Thoughts on telling children the truth about their parentage

[phyrelight83]

First of all, I want warn you guys that I’m gonna get on a soap box and rant about a very serious real world subject. I don’t care if no one can relate and I end up talking to the wind, but I feel very strongly about it. I at least truly hope I can help change someone’s fate.

After watching “The Crocodile” a couple of times, I am very, very angry at Rumpelstiltskin for not telling Baelfire the truth about his mother. If or when Bae does learn that Milah was alive at the time that he traveled to our world, it is going to have very damaging consequences on both him and his father. My reasoning is that I know of two young men who have had the truth about their parentages hidden from them.

The first was the nephew of a childhood friend of mine. I’m going to call him Joey. My friend’s sister (at the time, 14 years old) naively slept with an adult married man and became pregnant. (Yeah, he is a real pig.) The time was the early 1990s, and we lived in a conservative area where pregnant teenage girls were almost a non-existent sight. Unfortunately, Joey’s father was already expecting a little girl (I’ll call her Sarah) with his wife. I knew at the time of his birth that Joey’s maternal grandparents were going to adopt him and be his legal guardians. A couple years after he was born, the whole family moved to a different state, and I didn’t hear much from them until the invention of Facebook. I did not know that in the meantime, Joey’s family had lead him to believe that his grandparents were his biological parents. Also, I later came to be close with Sarah and even babysat her a few times. Their father was from another country, and after being imprisoned for a few years for statutory molestation he was deported to his homeland. Sarah’s mother did tell her the truth about why her father wasn’t around and that she has a half brother. I didn’t talk to Sarah when she was younger about the mess that occurred when she was still in the womb because I wasn’t sure how her mother had handled it, but I did figure out that she knew about her brother when she told me her favorite movie was “The Parent Trap”. A few years ago when Joey and Sarah were in their late teens, Sarah found Joey on Facebook and sent him a message stating that she was his half-sister. It was a huge trauma for him, and the consequence of this deception was that he immediately felt a distrust of his grandparents and his self-worth went flying out the window. Sarah’s mom later told me that for a while he felt he didn’t have the right to exist. He was in therapy for several years which included some family counseling to straighten out the whole mess. If they had been honest about his true parentage from when he was in diapers, he never would have suffered such a shock. Now, both he and Sarah are in college, and they have become close. She also recently took an internship in the same city where his is going to school in part because she wanted to get to know him better.

The other young man I know (I’ll call him Anthony) is in a similar situation: he was adopted by his grandparents and told that they were his biological parents. His true biological parents are a couple of drug addicts who are both in and out of prison and rehab. Also, Anthony is autistic, so I can kind of understand why his grandparents chose to do what they did because they didn’t want to confuse him. At the time of his birth, his doctor didn’t know how well his brain was going to mature, and his grandmother and grandfather didn’t want to bewilder the little child. But on the other hand, deception is still deception. Anthony is now in his mid-teens, but his mind is that of a 10 year old. I no longer talk to Anthony’s family because I knew how the lie effected Joey, and Anthony’s grandparents refused to listen to my words of warning. I feel that even if he had the mind of a three year old that he would have been able to comprehend that he was raised by his grandparents and he is in a much better situation than with his biological parents.

So, I see no good result if Baelfire finds out the truth about his mother. It was a really, really, really cowardly lie on Rumpelstiltskin part. What if Milah had decided that she missed Bae and showed up on their doorstep one day? It wouldn’t have been a good scene at all because he would have been very hurt and distrustful of his father. I know that Rumpel will lose Bae again but in a very different way.

So, if you have a child that you have lead to believe to be your biological child, please tell him or her the truth before they find out from someone else and seek counseling if you feel the need for it. Or, if you know of a family where a child has been lied to about his or her true parentage, then please, please, please talk to the adoptive parents and tell them about what happened to Joey. The last thing a person needs is to find out that his or her parental figures have been lying all along.

Also, I want to say clarify that just because a child is adopted that he or she is not any less important than any other child. I believe in destiny and adopted children are meant to be part of the adoptive family as much as any biological child. He or she just came to be in a different way.

[thetrickster]

You are not talking to the wind. This is a really serious matter and should be treat very tactfully.
First of all, i completely agree with you: one shouldn’t be able to decide what a person has to know and what not. We all deserve the truth, whatever the circunstances. Although maybe what should be done is choose the correct moment to tell everything, because maybe a little child can not face up or even understand the real dimension of what s/he is hearing. Of course, beind adopted is not a crime, and makes no one less beloved, but there are different circunstances and one should act in consecuence and say the truth kindly.

On the other hand, all these thoughts are suitable for the real life in the real world. When coming to create a story, a writer chooses his/her characters to do what makes the plot advance. It is true that we as readers/audience grow fond of some characters and care about them, but being honest, the way Rumpelstiltskin behaved is the one that fits better for the storyline: he is a coward, has no corage enough to tell his son the truth. So the child thinks that only his father is alive and being afraid of him, decides to run away to a world without magic. Knowing that his mother was alived, Bae probably ran away to try to find her instead of to another world. It is tragic, and sad, but it is the way it should be “literary”.

It’s us, as real people in the real world, who have to know the difference and to act properly in our lives if a similar situation is near us. And the correct way to act is the way you ask for.

Because here, cowards have no magic to use as a crutch, and children have no magic beans to run away to Neverland.

[Author]

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