Lessons Learned…and Learning.

Thank you to all my blogging peeps, who came through for me about the stacking cups issue I had a couple days ago. I found the ones I wanted at buybuybaby. And walternatives also sent me a cool website that explains why this particular toy is such a good one for enabling both a child’s cognitive development and her fine motor skills.

I also got a lot of great suggestions for bottles and sippy cups, and wzgirl over at buttercup directed me to a great cleft website with all sorts of suggestions for babies born with cleft issues.

There was also a section of this site devoted to dolls that can be specially stitched so as to appear to have a facial difference, such as a repaired cleft lip, like Emme has. This was a totally new idea for me. I have been thinking for quite some time now about how important it will be to encourage Emme to believe in herself as a powerful, beautiful human being (which is, of course, how I already think of her), despite her abandonment, despite the role that her cleft *may* have played in that. But how best to do so? Perhaps a doll like this could become an important tool to open up conversation at a young age and start presenting her with language that will help her make sense of what happened to her. It is the opposite approach to the “don’t make a big deal about her scar/facial difference, and it won’t seem a big deal to her.” I’m not sure I want to take the risk that it won’t seem like a big deal to her. And I highly suspect that the surgeries she will have to have to correct her palate will only serve to emphasize that there is something “wrong” with her that needs to be corrected.

Not only will I at some point have to field her questions about why her birth parents left her on the courthouse steps back in China, but I’ll have to address how and why her cleft lip and palate played a role in that. Whether it actually did in reality will probably be a moot point to her. It will seem like it did since it marks her as different from other children and–in a society like ours, predisposed to “normative” values–could offer an all-too-easy explanation for the abandonment.

This link to the dolls also offers a brief discussion of the “people first” style of talking, in which you avoid such phrasing as “cleft baby” or “cleft-affected baby,” which tends to emphasize the condition before the person. Re-phrasing into “she is a child born with a cleft” puts the person first. As a big believer in the power of language, I am grateful for such suggestions. While I understand the frustration that circulates over the seemingly endless expectations of Political Correctness when it comes to language, I also have some sense–as a professional language guru–that it matters.