Do your kids like to hear stories about your parents, or your grand parents, or great-grand parents?

Do they love to sit and hear about their first birthday, or their first steps, or the time they put a bug in their ear and went to the ER?

Do you help them (older kids, that is) create elaborate family trees for school, or write about how their ancestors came to America during the Irish Potato famine or something like that?

Well, I can’t do that with my kids, not in the traditional way, since they don’t have much history. Let me explain:

My kids came to me, at first, as foster children. They were removed from their parents for some reason or other, and brought to stay with me, temporarily. Then as things sometimes go, they stayed longer and eventually were available for adoption. But now I’m left with a void to fill – a void about their past. They have questions, and I have few answers, and I don’t wish to lie to them. So we do the best we can. We talk about what we do know – what their parents looked like, where they lived, what kind of work they did. How old they were when all this happened. We speculate about where they might be now. In one case I read a six inch thick pile of legal documents (mostly complaints about mom). In another case my wife met the mom twice before she left town – I never had the chance to see her. We have a name, that’s it. And strange as it may seem, kids want to know these things.

All of this is a long prelude to one of my recent Dumbass Moments. I’m teaching a class for foster/adoptive parents, and we do a section about Life Books. A life books is a scrapbook you keep for your foster kids, and it goes with them wherever they go – back home, to another foster home, to adoption, whatever. And I was talking to these wonderful parents about making a life book, and trying to stress why it was important and how little history these kids actually have (imagine no family reunions, imagine not knowing if you have brothers or sisters).

So I say “How many of you know your grandparents?” (raise hands) “Your grandparents?” (raise hands) “How many of you know significant things about your ancestors, like whether they came to America on the Mayflower.”

Silence.

Then, the sea of black faces erupted into laughter as someone said “None of our people came here on the Mayflower!”

I got to wear a Stupid White Man pin the rest of the evening. (not really, but I should have)