YES!!! It’s finally going to be official! After years of uncertainty and waiting, we will finally be able to call our precious little girl daughter. As we plan for this day with eager anticipation, I have also been pondering what I want our friends and family to know before celebrating our child’s adoption.
Celebrating Adoption, Celebrating Love!
“I can’t wait to see how many people will come to celebrate love!” These were our child’s next words (after asking for balloons) when we first began talking about her upcoming adoption.
What did she mean by “celebrate love”? We had recently attended our friends’ adoption of their son, so she had a picture in her mind how these things worked. Imagining a gigantic party, she couldn’t wait to see how many people will come to celebrate our love for each other at her adoption!
Adoption is exciting. Especially when both parent and child have been waiting a long time for this finality. And when family and friends have been praying and cheering you on for years.
To be sure, our daughter’s upcoming adoption is certainly an event to celebrate, both for us and her. (She wants a huge party for everyone who loves her to come, and cake and balloons and music and fireworks!)
Outsiders (by whom I mean friends and even family who don’t see the daily realities of our home) cheer the positive aspects of adoption. They see us, who have lost so much, and rejoice at our finally getting a child to keep. They see a happy child thriving in our care, and rejoice that she gets to stay forever.
Yet it’s not all sunshine and flowers.
Celebrating Adoption, Ignoring Grief?
When I was young, parents who adopted children were hailed as heroes. They saved children from abortion or foster care or life in an orphanage. Children who were adopted were lucky to have a loving home.
However, as I have been learning, that’s not the whole picture. Through thoughts shared by other adoptive parents, our own experiences with foster care, and books about adoption, my perspective has broadened to see the complexity of adoption, including the joy and the pain.
Here’s what I mean:
While our little girl is as excited as we are for her adoption day, her realization of its finality has dredged up another wave of emotional processing. (I touched on this in an earlier article, Why Foster Care and Adoption Don’t Provide Perfect, Happy Endings.) Periods of extreme behaviors have arisen from places of deep sadness.
We are learning to be sensitive to this, creating a safe space to ask questions and express feelings about her biological family without taking the negative emotions personally.
We hope others will also take the time to understand these things before praising us as heroes or exclaiming how lucky our little girl is.
Things to Know Before Celebrating Adoption
All children are different, and children who remember their birth families may respond differently than children adopted from birth. Nevertheless, there is a loss that needs to be understood.
For friends and family of anyone about to adopt, please consider these realities of adoption so you can celebrate with sensitivity:
- While finalizing the adoption does give the child a forever home, in her perception, it may also sever the final thread connecting the child to her birth family.
- The adoptive parents ARE the parents, but they’re not the ONLY parents.
- The very act—the very institution—of adoption exists because of loss, whether through choice or inability to parent well. In adoption, the child and parent lose each other.
- Adopted children need others to understand that there is more to their life story than their time with the family they have joined.
- Adopted children may have mixed feelings about being adopted; they need others to allow them to express negative emotions about their family situation.
- Being adopted does not fix or erase the trauma or loss the child may have experienced beforehand.
- Adoptive parents do not replace birth parents, just like an adopted child does not replace a biological child who has died.
- When the judge pounds the gavel, parental rights are legally transferred to the adoptive parents, but the child’s heart may continue to have divided loyalties.
- Parenting an adopted child is not the same as parenting a biological child. Both parent and child may have challenging griefs and insecurities to work through.
- Adoption is not a happy ending; it is the beginning of a complex journey.
For Further Reading
If you are close to a family touched by adoption, I encourage you to learn as much as you can to better understand the needs of the family.
Much of my growing understanding of the complexity of adoption comes from author Sherrie Eldridge, who was herself adopted and has worked extensively with other adoptees. I highly recommend her two books, Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew and 20 Things Adoptive Parents Need to Succeed. There may be newer books about adoption available, but these have resonated with me and our experiences so far.
Another excellent resource for adoptive parents and those considering adopting is Adoption Learning Partners. They offer webinars, by professionals, on many topics surrounding the needs of adopted children and their families, as well as some free downloadable materials.
There are many helpful articles available online, as well.
To Sum It Up
Adoption is a huge reason to celebrate!
Rejoice with families you know who are adopting children! However, while offering your congratulations, remember the complexities described here and be sensitive in what you say. Doing so will help the child (and adoptive parent) feel validated and understood.
And that’s what adoption is about, right? It’s about love!
So go celebrate love, the kind of love that embraces others as they are, even when it’s messy!
Embracing the Uncertainty of Parenting
In the weeks leading up to our kids adoption, there was a ton of behaviors. After years of heartbreak and loss and lots and lots of different placement, they knew they would finally get to stay forever and have a place to call home forever. But that’s a lot to process for a young child, and every day we would get calls from preschool asking us to pick one, or both, of them up because they couldn’t handle the extreme behaviors. We had friends who stopped coming around. Coworkers who got annoyed when I had to answer yet another private call about something my kid did.
To this day, there are friends who aren’t friends anymore. You can accept my children and everything that comes with them, or you can go away and not come back. My children have more baggage than most adults, and I stopped apologizing for the resulting behaviors.
I don’t understand why people expect children to be grateful for losing such an important bond.
I know a big part of us is that traditionally, as you stated, kids are considered resilient and ‘they’ll forget’, forgetting that trauma alters the brain.
Anne, thank you so much for your perspective. I wish we lived closer to be able to talk more frequently. It is easy to expect children to be grateful for a safer home when you think in terms of “good parent vs. bad parent.” But when you consider the human side of relationships, it is a lot more complex. And maybe only those involved start to see this. I think parents who adopt children who have been through foster care need more understanding and support than I ever dreamed going in to it!
I wish no one questioned the degree of love for adopted vs. biological children.
You made some great points about the grief involved. I want those around Dominick to respect all parts of his life. My goal is not for him to forget his past but to be able to use his experiences to help others.
Something that really bothered me about the process is that they create a new birth certificate with my name on it. I felt wrong, like it altered his access to his history because it makes it appear that I gave birth to him in the hospital. I also don’t celebrate his adoption day annually (we did celebrate the actual event) for the reasons you mentioned. I am happy to celebrate the day when he gets older if that’s something he wants to do, but I hope people understand that we don’t celebrate every year because I don’t want to make him feel that he needs to celebrate something that was also a loss for him.
Marley, it has also bothered me about changing the birth certificate. Especially for our child who knows some of her history and has contact with other family members. I think it is wise to follow the child’s lead in deciding whether or not to celebrate the anniversary of the adoption date. I am glad your son has you to walk this journey with him!
From my friend Gay Gillespie: Excellent post! Lots of good information for those considering adoption. When we adopted two of our children (we have 5 total, 3 are birth children), we were a bit naive about the grief and loss process since we adopted at birth. There definitely is still trauma involved even if you adopt fresh out of the hospital.
We had an added layer in that ours we’re transracial. That has brought up issues of belonging and identity. I’m reading a book right now called” In Their Own Voices” by Rita Simon and Rhonda Roorda. It is excellent and has opened up opportunities to discuss race issues. I highly recommend it.
Thank you Laura and Gay! It is a lot easier to see the trauma involved in adoption from foster care than adoption from birth, but I am learning that it is real. So far we have only had Caucasian foster children in our home, but we have talked about what it would be like to foster or adopt children of other backgrounds. I realize that more is needed than simply giving a child a safe and loving home. Thank you for the book recommendation!