Life Books

Lately as I’ve been picking up my house from tornado whirlwinds of kid chaos, I noticed both the kids have been carting around their Life Books and looking through them a bunch.

What’s a Life Book? And why make one?

Everyone is curious about their origin, their early years, their “story” as it were. But that curiosity can be tenfold for an adoptee or foster child who is trying to understand where they came from, why things happened to them, and how they ended up where they are. For adoptees, a life book can be an essential therapeutic tool, a way of making sense of a confusing and traumatic story.

There’s LOTS of research and support for creating Life Books for adoptees in particular. Here’s a great web site for more details:

https://adoptioncouncil.org/publications/adoption-advocate-no-114/

In short, for our foster kids, it’s a photo album of their time in foster care living with us. I take lots of photos of the kids, and assemble all those photos into an album so they have a way to remember their time with us. I’ve done one for Kiddo and Sprout, and also did them for several other kids who were with us a long time and left to go home or to a relative.

For Kiddo, hers is just the time she lived with us full time – a year and a half of photos from when she just turned 4, to when she left to go live with a parent again at 5 1/2. I could update it and probably should. Perhaps I’ll put that on my to do list. I now have photos of her from age 5 1/2 to age 10 in my phone, and she occasionally asks me to print out a family photo or a photo of another foster kid so she can remember them. I’m sure she’d love it updated.

Kiddo treasures her book way more than I expected her to. She loves to see the pictures of all the activities we did with her, from taking her to a frog catching camp at a local forest, to our big beach vacation at Chincoteague Island, to dips at the local lake. We took her to an amusement park, and a puppet theater, and for walks in the woods. We take our kids on lots of adventures. She also loves the photos from around the house, like the photo of Seth helping her dig a matchbox car out from under the dishwasher.

And she loooooves the pictures of herself with the dogs, especially our old Basset hound Slimy, who was really HER dog.

For Sprout, I just did her book a few days ago. It’s bigger than Kiddo’s and has text in it, not just photos. I took more care with hers because it needs to tell the story of how she wound up with us, in a kid appropriate way, because she’s likely to stay with us for good, and she’s going to have a lot of questions that her Mama won’t be able to answer for her because she won’t live with her and they don’t speak the same language. It needs to have info about her background. She’s too young to understand what’s happening in her family’s home country now but in a few years she’ll start to be able to understand it.

I’ve also bought an archival box for Sprout, and it’s ultimately going to contain alllll of her court documents, and medical records. She’s likely going to want to understand WHY. Why she came to us, why she stayed with us, why she couldn’t go back home but her siblings stayed with her Mama. Of course we can explain to the best of our ability, but the court records may some day be of great interest to her. I want her to have the letter her Doctor wrote about how sick she was when she came to us. I want her to have the court order that told the county to start working on terminating her parents’ rights. Those things may absolutely break her heart when she’s old enough to read them but they’re part of her story and she needs to be able to have access to them if/when she’s ready.

She’s already using her book to explain her story to herself. The first few photos we have of her show her looking incredibly sick, and terribly terribly sad. As she looked at them the other day, flipping through the book by herself, I heard her say out loud, “I was sad then because I missed Mommy [name]. But now I happy!” I’m sure her narrative will gain nuance and change many times over the years, but my heart both broke and swelled to hear her say those words. I’m infinitely glad she’s using the book to figure out her own version of her story.