Curiosity and Questions

Ari has a lot of questions and comments about her China Mom these days.  This is probably because she is watching her Auntie get ready for her new little cousin's arrival.  It is interesting that a little girl who hasn't even seemed to realize that she is Chinese has such a curiosity now about birth mom.  Of course, this is what my adoption education prepared me to expect and helps my answers about her history be matter-of-fact.  I just thought I'd take a moment to offer testimony to the fact that even though her history is beyond the reaches of her memory, and she has been in her forever home since babyhood, she still wants to know about her origins.

She wants to know if she can call her China Mom when she is old enough.  I tell her that we won't be able to because we don't know who she is, but we can send a letter and pictures every once in a while to her Nai Nai (foster mom; nai-nai = grandmother).  She wants to know if we can go to China and find out where she (China Mom) is.  This I allow as a fantasy without making promises.  "That would be really great, wouldn't it?  I don't think we'd know how to find her, but it would be nice to go to China sometime, huh?"  She has a picture in her mind of what her first mom must look like; she pointed at a picture in the computer and said that a woman could not be her China Mom because the pictured woman had blond hair.  I asked what her China Mom looked like and got a shrug and "I don't know."  So we talked about how she would be Chinese, so she would have dark hair, dark eyes, and smiling eyes (asian eyes).  For now, she is satisfied.