Do be careful, KD, and don't just assume he'll learn how it all fits together. He needs to be told. It gets very confusing and we make stuff up to make it all fit as children but don't necessarily get it straightened out in our insides if we're not given a true map spelling it out.

I knew my mother died but I did not remember her and had no connection to my life with her, my first three years. My head was divided up into three parts; the missing chunk when my mother was alive; the year and a half when she was dying/dead and it was just my father, brothers and I; and after "we" got married to my stepmother. My T was struck by my speech when I first saw her in my late 20's because I literally talked about when "we" got married in 1955. Some things we create as children can't get corrected unless they are by someone older who knows the real story! At the time, "we" did get married; my stepmother, until her dying day, talked about how she "got" my brothers and I, instant family, etc.

No one ever taught me to separate out and put my life in correct order and my "vision" of myself and life was always that of a child of that age. It literally took nearly 30 years to get my life to make sense. I was very lucky because my father's sister was there when I was 2 and 3 and knew that portion of my life and could tell me stories about it, etc. so I could reclaim that chunk and re-experience myself, listen to the stories and know they were "me" and have my insides recognize them even though I didn't have any memory of them.

When I told my stories to my T about the period between when my mother was dying/died and my father and stepmother met, that covered two summers and my T was saying how jumbled they sounded; I couldn't tell when things happened in the correct order because I was so young and there were different feelings, and happenings and facts I knew and they didn't fit together coherently because at the time they were "learned"/experienced, I wasn't mature enough to see them like an older child would and get them in order, etc. It took my T and I over two years, alone, to separate my mother from my stepmother; I had merged them.

My stepsister's children (she's 13 years older than I) were never quite told the whole story either and my niece (now in her 40s') and I recently were sharing what we thought, she had all sorts of weird ideas and misunderstandings because she'd tried to figure out my stepsister's dead father and my father, etc. as children do, putting it together the best she could. We were laughing about what she had "thought" but even in her 40's she still had questions I helped her by answering.

I've dreamed about my stepsister's father and grandfather! I never met her father and only met her grandfather a couple times when my stepmother first "got" me and had to take me everywhere with her as I was so young, and would take me to her previous in-laws, etc. None of that was explained very well to me at that age, I wouldn't have cared/understood anyway, but that doesn't mean I didn't try to incorporate those people into my life/story! LOL I'd look at pictures of my stepsister, stepmother and her first husband (who died about the time my mother did) in Germany, before I was even born, and I'd look at the pictures and wonder where I was, why I was not in any of the pictures!

Children's stories are age-appropriate and can be wonderful but they're not "correct" and are also like icebergs in that a lot of other thoughts and "memories" are happening below where they can't be seen. Every now and then point out the facts the way they actually are so questions and misinterpretations can be raised and "fixed" as it all could influence how your little guy feels about himself and his world later on when it might not be possible for you to correct. Other people aren't always kind and if he says something inconsistent, they may notice and ridicule him in such a way he thinks it's his fault or that there's something wrong with him and his thinking/memory, etc. If some "stories" work too well for him, he may make them up willy-nilly and/or his imagination wander too far afield (like mine did) because it is so good.