Another email
As much as I wish I was getting an email from the CCAA telling me how it's going to be, that's just not the case. Sorry. If you really really really trust your agency, then go with what they say. (But, my guess is that if most of you really really really trusted what they were telling you, you wouldn't be stalking a rumor blog.)
I got another email, stressing that these are things as this person knows them. It was pointed out that answers from the CCAA depend upon who you talk to and upon who you are and what your relationship with them is. This is why agencies sometimes give conflicting information.
My emailer feels good about the 12 month information, but does want to stress that sometimes even information you get straight from the CCAA turns out to not be the case.
I will say that I was given a lot of details about how this person came to their conclusions. And I feel pretty good about it as well, based on that. However, I've done some math, and it looks like the CCAA is going to have to really kick it into high gear to accomplish this... I'll run through some scenarios in a later post and we can talk about how they might go about making this happen.
So, I'm going to go on record as saying that just from the emails with this person - I like and trust them. I would enjoy the opportunity to buy them dinner and have a nice long talk with them. Preferably somewhere in China, of course. :)
As for whether to believe the 12 month thing.. we also have a few agencies sticking with the 12 month time frame, and I've recently seen somone say that their agency had extended their wait out past 12 months and then pulled it back to 12 months (insinuating they also got some similar information from the CCAA about not wanting to go past 12 months).
As to the question about why I said what I did about birthmothers... I called it a major point because I could write about this at length, but I was just hitting the high spots and that's a pretty high spot. And this is something that a lot of people don't think about. I guess my actual major point would be to not give your child any absolutes, because we just don't know. There are some Koreans out there who were told all of their lives the standard reasons, but who grew up to discover it was something completely different. One in particular sticks out in my mind, her birthmother wasn't married and had an alcohol problem - that is why the baby was placed in the orphanage. It had absolutely nothing to do with the war. After being told the "war" stuff all of her life, the child (a young adult when she found her b-mom and got this information) had a lot of trouble coming to terms with this, and was angry with her a-parents for telling her something as fact that they didn't know as fact.
So, with my child, we'll talk about many of the possibilities, but I will be clear that we just don't know for sure. I will even tell her that the things in her records may not be true - I've seen too many cases of a finding spot not being the actual finding spot, or of there being a note that isn't listed, or of a note being listed but it was fabricated. There are a few things I do know - I know that her nanny at the orphanage loved her because I saw that with my own eyes. The things I am sure of I will make clear that I'm sure of.... everything else will be "your records say", and I'll occasionally be clear that some people have found that those records are not very accurate. And, as for reasons for her abandonment... the answer is "I don't know". We can talk about possible reasons, but we just don't know.
Based on the area my daughter is from, I'd say there is probably about a 65% chance her abandonment was due to the one child policy and a 35% chance it was something else (the same reasons children in the US are placed for adoption, basically). But even that is up for debate, as it's possible her birthmom (or birthfather, or birth grandmother, or whoever did the actual act) got on a train and travelled a few hours to do the actual abandoning. Her birthmother/birthfamily may not have even been from that area. No way of knowing.
Okay - next post will be some scenarios.
posted by RumorQueen at 3/31/2006 06:31:00 AM
4 Comments:
I love this post. I do. Because I agree that its important to be honest with my dtr, rather than just creating a lovely story for her. Of course, this should be communicated with kindness and compassion, but compassion doesnt require a lie, in my opinion.
Good points as always RQ, and i agree that 'we just don't know for sure' is probably the best answer for our girls. One issue is have, though, is that if unwed moms comprised more than a very small portion of the abandoned children, wouldn't there be more boys than there are? ( i.e. the birthmoms wouldn't care about the gender and would abandon boys and girls equally)
Another thought: maybe a larger number of the boys get adopted domestically, rather than internationally, which would be interesting too.
Just pondering...
Eli - you hit on the answer yourself - the boys find other families in China.
Apparently when a family is having problems getting pregnant they put the word out (quietly) that they would like a son, and then at some point they find a baby on their doorstep. They take the baby to town and fill out paperwork and claim it as their biological child. There is no formal adoption, the records will show that they birthed this child. From what I've read, this happens a lot more than we would think - but there are of course no formal numbers for it.
This seems hard to imagine to us American's who go to hospitals to give birth, and who may or may not know the names of our neighbors.
I've had the opportunity to visit some villages in China, so in my mind I can see how this could happen.
Thankfully, in the cities, the preference for boys over girls is starting to decrease. But it's not happening yet in the rural areas.
Thanks for the clarification about your source. He/she sounds very reputable.
About the abandonment circumstances, I agree that it's a good idea to not present just one scenario to our kids about how they might have come to be abandoned. I might present 20 scenarios and if I still miss the mark completely, I know my daughters won't think I misled them. They'll have all of the information they need to come to their own conclusions.
Truth is, they'll probably never know their "true" story unless their birth family finds our blog and contacts us (something I've often thought about).
Until Gwen and Maddy are old enough to read books and understand human sexuality, I'll stick with the good 'ol "Your parents couldn't keep you so they left you in a safe place where we could find you" story. I have evidence to suggest this is true and no reason to think otherwise. Is that weaving a dishonest - but lovely - lie? I don't think so. But it's my call and I think it's more kind to sugarcoat some things until children are old enough to grasp a deeper discussion of the subject.
:)
Donna
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