This can easily be both the easiest and hardest part of adopting a child into a family that already has other children. “Adoption means you’re part of our family.” Yep, it’s both easy and hard to explain.

Our first adopted child was first our foster child, with a return home plan. The case plan for these two children changed gradually and so we were able to present these changes to all of the children as they happened. First, they understood that the children were staying with us, so that we could take care of them because their mommy and daddy couldn’t. Then, we explained that their mommy and daddy still couldn’t take care of them and so the judge decided that they would need a second mommy and daddy to keep taking care of them. Lastly, we explained that they would need this second mommy and daddy to be there for them permanently, to keep taking care of them forever as part of their family, and that this would be called adoption; we would adopt them to be part of our family forever.

We’ve had other children arrive to us as private placements. In these cases (as well as some of the foster care to adoption cases we’ve had where the parents voluntarily relinquished and are choosing to remain in an open adoption), it’s been somewhat easier to explain. In these cases, the parents CHOSE us to be the second mommy and daddy – or the second family – for very individual reasons. For these reasons, we could go to the birth parents for explanations that made sense to all of the children (or at least honest reasons that we, as new parents, could then try to explain to the children.).

We’ve also adopted children who had already been adopted before, both internationally and from in our country. These are the trickiest to explain. Each situation is so different. Each birth family situations is incredibly different. Internationally born children seem to be the hardest to explain, knowing now that other countries do not always tell the truth about the children’s stories, perhaps in an effort to still get for them that “better life in America”. Then, there are the situations and problems that the original adoptive families incurred. In some cases, the original adoptive families truly helped the children by explaining, good or bad, their story up to the point of their arrival in our family. More often, they did not, leaving it to us once the child arrived – and then having children who do or don’t believe it, accept it, or have “open ended blame and pain” with no one to give truth to their questions.

The one way we can always explain it, both to adoptive and to birth children, seems to be this. “For whatever reason, you need another family. You need another family to take care of you until you get to be a grownup, at least. You need people to love you inside of a family. We want to adopt you. This means that you will be part of our family forever. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have other families. But it does mean that we are one of your families now, that we want you to be in our family, that we love you. Family, at this house, means you don’t have to leave anymore.”