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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nThe Life Story Book <\/em> I replace both images with a tree in the shape of a heart \u2013 calm colours, less directive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead of clip art of a funny little butcher, a chef and a prominent fast food chain \u2013 colourful pictures that apparently engage children\u2019s attention – I use plain text to explain where birth parents have worked, and add that they were also out of work. This of course still doesn\u2019t explain why the children were taken into care. Being jobless, poor, or poorly trained is no crime. I add text about criminal convictions, where they existed, indicate brushes with the law, saying factually but in a few words the reasons for this; in child-friendly language (\u2018xx was often in trouble\u2019) but clear nonetheless. This matters, it matters a very great deal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Embodied memory<\/em> I make photographs smaller, especially of the birth parents, and I pare down the great number of happy smiley pictures from the last time K met her parents, when they all had to say good bye to each other \u2013 a clearly terribly sad moment despite the smiles and tiny birthday cake. I remove mention of \u2018wonderful presents\u2019 that had been exchanged. Much of this is due to Ingrid \u2013 adoption specialist, child therapist and general lifeline. Large pictures of birth family become very intense for the children. They unsuspectingly turn a page and wow, there are MUM and DAD! Back in force! So pictures are smaller; and I try to mix several to reduce intensity of just one image that displays K, her family or us – frozen in time. Regarding the \u2018good bye contact\u2019 I pick only one picture, making it smaller, and add a sentence that this is \u2018another difficult part of the story\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So I engineer my daughter\u2019s life story sand her identity. Do I? That\u2019s not the goal, says my gut.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The text was first written by the relevant person in social services. Ingrid was never happy with it, nor was I. I\u2019m reworking it, and Ingrid will check on what I\u2019ve done and amend as need be. I combine my interest in writing for specific audiences, my enjoyment of making a page visually attractive (yes, actually, although some people are much better at it than I am), my understanding of the needs of adopted children and my daughter, with my academic \u2018gut feeling\u2019. Veena Das<\/a> has recently argued that however much we may wish to believe that our academic work springs from pure intellectual thought and reason, concepts actually arise from experience and emotion. We have a gut feeling for which concept seems best, or is really quite incorrect, and then look for literature, theory, arguments to build that point. I know in my gut that I need to write K\u2019s story better, photos, clip art and all, in order to allow her to keep growing through understanding herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the future <\/em> So I am writing about this past to enable K to know herself better in time and open up new potential futures for herself!<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Notes<\/p>\n\n\n\n 1 See Van der Kolk (2015) The body keeps the score<\/em><\/a> on embodied, word-less, trauma memory and its everyday impact. <\/p>\n\n\n\n References<\/em> A lockdown story, by Anselma Gallinat. This cluster concerns the ways in which imaginations\/views of the past interlink with visions, hopes or fears for the future. My own work has looked at how the history of difficult time periods is … Continue reading
This cluster concerns the ways in which imaginations\/views of the past interlink with visions, hopes or fears for the future. My own work has looked at how the history of difficult time periods is written, told, performed to support national identity and how it interlinks or challenges individual recollections and senses of self. I tend to do so through a focus on narrative and have usually collected life stories as part of my ethnographies.
While I have read and used Jerome Bruner<\/a>, Charlotte Linde<\/a>, Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps<\/a>, and have used quotes like \u2018identity is a life story\u2019 McAdams (1993), as a postgraduate student especially I often found some of this literature problematic. It seemed to imply that we fashion our stories rather consciously to \u2018manipulate\u2019 others (Fernandez <\/a>and Carrithers<\/a> [and, yes, Gallinat<\/a>] call it \u2018persuasion\u2019), and I felt much of this narrative work, at least on the individual and social level was undirected, unconscious, sort of emerging organically. Later I considered it as the – at best – semi-conscious outcome of social interaction (2016)<\/a>. I continue to see narrative, story-seeds, discourse and metaphor as not only consisting of text language, but also performances, symbols, embodiment.
However, if I am critical of word-heavy constructed stories, what am I doing sitting here \u2018writing\u2019 and illustrating (yes, with pictures) my nine-year\u2013old daughter\u2019s \u2018life story book\u2019\u2026? So this blog reflects on why I felt the need to rework her life story book, some of the ways in which I have done so, in their relation to childhood trauma in adoption. Whilst K’s life story book is the peg, on which I hang these reflections, this blog doesn’t tell ‘her story’. It tells a story of my writing an immensely important text.
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In adoption, the LSB, a folder with printed A4 pages, is used to tell a child where they have come from \u2013 how they have come to live with their \u2018new\u2019 or \u2018forever\u2019 or \u2018adoptive\u2019 family. It provides information on their parents and siblings, if any. So if I, as K\u2019s adoptive mother, write this story, about her birth family, it surely cannot get any closer to trying to engineer<\/em> an identity, can it?
To understand this, we need to backtrack a little. In British adoption, children should be told about their birth origins. To this end, within 10 days of the adoption being fully legalised (granting of adoption order) a life story book is provided to help parents tell their child where they came from in a child friendly way. At this point, in many cases adopted children no longer have direct contact with their birth family, especially the parents. Contact is usually continued only by letter mediated by social services. Much of these practices seem to work ok for children who are very small when they were moved into care.
