Maia asks about why her parents gave her up

We were driving to Big City Diner for breakfast. On Saturdays, she has class at a place that's near there.

She was asking about her ear. She's been talking about it a lot recently. She had asked whether it was wrong for people to tease her about her ear, and I had told her that it was.

"Is it my fault?" she asked.

"No, it's not your fault, Sweetie. It's because of a defect in your cells, or it was something that happened while you were growing before you were born."

She thought about this for a while.

"Did my other mother know that I was missing an ear?" she asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Yes," she continued on her own thought, "because she saw me when I was born."

"Yes," I agreed.

"Do you miss your mother?" I asked her.

"No," she said.

"Because you didn't know her,"

"Yes," she said.

She was quiet for awhile.

"Why did she just throw me away?" she asked. "Why did she give me to the orphanage? It's like she just dumped me."

I decided to start videotaping the conversation then, because I didn't trust my memory to get it right, and I wanted her to have a record of the first time she asked about this. I will post the video when I can figure out how to do that.

Parts of it went something like this.

"We don't know why she decided to give you up. And we don't know whose decision it was. You had a father, too. Maybe it was his decision."

"Did they have children after me?"

"We don't know. But they had children before you. Two sons."

"They were already there when I was born?"

"Yes."

"They took them home?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't they take me home?"

"We don't know. But it had something to do with your ear."

"Did the other children have ears?"

"Yes. They were normal. That's what the medical records said."

"Would they have taken me home if I had an ear?"

"Yes. Probably."

"Is my other mother a bad person?"

"No. We don't know why she did what she did but she must have had a reason."

"Did the other children see me in the hospital?"

"Your brothers? We don't know. But they must have known that you were born."

She was quiet for a while.

At some point, she asked if I were videotaping, I admitted that i was, and she gave me a little push back on that.

"Do you want to go there someday?

"Yes," she said. "But Mommy said we can't go because we don't speak Kazakh."

"We can get an interpreter," I said.

Well--it went something like that, anyhow.

John, Saturday, January 14, 2011