I have asked GlitterGirl’s teachers to let me know if they are going to be talking about family or genetics or anything along those lines, so we could have a conversation about it at home as well. So far I’ve either gotten a note or an email letting me know about such things and there have been no major problems.
I never thought that I’d need to include “names” into that list.

This week GlitterGirl had an assignment that included (in part) interviewing her parents to find out how we chose her name. And if someone else chose her name (like a grandparent) she’d need to interview them as well.  That’s not such an easy question to answer when we chose part of her name and some stranger in China chose the other part. GG’s middle name is the name she was given at the orphanage.

At first GG didn’t want to write any of the information about her middle name down. I told her that it is completely up to her, and that if she didn’t want to we’d find another way to do the assignment. I mentioned three or four ways she could word it, but she didn’t like any of them. We talked about how sometimes she feels proud that she was born in China and sometimes she doesn’t want to think about it, and that’s okay. However she feels about it is okay. And then I told her she could use my middle name for the report if she wanted, and she could say it is her mothers middle name and just leave it at that.

She decided to use her special name from China after all, and she wrote that this was her name when she lived in China and now it is still part of her name.

Until I offered that she could use my name, she didn’t want to use hers. Somehow, my offering another solution was what she needed in order to be okay with using her own name.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 11:01 am and is filed under Adoption Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.