A little more backtracking. Most looked after children are in care because of neglect, broadly speaking. Neglect from womb through to baby and toddler stages impacts on brain development \u2013 usually talked about as \u2018developmental trauma<\/a>\u2019 or \u2018developmental delay\u2019. One consequence of this is that those children, who experienced life in their first home, only have very fragmented memories that lack language and are dominated by sensory impressions \u2013 the way a situation feels, smells, sounds like, including how the body feels in that situation (in pain, cold, hungry, dry, itchy).
What kind of a story is this?<\/em>
In these cases the LSB has to tell the story of the early years in a way that allows the child to order those sensory, felt, non-narrative memories. It has to tell the story in a way that makes clear to the reader that this home wasn\u2019t safe and won\u2019t ever be safe, however much the parents loved their children, no matter trips to the park, the beach and MacDonald\u2019s. This is one important purpose. The second is to help these children develop a sense of identity \u2013 a \u2018habitable identity\u2019, as Vieda Skultans <\/a>put it for sufferers of severe trauma in Soviet-occupied Latvia \u2013 as part of both birth and adoptive family (and for the anthropologists: in a cultural context of the primacy of biological descent).
So I am sitting here ordering pictures (better pictures) into the LSB, adjusting the text, and taking out an awful lot of cheerful clipart! Like the almost stick figure couple \u2013 the man with tie, the women with skirt carrying a baby, smiling broadly \u2013 a \u2018family\u2019! It doesn\u2019t get more heteronormative, garishly coloured than that. This picture and that of a house framed by a rainbow are moreover inappropriately suggestive of the \u2018happy ever after\u2019 that stands in great contrast to the tough grind wrought through with loss, screams, spit and tears that adoption is for most \u2013 children and (adoptive and birth) parents alike.
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As Oakwater <\/a>argues, if we narratively \u2018bubble wrap\u2019 our children (2012<\/a>) telling them their home was a \u2018bit messy at times\u2019 and then later request they tidy their bedroom because it is \u2018a bit messy\u2019 too, our children will not understand that their first home was an unsafe place to be. We need to be clear that it was dirty, chaotic and had a bad smell. So they can place sensory memories of awful smells or understand their own involuntary reactions when certain noises send them into an emotional spin.1<\/sup> But also to create a contrast to the new, safer home. To be clear, this is not about demonising anyone. Good days and \u2018treats\u2019 in the first home are also displayed, including in pictures. Maybe the hardest part of the LSB is that it has to teach children about complexity \u2013 the good wrought through with the bad and the very much in-between.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am not writing a coherent story of her either. The \u2018texts\u2019 have narrative quality, but key is to provide information, knowledge – of the family, her birth, her first home – to enable K to start putting her memories into her own words, and to create her own narrative\/s. I am not expecting and I don\u2019t want to shape her reflection into the production of one \u2018rescue narrative\u2019 akin to the stories patients or recovering drug addicts are institutionalised into (Holstein and Gubrium<\/a>). Rather, I want to aid her thinking. I hope she will use the story as impetus, \u2018story seeds\u2019 that do not, as in Carrithers (2012<\/a>), indicate an already known longer story, but seeds that spark potential stories in K\u2019s own mind. Nuggets of information that allow her to sift through her memories, put words to them, take on board, reject, rewind, and that way learn who she is or feels she is, then and now. Also to learn the good, the bad and the in-between. To learn about love and loss and families, of all sizes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/pastsandfutures\/files\/2021\/02\/DSC_0047_resized-2-779x1024.jpg\")
Bruner, Jerome. 1987. \u201cLife as Narrative,\u201d Social Research<\/em> 54(1): 11\u201332.
\u2014\u2014\u2014. 1990. Acts of Meaning<\/em>. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
\u2014\u2014\u2014. 1991. \u201cThe Narrative Construction of Reality,\u201d Critical Inquiry <\/em>18: 1\u201321.
Carrithers, Michael. 2005. \u201cWhy Anthropologists Should Study Rhetoric,\u201d Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute <\/em>11(3): 577\u201383.
–. 2012. \u201cStory-Seeds and the Inchoate,\u201d in M. Carrithers (ed.), Culture, Rhetoric and the Vicissitudes of Life. <\/em>New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Das, Veena. 2018. \u2018The life of concepts and how they speak to experience,\u2019 in Morten Nielsen and Nigel Rapport, The Composition of Anthropology<\/em>, London: Routledge.
Fernandez, James W. 1986. Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture. <\/em>Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Gallinat, Anselma. 2016. Narratives in the making: Writing the East German past in the democratic present. <\/em>New York: Berghahn.
Holstein, Jaber F., and James Gubrium. (eds.). 2001. Institutional Selves: Troubled Identities in a Postmodern World. <\/em>Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Linde, Charlotte. 1993. Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. <\/em>Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McAdams, Dan P. 1993. The stories we live by: personal myths and the making of the self. <\/em>New York and London: The Guilford Press.
Oakwater, Helen. 2012. Bubble wrapped children<\/em>. MX publishing.Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. 2001. Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling.<\/em> Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Skultans, Vieda. 1998. The Testimony of Lives: Narrative and Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia<\/em>. London: Routledge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"