What's in a Name?

Today Sweetpea and I took to the love nest after lunch to have a little discussion. She soon found the discussion not to her liking but stayed with it all the same. We talked about her adoption into our family. She continues to insist that she is waiting to return to Singapore. We talked about some of the hard details surrounding that hope. She did not seem to want to comprehend them. I decided to try and talk to her about names, the fact that she has many names. She is disconnected from most of her life story, perhaps as a defense mechanism, and does not acknowledge her adoption into her first family but does differentiate between the biological offspring and herself in that family. I told her that when she becomes a part of our family through adoption she will have our last name. She then made a comment about the first family wanting to take the name back. Then I talked to her about the idea of having a new first name and she got agitated for a moment and blurted out "What! They take that back too? They give it to a new girl in their family?" My heart sank, she really was wounded by their replacement of her with a new daughter, a more perfect daughter in their eyes.

I quickly assured her that they could not take those things away from her. I wanted to get out of this detoured conversation and back into something I felt I could handle wisely. I asked her for suggestions on names that she would like to consider changing to IF she were to ever consider that an option. She came up with some silly ones and then settled on "Singa-rella" her cute version of Cinderella. So we closed the chat with my asking if she were to be called Singa-rella would then Singa-rella want to be tickled. Singa-rella certainly did!