[leoson]

My son, adopted from infancy, was around three when he asked where babies come from. That was a good chance for me to tell him the basics of how babies grow. I was careful to use "in a special place in ladies' tummy" (rather than use "mother's"). After I told him the basics I then went on to explain, "Most of the time, when a lady has a baby she brings the baby home with her and is his mother. Sometimes, though, some ladies are not able to know how to be the best kind of mother for a baby. When that happens she will ask another lady, who knows how to be the right kind of mother, and who very much wants a baby, to be the baby's mother."

At three years old, little kids aren't all that interested in a whole lot of details; so I just told him that when he was born another lady had him and asked me to be his mother because she wasn't able to be the right kind of mother to a baby. A he got a little older (not a lot) I talked about how "ladies need to learn how to be good mothers, and they learn that when they, themselves, have had learned from their own mother".

My son had been removed from the birth mother after serious injury in early infancy, and I needed to lay the foundation for any information I would share later.

The message I wanted him to get was that it's unfortunate when a woman can't be "the right kind of mother that a baby needs", and it isn't because she didn't want him or didn't love him. Also, though, I wanted him to have that "foundation" of information that would prepare him for the carefully edited details I'd reveal a little a time as he got older.

Once, when he was four or five, he did ask me if I knew the "lady who had him". I told him I didn't, but that she knew a lady I knew (a social worker), and that was the person who knew I'd make a good mother.

When you've adopted a child who was involuntarily placed for adoption there's that extra element of thinking about how to tell THAT story.

He's grown now. It was mostly a matter of telling him the "skeleton/foundation" story when he was three; answering a couple of simple questions when he was four; and then not talking much about it until he was eleven or twelve and had some more questions.

Then, we had a few years of not talking much about it again. As an older teen he had some more questions, which I answered. Some "ugly details" I still didn't tell him. When he was 21 he met the birth mother and all her relatives. He already knew the woman was someone with "issues", so he knew he hadn't come from royalty or some innocent little teenage girl. It wasn't such a shock for him to discover some of the uglier details by then.