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Lifebooks
An Adoption Backstory
By Kelly Burgess
Kerri Charette's daughter, Joy, was 7 months old when she came to their family. In her first seven months, Joy was adopted by a family on the West Coast, removed from that family and placed in a foster home. While Charette of Ledyard, Conn., doesn't want to dwell on the circumstances of Joy's journey to her permanent home, she does want Joy to have a sense of her first few months of life. To accomplish that, Charette created a lifebook for Joy, covering her birth and her early life.
"This book was actually purchased by Joy's godparents and can be used for either domestic or international adoptions," says Charette. "We just took out the pages about international adoption, because they didn't apply to us."
Since Joy is only 2 1/2, Charette also left out details of Joy's first adoptive family, because there were domestic abuse issues involved. Right now Joy is too young to understand that, but down the road, as Joy gets older and Charette decides what is appropriate, pages can be added to the lifebook to tell more of Joy's story.
To Charette, Joy's lifebook is the equivalent of her biological children's baby books. They have a completely open adoption with Joy's biological mother, and the children enjoy reading about Joy's "tummy mommy" just as they enjoy reading their own prenatal stories.
According to Cindy Probst, MEd, MSW, LCSW, giving children a backstory, what happened to them before they came to their family, is the most important function of the lifebook. Probst, who is the author of Adoption Lifebook: A Bridge to Your Child's Beginnings (Boston Adoption Press, 2002), says a lifebook is a "sensitively and honestly written document of a child's life before they were adopted."
"The lifebook is written from the perspective of the child and is about the child's early life, those days, months or years before the child was adopted," says Probst. "Once they're adopted, they have access to plenty of information, such as photos and videos. The lifebook's purpose is to provide all of what we know about their beginnings to help them on their roads to greater self understanding."
