This
?must-do? task on your project list can rapidly become a
procrastinator?s worst nightmare: an un-organized bin of
adoption papers, mementoes and photos, heaped with parental fear
and guilt!
There is HELP for those gripped in
the paralysis of ?where to begin?. You don?t have to be a writer
or a scrapper or an artist; guidebooks and online listservs
provide step-by-step support for parents who are beginning the
narrative journey. These resources offer ordered lists of topics
to include in a child?s book and examples of sample wording for
tough subjects. Some parents prefer to create digital lifebooks
online, and use a printing service to ?publish? their final
product. A lifebook can be a crafter?s work of art or as simple
as a three ring binder?the most important piece of the book is
its content.
Include Your Kids!
Remember to include your children in
the re-creation of their stories. Ask for their input, and
insert pages of their thoughts, observations and feelings into
the album. Use the realistic list of questions in ?The BIG
Questions?What Your Adopted Child Wants to Know? as a lifebook
conversation starter. You may not have many answers for your
child, but the ongoing process of questioning, examining and
discussing aids children in dealing with difficult information
or ambiguous life stories.
Young children may prefer to color
pictures of the people and events of their pre-adoptive lives
and dictate an explanation of their artwork. Some children may
resist any discussion about their early lives and may not wish
to be involved in their lifebook at all... and that?s okay, too.
Simply, our job as adoptive parents is to provide our children
with all of the information that we have, or that we can
honestly surmise, about their early lives. A lifebook is a gift
of the past; when our sons and daughters are ready they will
understand the histories that we have helped capture?and they
will be able to build their futures on the powerful basis of
what is known, what is not, and the personal truths they derive
from both.
The
header for this article contains pages from
Christi Bowen?s lifebook, made for her daughter Kate.
Pictured to the left:
Christi and 2-year-old Kate flip through the pages of Kate?s
?toddler book?.
Home with Kate since November 2006,
Christi now helps moderate the Chinalifebooks yahoo group, which
helps thousands of new mothers help tell their children?s early
life stories, for them to always know and look back on their
beginnings.
The "writing season" at
Chinalifebooks begins in January. Join their group this month
before the fun and energetic (and sometimes stressful) month
begins.
?We begin in January with the first
topic and follow the order of topics laid out by Kay Graap,
founder of the group and writer of The Lifebook Writing Guide.
Each Monday a new topic is introduced and we generally take one
week to write each topic. Harder topics (birthparents,
abandonment, one child policy) will get 2 weeks,? says Christi.
Many members post their writings and
friendly feedback is given from the group. Families can gather
resources and ?work silently? and only post when they are
comfortable. In the fall, the group begins putting their books
together, with helpful posts on what to buy, how to do it,
different options for creating the book (digitally or with
traditional scrapbook paper). Around the holidays we slow down a
lot but behind the scenes the moderators work on next years
writing plans.
?The writing time is really an
amazing experience,? says Christi. ?The group is very welcoming
and we encourage each other to work through the hard topics...
The main focus of the group is and always has been creating a
book that will start a dialogue with your child about their
early life and who they are.?
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ChinaLifebooks/
2007 Children's Hope International.
All rights reserved.