A comment yesterday has stayed in my mind regarding “nothing of their former lives.” The exact quote was,

“It always surprised me to hear him and his siblings talk about their childhoods, because I knew nothing of their "former" lives...my reality was what I knew.”

Now that eight of my grown children have had their own children, what should they say about their early childhood years before they were adopted? When their children are old enough, should they spill the beans?

So far, my oldest granddaughter, now 12, knows very little about her mother’s life in El Salvador. This granddaughter can do the math, learn how young her mom actually was when she married and birthed a baby. She was so very young that she was an emergency foster care placement for me who was allowed to run away and get married. The supervisor told me to unofficially permit this wedding since she was pregnant.

Technically this young lady lived with us for only a few months, back then few foster families spoke Spanish and this girl was quickly placed with us, even though I wasn’t exactly a foster home, I was an adoptive mama in the middle expecting of a new placement of a sib group from Texas.

I legally adopted this girl many years later when she was an adult wife with several children, now she has five. She has always remained close to our family, needing the support and security especially of my daughters who were her peers.

One of these daughters, now also a wife, a mother, a homeowner and a Master’s Degree in Social Work graduate struggles with how much she should ever tell her two children about her past. It gets even more complicated in a large family of bigmouths. If she remains quiet, it wouldn’t be that hard for her kids to pump another aunt, uncle or cousin here for information. And then there’s the fact that there are birth siblings of each parent that share the same history.

So if she chooses to tell part of her story to her children, their cousins might well tell the rest that they’ve heard from their parents.

We have no plans, nor intentions, to keep secrets. It’s more an issue of protecting the hearts of this next generation. The past has some sad, some shocking, and some ugly issues of abuse and neglect that’d likely break the hearts of the grandchildren to know about in much detail.

As the Abuelita (Grandma in Spanish) I’ll remain quiet, I won’t answer any questions raised to me because I think that’s for the parents to divulge. But then again, I’m writing a book, how are we going to hide that? Should we? How is it possible for us to have so much new territory to cover each day?