Birthdays for foster kids can be unexpectedly full of strange emotions and events.
It’s Sunny’s 9th birthday today, and she’s suuuuper excited. For one thing, her family didn’t really celebrate birthdays so this is an exciting new “English” (non-Muslim) tradition for her. For another, like all kids, she wants to be the center of attention and get to do what she wants for a day. She’s a typical now-9-year-old in many respects.
But in some respects? She’s different. And she just gave me a harsh reminder of that. A friend sent a FB link to a traditional Karen birthday song on YouTube. (The Karen are an ethnolinguistic group prevalent in Myanmar). I started playing it, and Sunny exclaimed: “This is my Daddy’s song!” I started to feel excited for her to be hearing it, then she followed it up with “He used to sing this when he was drunk!” Heh, oops. Not exactly the memory I was trying to elicit!
This is not the first time Sunny has blurted out traumatic memories nonchalantly. She’s come out with other stories – some pretty horrifying – casually at the dinner table. But there’s something about “events” days like Christmas and birthdays that can trigger memories that are less than stellar. Overlooked birthdays, family fights on a day that was supposed to be special, Daddies being drunk… lots of terrible things can happen on big days. These memories can come out as a statement like Sunny’s earlier, or as Big Emotions that have no obvious source. So we hope for the best for the big holidays, and brace a little for impact just in case.
Despite the iffy memories attached to it, Sunny is still over the moon to be listening to the Karen birthday song, and begged to have a way to listen to it any time she wants and misses home. So I just ordered a bear with a 30-second voice recorder for her. It won’t be great quality, but she’ll be able to listen to “home” when she wants. I’ll look for some other Karen songs too that we could put on it. Perhaps some with better memories.
Speaking of things with recorded voices, allow me to plug a toy for Muslim kids. We got her a doll that has a hijab and says and sings a bunch of Muslim phrases and songs. It’s a truly beautiful little thing, well made with super soft fabrics. Sunny adores it, and has been hugging it and playing every phrase and song again and again. We got her the darker doll, and she exclaimed that it is “brown like me!” I think it makes Sunny feel seen in her white English family. She also got a t-shirt with an anime Muslim girl on it wearing hijab, and she’s wearing that today despite its being short sleeved. So far so good.
We shall see how the day unfolds. Hopefully she doesn’t have too many bad birthday memories that could get triggered today and things unfold smoothly!
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