Whose Tummy?

This morning at 7:15 am, I was trying to get Ethan up and going before work. Mark’s out of town, so it was a bit more difficult than normal anyway. Rushing a bit, I had just pulled some clothes onto him, and was heading him out to the kitchen for breakfast, when completely out of the blue he demands to know, “Why didn't you have a baby in your tummy!”

My first thought was fear that I was somehow deficient because I was never pregnant. That went away fast since I never really wanted to be pregnant. So I answered with something to affirm our relationship -- "Because I have you." I meanwhile was trying to usher a tired, fairly floppy boy from his room into the kitchen.

"Why wasn't I in your tummy" he threw back immediately. Panic struck. More questions I wasn't prepared for. He hasn’t asked any adoption related questions in months. I knew this question would come at some point, and I’ve heard that it comes at unexpected moments – but this was an especially unexpected moment, and my mind was both groggy, and focused on getting food into a resistant five year old.

I stalled for time, settling him into his chair, and handing him a banana and cereal, and trying to be as nonchalant as possible. “Because you weren’t” was the best thing I could come up with on the fly. Hoping it might evade the question nicely, I handed him his vitamin. “No, why wasn’t I in your tummy!” he demanded again, pursing his lips, crossing his arms, and refusing to eat the vitamin until he had an answer.

Oof The first thoughts that came to mind were, well, we couldn’t? But that wasn’t really right, and not the message I wanted to convey anyway. I tried to rack my brain for what the books said to say, but of course, I couldn’t remember a thing. Focusing on the vitamin, I said, “Please eat your vitamin. You were in someone else’s tummy, not mine.”

“But everyone was in their mommy’s tummy” he insisted. I kept focusing on breakfast, pushing in his chair, handing him his milk.

Thinking fast, I smoothly brought up the other adopted kids we know: “No – R. wasn’t in her mommy’s tummy, Z. wasn’t in his mommy’s tummy, and J. wasn’t in either of her two mommy’s tummies. That’s what it means to be adopted --you were in someone else’s tummy" I said as matter-of-factly as I could.

(I realize some readers might bristle here that I wasn’t calling their birth moms their “mommies”, but since it’s not a concept we’ve ever discussed, I wanted to emphasize what he understands as “mom”. )

Then I thought for a second about something more I wanted to convey to him. “I wish you had been in my tummy – it would have been a lot easier” which is true. “I looked very hard for you, and worked very hard to get you,” I said. “I had to go half way around to world to find you – if you had just been in my tummy I wouldn’t have had to look for you so hard”. This final part I was trying to echo some things the orphanage workers told him (at least how it was translated to me from Kazakh), about how we had been searching for him, and that’s why it had taken so long for us to come adopt him (they need to have some way of explaining to kids why things happen the way they do.)

Apparently satisfied, the conversation topic switched immediately, dramatically, and decisively to the ladybug flying around the room, and why we have so many ladybugs in the house this year. I know there are more tricky questions to come, but at least I got an answer out for this one that (hopefully) made us both feel better. When I dropped him off at school, he gave me a big hug, and seemed very secure. I felt very complete.