I recently read an article on social media written by a first mother sketching out the story of how she came to re-adopt the daughter she placed for adoption eighteen years earlier. For those of us in the adoption sphere it’s a fascinating and bizarre tale. I won’t attempt to recap it; if you haven’t read it already find it here.
As you can imagine, it has inspired a good deal of conversation. Judgment flies in all directions, speculation regarding all of the “issues” that may exist behind the scenes is rampant, but one thing that is interesting to me is that there is no explicit moral to the tale. The writer doesn’t attempt to draw the story to a conclusion. As one commentator has said, “What’s the takeaway here?”
As an adoptive parent, something that I have tried to keep in mind (more successfully than some others) is that tough times are going to come. A little preparation is prudent.
I work as an operator in an oil refinery in Alberta, Canada. The majority of my job is quite routine, doing water tests in my little lab, walking around reading gauges and writing down numbers, watching squiggily lines on a computer screen. But sometimes things go really sideways. I have some anxiety issues that I manage, and when I was new to this job I found that part really difficult. Even when things were completely fine I would sometimes find myself soaking in sweat, waiting for a bomb to go off. I was not convinced, in spite of really excellent training, that I would know what to do in an emergency. The two things that made the most significant difference for me were experience and rehearsal. The experience part isn’t something that I had much control over, other than to keep showing up even when it was excruciating, and to tell myself that I didn’t need to know what was going to happen in the future. I just needed to meet the challenge of each day as it presented itself.
The other strategy, rehearsal, was something that I did when I was experiencing irrational fear. I called it answering the question. I would take the situation that was causing the panic and make a plan to deal with it. I would walk through my plant, looking at the valves that I would open and close, making sure that I knew exactly where each one was and what order I would do things in.
And sometimes, bad things happened. When they did, my training and rehearsal were sufficient for me to gain the experience necessary to convince myself that I would know what to do.
As an adoptive parent I know that tough things are going to happen. I fully expect my kids to use their adoptions or birth parents as weapons against me. At some point in a hormone-fueled rage of teenaged angst I anticipate such classic phrases as “You aren’t my dad” or “My bio-family wouldn’t…” And honestly, I’m not worried about it. Because it won’t be a surprise.
I am convinced that at least some surprises overtake adoptive parents because of a naivety about adoption as a whole. This leads into a larger conversation about the inherent loss that adoptees and first families experience. Suffice it to say that you can’t be prepared for things of which you are ignorant. And I started this journey very ignorant. I wish I had known more, but for many of us the saying was true that “we didn’t even know what we didn’t know.” However, the saying “when we know better we do better” is also true. If the adoptive parent side of the adoption triad is going to do its part, continuing education and exposure to the stories of first families and adoptees are vital to removing our ignorance. I don’t think that I could love my kids more deeply but I can love them better when I know them better, and that includes knowing about and acknowledging their loss, not minimizing or ignoring it.
I have no idea what issues arose in the family whose story triggered this conversation. But a storm did come and they were unable to weather it.
Do what it takes to get prepared. Expect to be rejected. Expect to be pushed away. Expect things to be complicated.
Who cares. Love anyway.
– Shawn
