Sunday, March 18, 2012

A Strange Ocurrence

A strange and cool thing happened while I was babysitting yesterday. A little back story on this family first.
I watched a 8-9 year old girl named Hannah* yesterday morning while her parents went out and ran in a race. I've know Hannah and her family since they moved in before Hannah was born. Hannah was adopted and from what I understand the family has a semi-open (or did have, I'm not sure what the situation is now) adoption. They had tried to adopt a second child but after 2 or 3 attempts that led to heart break, they gave up. They are a very nice couple and at first I considered them to adopt Jude. The declined though and said that they were too old to adopt a new born. It all worked out in the end though and they focused on other things in their life.
Hannah is a very smart and straight forward kind of girl. She likes sports, riding her bike, and other more typical girl things. It was 7am, so I wasn't in the best mood to be an active and fun loving baby sitter. Luckily for me, Hannah just wanted to sit around and watch a movie. Later we made some food, attempted to make pudding (that never set for some reason), and went out for a walk/bike ride. Some time during all of that, she turned to me and asked:
"So, who was Jude adopted to?"
I was really thrown off. Not many kids ask me questions like that. Mainly because not many kids that I watch know that I was pregnant. Also because they don't care, which is understandable because, duh, there just kids. Not only that, but I didn't really know that  Hannah knew about my whole  situation. I didn't want to drill her with questions on how she knew about Jude and such, so I just answered her question as simply as I could.
I didn't know that Hannah had knew about adoption. I didn't want to ask if she knew that she was adopted, because she might not have and then that would have been extremely bad. It's refreshing though to see a child be open and curious about things around them though, and its more refreshing for me to see a child interested in my adoption. Even if it was one question, its a question I like to answer and inform people about. I want to educate others on adoption and even my adoption experience if they want to know.
It was one question, but it meant a lot to me. 

1 comment:

  1. Hopefully she would know she was adopted by that age!!! It is terrible to lie to adoptees! I am glad she felt comfortable asking you. She probably was fascinated by you. I always wanted to know about my birth mom and who she was and where she was and why she gave me up... even when I was a kid- actually from a very young age- it was all I thought about a lot of the time. I found her at age 20 and my dad at age 26.

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