Lifebook: SWI Sending Child’s Paperwork to CCAA

So many of us see our family’s adoption stories only through our own lens.  It’s natural – we chose to adopt – of course we see it through our view of the process.  We may have been infertile, wanted to save a baby (I don’t like it but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t doing it), thought adoption was another way of adding to a family or were first choice adopters – whatever the reason, we come to adoption. And after a lot of legwork on our side; applications, homestudies, INS approval, working with social services, adoption agencies or lawyers – we are finally matched with a child.  And that new family begins.  

But wait a minute – that’s our story.  While important to us – it doesn’t tell our child anything about why or how they came to be placed for adoption*.  And so – we need to be careful in our children’s lifebooks not to confuse our journey with theirs. 

A lot of other lifebook guides I have read do focus on the parent’s journey to being matched with the child.  However – you [as parents] know that piece of the story very well and I am sure (unless you are hiding the fact you are an adoptive family) that journey is a favorite topic within your home.  It probably also is a favorite topic with some of your children.  There is a reason that Jamie Curtis’s Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born is so popular**.

But, going back to Grace from the Nat Geo’s ‘Lost Girls’ – I think it is essential for our children to hear and understand that they were not placed for adoption because we [their adoptive parents] wanted a child.  Or just because it was ‘meant to be’.  They do not exist solely due to our wants and desires.  Adoptive parents are not and never were sole omnipotent forces in their children’s lives.  We need to acknowledge the power and choices made by others in this process and how those other people affected our child’s placement and our family’s formation.

If you are a parent writing a lifebook for your child – you are probably fairly open about the adoption process.  And I think it is important to tell your child why/how they came to be available for adoption.  However, in the case of Chinese adoption – the birthparents did not make an adoption plan.  So, we need to look further into why your child was made available to be adopted.  We need to figure out the who, what, why, when and how.

Does this mean our side of the story should be shunted aside – never to be mentioned in a lifebook?  At this point in the lifebook – YES. 

While it is important for our child to know the steps taken on our side as well, I wouldn’t be adding in stuff like your personal timeline/checklist of the entire paperchase/wait/referral to your child’s lifebook – unless the child requests that type of drilled down detail from you for the lifebook that they put together when they are old enough to create/add to/enhance it.  in my opinion, it really doesn’t add anything to your child’s lifebook except the knowledge that you thought your efforts to adopt were worth however many pages you create in the book displaying them.  A brief mention of your paperwork will be helpful in the next section – CCAA Matching.  If you want to do a more detailed section – perhaps we should create a separate scrapbook/parental lifebook/memory book of your own that can house those thing sthat were important to you during this part of your life.

Your final wording may be something like this

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While my Ayis loved me and took very good care of me, they and Director Xu also wanted me to have a mommy and daddy.  So, the Orphanage created a dossier about me to send to the China Center of Adoption Affairs (CCAA) in BEIJING, the capital of China, to match me with a mama and baba who would become my family.  The CCAA works very hard to find forever families for its children.  Their mission is to do the very best they can for the children entrusted to them.

This process is called ADOPTION which is “a legal proceeding that creates a parent-child relation between persons not related by blood; the adopted child is entitled to all privileges belonging to a natural child of the adoptive parents”.

Adoption creates families. 

The dossier contained a medical report that told the CCAA how I was developing physically.  It also described my personality and highlighted my likes and dislikes. IN December 2004, several pictures were taken of me to also be included in my paperwork.  The CCAA used all this information to find the family they believe was the best fit for my needs.   

My dossier was sent to Beijing in January of 2005.  While I continued to grow bigger and bigger, Director Xu and my nannies knew that at some point – I would be matched with a new family.  Big changes (unknown to me) were already afoot.

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Short, and to the point.  I would recommend using a referral picture (if you have one available) to flesh out the page.  Additional information from your child’s paperwork can work well as a caption.

The really nice thing about taking yourself out of the equation up to this point is that it  helps to gently show your child that their lives were not changed irrevocably solely because of you.  Their adoption was going to happen whether you existed or not.  This is an essential point to our children’s stories.  And I believe it will help them understand and make sense of their experiences if they have that information.

Next up: The CCAA matching process…here’s where the first mention of YOU! the adoptive parent comes in.

* Some people will tell you to give possible reasons why your child’s first family abandoned them.  As I have stated before, I disagree with this idea – as I don’t think it is necessary to put into a young child’s lifebook.  Especially since – barring the presence of a note – most of us who adopt from China will never know for sure why our child’s parent decided to abandon their child – and written possibilities too often can take on the strength of FACT to young children.  Once a child is old enough to truly understand some of the possibilities of the ‘why’ of abandonment  – that might be a good time to work together on that section of your child’s ‘Independent Lifebook’ – or let them work on it. 

The ‘why’ of being abandoned (in my opinion) has very little relationship to the ‘why’ of being placed for adoption (in China – other types of adoption may have a much stronger causal relationship).  Remember, IA from China represents the fate of approximately 2% of the Chinese orphanage population, a very small percentage.

** While I like some parts of this book – I really do not like how the birthparents are treated as non-people in the story.  It is pretty freaky to me.  So, I still love Jamie – just wish her book could hold both sets of parents within.