what they don’t know…

There are a lot of things my kids do not know. Whether because they have purposely blocked it out with all their trauma or that they did not completely understand a situation they went through when they were younger. I have always taken the approach of letting them ask if they want to know. They typically just ask the same questions over and over. I give truthful responses over and over. I do not guess at anyone’s feelings or anything else that is beyond my ability to truthfully answer for them. I state the facts of what happened.

I have had to dispute many lies that they were told growing up. My youngest was under the impression that she was born six weeks or six months early depending on the paperwork. My oldest was given fake diagnoses and a false assault history. They were even told that their birth mother was dead at one point. They were taken to a random grave and told it was their birth mother’s grave.

There are many theories as to why these fabrications were treated as reality by their caretakers and I have speculated with many professionals that have worked with our family. There are no “good” reasons for any of these lies to exist. They were used a lot of the time to hide the abuse and neglect that the girls were suffering. That much is very clear to me.

With all the record collecting I have done, I have been able to show the girls that these things are all lies. I have the birth records. We have photos of the birth mom and her family. We have been slowly unraveling all these false narratives that they have lived under the bulk of their childhood.

This is why we did not immediately open up the door to meeting with the birth family after their separation of eight years. We needed to become people the girls could trust. They needed the coping tools to go from believing a person died to understanding that she left and has a family with their half-siblings. That is a lot for anyone to comprehend, let alone two abused and neglected little girls.

It has been an extremely slow process and I think that the girls are finally ready to meet their birth mother. They have no memory of her as the last time they saw her they were 2 and 3, respectively. I actually do not think they can go any farther in the healing process without meeting her. She is a ghost that has haunted them for years. All their pain stems from their original trauma: losing their birth parents.

They can finally articulate what is really the root of their pain when their emotional outbursts subside. They are afraid we are going to leave them like their birth parents. They think it is their fault their birth parents left. They believe that they are unlovable.

They need to meet her. She needs to tell them it was never their fault. She needs to tell them that she loves them. She needs to tell them that the reason she left had nothing to do with them.