You know it's going to happen, yet you really don't know what to say when it does. Someone says to your adopted child "I wish you would have stayed with your other mommy and never came here."
You kind of expect this kind of stuff on the playground at school, but in your very own home, by a child you love as your own? Well it happened, and I don't know if I handled correctly or not but I do know it broke my heart.
My daughter wasn't as affected by it as I was.
The children I keep during the day are related to me, and I love them very much, which is why I suppose this hurt me so bad. They were told to clean up my daughter's bedroom before lunch was to be served. They had all been in there playing all morning, and I believe they had every toy in the floor. Well one of the children was so upset that now they had to clean up the mess they all made, she looked at my daughter and said "I wish you would have stayed with your other mommy and never came here." When I heard those words my head started spinning, "What did you just say?" I asked the child. Then she repeated to me what she had said. Shocked, I put my hands on her shoulders and asked her how she would feel if someone told her they didn't want her around? Of course I know she didn't really mean it, after all she was just thinking if my daughter weren't here she wouldn't have to clean her room. Little does she know she still would have been cleaning up any mess in any room they had made it in even if we had never adopted our daughter! But anyway, she knew she had messed up and told me it would hurt very bad if we told her she wasn't wanted around. I asked her would she like me to tell her "I wish you never would have been born into this family?" She said no that would be very mean. SO I reminded her that my daughter was born into this family also, just in a different way than she was. I also firmly reminded her to never say that again, to my daughter or to anyone for that matter.
I guess this hit me so hard because it is one of my greatest fears, that my daughter will one day feel like she is not part of this "family" because she isn't biologically attached to us. That we could send her back. That we don't love her as much because she is adopted. That we too wish she would have stayed with her birth mommy.
Of course this will never happen, as she is our daughter in every sense of the word. We love her more than we could ever explain. She is the light of our lives. She will always be our precious baby.
I just hope that she will understand this and be able to let things like this go without paying much attention to them. Like she did this time....I asked her did she hear what the other child had said? and she says to me "Yes mommy, she was talking about my other mommy, and that's okay mommy, I don't mind." So thank goodness she didn't really understand what the other child had said.
