Adoption ~ to me this word sounded heroic, beautiful, immense, and so many other things that made my heart warm inside. I remember going to the adoption information classes and the presenters trying to speak a wee bit of reality into those of us that were there. We all had our ideas already of what adoption meant to us, and we were not really able to change our perspectives much I don't think. Adoption has so many faces, so many complex layers, but a thread that seems to wind through it all is grief.
My husband and I adopted our daughter when we were twenty four and twenty five years of age and she was a year and a half. At that age she was talking in sentences. She had lived with her birth mother and in the same foster home from birth. When we moved her into our home I had not a clue of the depth of the grief and bewilderment this would cause her little heart. If only I had known. If only. I was just too blinded by myself and all I was going through and the selfish wants and needs of my own heart. I wish I could have been more understanding and aware, more motivated by attachment and empathy. I really had no clue. I am not saying I did not do my best and I did not love with all I had because I did! However I wish I would have understood her needs better ~ what was going on in her little spirit. I can't even explain it.
When earnest, eager, sincere and loving adoptive parents welcome a child into their home their motives are often driven from many many places but usually there is an element of wanting to rescue and help and feel fulfillment. These feelings often fade and are replaced with bewilderment, exhaustion, rejection or something not quite as warm and fuzzy as reality sets in. When adoptive parents welcome a new born baby, a toddler, a young child, a pre teen, a teenager ~ a child ~ into their home ~ it does not matter where their child is coming from...be it the streets, an orphanage, a foster home, another country....at the core of that child's coming is a rejection so deep and so damaging the effects of it will ripple through that child's entire life and subsequently the adoptive families as well.
Adopted children are treasures and I often hear that people are hesitant to adopt because a child may be 'special needs.' Something I often say to that is that quite frankly there is no guarantee that our birth children may be completely 'normal' whatever that means, and that yes, ALL adopted children have special needs. This is because all adopted children are coming from a place of deep rejection and trauma. They have gone through something that, if we have not gone through it, we can never quite understand.
Multiple studies now show that a child in utero is deeply attached to the one they are growing in. They react to their mother's thoughts. They share everything with their mother and when they are born they do not have a sense of self other than their mother. There is a literal time where they still think they ARE their mother and their need for her sustenance and comfort is beyond anything imaginable. When they are deprived of their mother comfort the trauma and damage (so to children who have to be in the NICU, children who are taken away from their mother's at birth or at any time really) is intensely deep. It leaves a child with a sense of rejection, or guilt, or shame, or grief, of deep loss, and the list goes on. This happens when a child looses his/her mother at any age no matter what the child's relationship with the mother has been but when they are a tiny baby there is no words ~ it is all feelings that go root deep. The deep sense of wanting their mother abides no matter what. This makes me wonder how the upcoming generation of children who are born to surrogate mothers will feel and be.
Is what I am getting at is that adoptive parents are not going to be able to heal the wounding, that gaping hole, the ache, the longing, that is left inside an adopted child when they are given up. However in many way it is to become our job as who else is there to do it? But the job is an impossible one. We are a reminder, a cause of the wound, and we will bear the brunt of it in some way, shape or form. Often we are so unprepared for it and the cruelty of the reality is brutal really. Our hearts were so kind, or so we thought, our motivations so good! How to manage this only ever perfect seemingly unfeeling child, or this wild, emotional, unstable, angry, illogical child. There is so much anxiety always!!! How do we find doors in their walls that they have built to protect themselves from ever being hurt so deeply again? How do we show this child, this one we love so deeply, that we are in it for the long haul ~ for forever!! One of the things that is always on my daughter's mind is being abandoned. She is in constant fear that I will forget her or leave her somewhere. I tell her she is stuck with me, that I will always come, and that she is in my heart, but that fear lingers and haunts. If only I could wash it away.
I wish I knew how to aid in the healing better. I feel like this adoption journey has been such a soul excavation for me. I have had to go through so many stages of grief and pain to try to uncover why I am who I am. Why I respond the way I respond. How to be who I need to be for my child when I don't understand and do not know what to do. How to deal with the rejection as it cuts so deeply. I feel like I know there is hope. I know that a sort of healing will come. I know that everyone has a journey. As a parent though ~ the wish, the deep deep desire to TAKE the pain away, to shoulder it myself as the pain and burden is too much for her to bear just tortures me sometimes, but it is always on her shoulders.
I am especially weary of it all right now. The anger that flames out from her as a result of all that is deep within, the strain on her body as the anxiety bubbles just under the surface, but I am weary in the sense that I just want her to be able to feel totally happy and free and loved. I want her to be able to feel like she is flying and there are not chains dragging her down. I do not want her to have to go through years of this. It has already been so long.
I'll keep fighting for that for her ~ for the healing ~ for our family too ~ as there are scars and wounds ~ but this battle is one like no other. I am up for it though. Do you hear me? I'll scream that from the roof tops. I am going to continue on!
And so onwards to another day.
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