Life Books: Just One Way To Tell Your Child’s Story

I am a Life Book negligent adoptive mom. Or would that be Life Book challenged? Life Book disabled? I know how important the concept of a Life Book is for many adoptive families. I respect and admire those parents who are diligent about keeping a Life Book for their adopted children. I’m just not one of them. From the moment the girls were permanently placed with us, we were caught up in the actual day-to-day living with them. The business of putting together and maintaining the Life Book about our journey to becoming a family just never made it to the top of my priority list.

I keep individual journals for all three of my children that I write in sporadically. I might write for weeks and months at a time in great detail. Then there are these huge gaps, punctuated by major world events that effect my childrens’ lives and the lives of children around the globe (September 11, 2001; The passing of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King; The beginning of the War in Iraq; The rebellion in the streets of Paris and elsewhere; etc.).

My journaling is distinctly different from keeping a Life Book. That does not mean, however, that I have not been busy helping my kids to develop and understand a coherent narrative (a psychobabble term) of their lives.

The transfer of critical elements of African American culture from one generation to another is characterized by oral traditions that can be traced back to our African ancestory. I am amazed by the clarity of recall of the elder generation in any given African American community. A simple question, “Big Mama? Who was (so-and-so’s) people?” can lead to an hours long sociopolitical history lesson complete with facts, figures, dates, and times.

I’m proud that all three of my children seem to be natural storytellers (in the positive sense of the word). There are days when the hectic pace of their childhood lives slows to a crawl and they will sit in a circle, or at the kitchen table, and re-tell their life stories to one another. I’ve also heard them doing this when friends are over for a visit. It is touching to listen to the way they hold the beginning and the middle of one another’s stories (the ends have yet to come).

“No, no. I think that was before we became a family. I wasn’t here yet.”

“Yes, you were! Remember? I said (blah, blah, blah). And then you said (fill in the blank). And mommy started laughing. Remember?”

“Yeah, yeah. I remember!” And everyone starts laughing.

What is interesting to me, is how my children never seem to tire of their own oral traditions. Invariably at some point I will be invited to the table, or, to the circle and asked “Mommy, tell us again about the time that…” I stop what I am doing and I join them and I begin to spin my yarn. They listen with rapt attentiveness like it is their first time hearing the tale. The stories never change. It is almost as if I were reading verbatim–from a book.

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