Library Find - With You Always, Little Monday by Geneviève Côté

Sometimes a mama gets her fill of trains and trucks, and just wants a quiet, sweet bedtime choice. That's probably what led me to pick up With You Always, Little Monday by Geneviève Côté, during a recent trip to the library. I'm a sucker for artists like Côté, whose sketchy, smudgy bunny named Monday is adorable in a way that won't make your teeth ache. I wasn't familiar with Côté’s work before this, but low and behold, there lurking in my Google Reader queue was this interview from the outstanding blog Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast. How’s that for serendipity?

Anyway, if the cover art made me pick it up, the quote on the back clinched it for me. “Sometimes, in a quiet moment, Little Monday wonders who his mommy might be.” The storyline is basically that – Little Monday doesn’t know who his mommy is, so he asks everyone in the forest. Each friend has something uniquely wonderful about them, but no one fits the description. Finally Little Monday goes to sleep, exhausted and wondering if he’ll ever find his mommy. But then he wakes up to discover his mommy has found him – she is the rabbit in the moon. And though Little Monday’s mommy can’t be with him physically, she is watching over him from above, and she is always there in spirit.

Whoa.

As adoptive parents, we know all too well the pain of loss in our children's lives. We all face the moment when we will tell our children about their birth families. For little ones, the details may be overshadowed by the loss, the sense of longing that their birth mothers or fathers or siblings are not within reach. Open adoptions allow for contact, but in the case of international adoption, it’s not always possible to have any relationship with the birth families. This is not an easy thing for anyone to accept, and children will naturally grieve for the loved ones that they may have never known.

Enter books like Little Monday. What Côté does here is introduce a book that not only addresses the grief and loss, but also gives children the hope that their birth families are with them, that the family they have lost is watching over them and that they will never be truly alone. What an amazing reassurance this is! Little Monday embodies all the fears and longings that I know Sprout will one day grapple with, and this simple picture book will be one more way that we underscore for him that his birth family is never really lost to him.

Even if your child is not adopted, Little Monday is a sweetly powerful way for you to talk to him or her about loss. What better way to begin the healing process, and to draw closer as a family.

With You Always, Little Monday by Geneviève Côté, published by Harcourt

All ages

Source: Library

Sample quote: “And there, in the big bright moon, a rabbit was smiling at him. Little Monday rubbed his eyes. ‘Could you be my mommy?’ he called. ‘But you’re so far away, up there in the sky!’”

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