All The Answers That I Started With Turned Out Questions in the End*

Lana has been asking the hard questions for about two weeks now.

THE QUESTIONS. The Big Questions.

The questions that have come from her these last two weeks...are the ones I have trouble answering. I'm not entirely sure what I'm "supposed" to say. It's one thing to read about these scenarios in a parenting book. It's another thing entirely to look into your child's face, to know they are looking for answers, and to know that sometimes the only answer is "I don't know."
The other day, she pointed at a photo of her foster mom and asked if she had grown in her belly. I told her no. She asked me "whose belly then?" and I told her what I knew about her birth mother.

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I know this is difficult for her to understand. She remembers her foster mother. I am pretty sure she believed her foster mother was her biological mother. To the best of my knowledge (and believe me, I understand that it is a blessing to have the limited information that I do have), Lana's birth mother never saw her again after Lana was about six months old.
We have had lots of questions about her foster mother, but the questions about her birth mother are, for the most part, recent.

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"Did she give me a name?" she asks. (I am surprised by this - the question seems complex to me.)

"Yes, she gave you a name. She gave you a name that was very close to her name. Her name means Jade Lotus. She gave you a name that means Jade Orchid."

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Lana knows what a "Jade Orchid" is - I have an orchid made of white jade on a necklace, and she knows I wear that necklace for her**, she knows that an orchid is a flower, and that jade is the stone it is made of. She knows her name in Vietnamese and she knows it means this type of flower made of jade.***

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"What is Lotus?" she asks me.
"It's a kind of flower, like an orchid is a kind of flower. A beautiful kind of flower."
We were lying in bed together (so often these hard conversations take place at the end of the day) - so she spooned her body closer into mine, but turned her face away from me. "Why did she even have me at all?" she whispered.

I said the thing that I thought she most needed to hear. "Because she loved you."

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I expected her to question this. I just wasn't expecting it...yet.

The truth is, I don't know why she had Lana. I wasn't about to explain the concept of abortion or it's incidence in the place of her birth. Vietnam doesn't have a rigid "one-child policy" for me to point to.

I have nothing, really, no knowledge, of why Jade Lotus chose to give birth to my daughter. Perhaps she was in love with Lana's biological father. Perhaps she was hopeful they would have a life together. Perhaps she couldn't afford to do otherwise. But, in my heart, it seemed the only answer that was appropriate to give a confused 6 year old girl who has concrete memories of two mothers and questions about a mother who gave her away when she was seven days old was,

"Because she loved you."

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Then she hit me with another big one. "Why did she leave me with her?" she asked, pointing to a photo of her foster mother, the other mother Lana remembers. The mother Lana lived with for three and a half years. The mother who still, on occasion, emails me to ask if Lana is okay, if she is eating, if she learning, if she is a good girl. The mother who, I don't doubt, loved Lana very, very much.

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I think...I probably should have told her she left her with her foster mother because she knew her foster mother could take care of her when she (her birth mother) could not. But I don't know for sure. Jade Lotus either wasn't particularly forthcoming with information, or that information never made it into Lana (extensive) file.

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What I did say was, "She wanted to make sure you were safe and loved and cared for."

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What do we tell our children, when they look at us for answers to questions that we have no answers for? There is a school of thought that we should tell them the truth - that we simply don't know.

The truth can be harsh and ugly. There may come a day when those answers can be discerned. I do not have it in me to tell my child, my beautiful, joyful child, MY child - how can I give her any answer that does not lead back to the only answer that she needs to hear - "She had you because she loved you. She gave you to me because she loved you."

Even if it's not true - even if there were extenuating circumstances - I have to believe that the woman who brought this joyful, amazing person into the world - love had to have been one of her motivations. And if it was not...if it was not...well, if it was not, I don't ever want my daughter to know. I want her to always believe that she was loved. And if that's not the truth - what good would it serve her to know that, at the age of six?

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*Alison Kraus, Gravity

**I also have a St. Gabriel's medallion on a necklace, for Gabriel, obviously. I cannot wear them at the same time - I try to remember to wear one or the other of them if something important is happening for either of them.

***Any native Vietnamese speakers care to tell me if "Bich Lan" (Jade Orchid) refers to a specific kind of orchid - an actual flower? Any searches I have done on the term Jade Orchid have results in orchids made out of jade, as opposed to living orchids in any shade of green. I am intensely curious about it, though.