Lifebooks & Lip Smacking Stories, Page 2
A Valuable IdeaAlthough I didn't get all the answers for my own LifeBook, it was enough to satisfy me for a while, as well as inspire me to create LifeBooks for many of the children I was to place. Each LifeBook contained a few Lip Smacking stories, as I called them. Those warm fuzzy facts.
It wasn't too many years before I was hearing back from families whose children had my initial LifeBooks (those plain, typewritten books - I'm no artist!). They reported that the LifeBooks became even more valuable over time.
Time passed, and after more than 19 years as a social worker, I bought a computer and started a Web site. A social worker with a dot-com business. The calls actually poured in, but they didn't contain a message that I expected. What callers were saying was, "Beth, we want to make it ourselves. Teach us how." My husband and I had just bought a small house on the ocean. I sat at my computer and watched the sun rise, and the words went straight from my heart to the screen. I translated my years of experience into a step-by-step guide for families, social workers, or anyone who wanted to create a LifeBook for a child.
In fall 2000, a local TV station contacted me and wanted to do a story. They needed shots of families and, ideally, children. I couldn't use families from my caseload, due to confidentiality restrictions. I was facing a LifeBook crisis!
I contacted a foster mother I had never met, who had signed up for a LifeBook training I was scheduled to offer. Would she come for a TV shooting and bring friends? Yes. Tomorrow? Fine. And it just so happened she was a scrapbooker.
LifeBooks Meet Scrapbooking Nola and Jerri arrived well ahead of the cameras. They had incredible adoption albums - pictures that most foster children only dream about. All of this was laid out with creative and detailed designs, on acid free paper, which would last forever. I had never seen anything like it. Any child leaving their foster home for an adoptive placement received a unique LifeBook, a gift from their hearts, to be treasured.
I provided information, advising them to include additional information about the birth parents (don't leave out that birth dad!) and the reason for placement. I encouraged them to do more writing along with the pictures, called journaling in the scrapbook world.
A team approach to LifeBooks may be the wave of the future. If foster parents can capture a few moments of the child's life, perhaps grab a picture of the birth family (regardless of the goal), then the LifeBook has begun. Social workers and/or therapists can add on to this beginning. The LifeBook can be completed by the adoptive parent. Information is shared.
I bet we all know a few Lip Smacking stories about the children who are at the heart of many caseloads. Think about making a record of those stories, and talk with foster, kinship, adoptive, and guardianship parents about them and about LifeBooks. They can make such a big difference to each child.
The template for LifeBooks concluded with a blessing page for the children. Here's one for all of us, the social workers:
A Blessing Page
May your days
Be filled with decisions
That always turn out right.
And your time
Be spent on LifeBooks
Which age just like fine wine.
Let your good intentions carry you
When the words don't
Come out right.
And give all those children memories
To treasure throughout life.
What is a LifeBook?Every Adopted Child Needs OneLip Smacking Stories
Lifebooks for Waiting Families ABOUT THE AUTHORBeth O'Malley, speaker, and author of "LifeBooks: Creating a Treasure for the Adopted Child", "My Foster Care Journey", and "For When I'm Famous: A Teen Foster/Adoption LifeBook", is a former foster baby, an adoptive parent, and has worked over 18 years as a social worker. She is married and lives on the ocean outside of Boston. She can be reached at 1.800.469.9666 or
lifebooks@earthlink.net or her Web site,
www.adoptionlifebooks.com.
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