Well I am still here, just barely:). A couple of years ago, I wrote an
article for a professional newsletter about adoption and shared it here on my beloved blog. I got a wonderful response. I was asked to write a follow up recently and learned a lot in the process of writing the follow up. I am not sure if anyone is really here reading anymore, but if so, I wanted to share here. This has really started me on a journey of wanting to write more about adoption. I am amazed at how much fear, anxiety and ignorance is out there around the topic of adoption. Maybe I will be back here writing some thoughts out and hoping some of you will still be around to read them. In the meantime, here is the article I wrote. Happy reading!
Quieting the Adoption Ghosts: A Personal and
Professional View
By: Faith
Eidson, LCSW, IMH-E® (IV)
It has been two years since I wrote “Adoption Ghosts,” and I
found it challenging to think about writing a follow-up to that piece. In that article (MIAIMH Infant
Crier, Winter 2012), I described how I came to adopt my son, Jackson, now three
years old, and how he came to me. I
also described ways in which our story of adoption impacted our developing relationship. As I prepared to write again, I found that
I kept asking myself “Who am I?” and “Who is Jackson?” and “What does this all
mean?” In asking these questions,
I realized I was stuck. I don’t
know the answers to any one of these questions. It is hard to write about something that feels unknown and
undefined. After careful thought,
what did become clear was my own process of exploring the unknown, and how
different I feel now in the process than when I wrote that piece. I also stumbled upon some
fascinating and, I think, key themes in my own development as a parent that
seemed to parallel the development of so many of us in the infant mental health
field.
Who is Jackson?
Jackson is a bright, charming, artistic, observant and
sensitive three-and-a-half year old boy.
He has the chubbiest cheeks that are so fun to kiss and he loves to
laugh and make people laugh. He
adores his family, plays confidently with his sister, impresses his preschool
teachers and draws any stranger to him when we are out in the community. He has been drawing people’s attention
and compliments since the day he was born.
We adopted Jackson when he was five days old. He has a birth father, whom I will call
Tony, and a birth mother, whom I will call Molly, who will forever impact who
he is in a multitude of ways. What we remember of Tony (he stepped out of
Jackson’s life when Jackson was one year old and we have not heard from him
since) is that he is kind, empathic, athletic and a gentle soul. He also tends to see things as “black
or white” and shows little flexibility in many areas of his life. He loves sports and he enjoys
doing puzzles in his spare time.
What we know of Molly is that she has a troubled past and has made some
unhealthy choices, but that she also is a compassionate and kind person. She is gorgeous, and she seems to
have a magnetic quality to her.
Molly has an artistic side and is creative and currently runs her own
business in fashion. She can
tolerate seeing multiple perspectives and she can think outside of the box and
take risks. Both Molly and Tony are extremely intelligent and resourceful. From the first time we spoke with them,
we liked them a lot and felt drawn to them.
Who am I?
I am the kind of person who likes to understand things, to
master them. I enjoy exploring my
inner self, and I have immersed myself in a field that allows me to help others
on their path to understanding. I
am the mom of two children, born only six months apart. I am the wife to my high school
sweetheart. I am a giver, and I
seek connection with everyone. I
am also a therapist, supervisor, trainer and consultant. I am these things, and so much
more.
What does this all
mean?
That’s a good question! As an adoptive parent, we spend months or years wondering
who our child will be. We often
don’t know race, gender, biological history, or even when or how our child will
be born. We are asked to
preference categories (do you prefer a white baby or a biracial baby, what
medical needs are you willing to accept, boy or girl, mental health diagnoses
of biological family that are acceptable?), and it seems to be a desperate
attempt to contain the uncontainable; to define what our future child will be,
which is futile. In the excruciating
months of waiting, I did a lot of wondering and attempting to master the things
I could master. I read
books, blogs, articles, really anything I could get my hands on, that were written
by adoptive parents, birth parents and adoptees. I began to talk about the kind of adoptive parent I was
going to be and what kind of relationships I was going to strive to have with
my child and with his or her birth parents. Then we found out I was pregnant. Then we learned that Tony and Molly had chosen us to adopt
their baby, due in two months and predicted to be a girl. I began a new line of planning: we will
have this kind of relationship with
Tony and Molly, we will do these
things with our baby, we will send these
mementos to Tony and Molly - you get the idea. I had images of this baby and who she would be,
melding versions of Tony, Molly, my husband and myself into one picture. Then our dreamed about baby was born,
and in that moment of learning that he was a boy, I believe something shifted within me. It was the beginning of the development
of a more complicated “me” that I am not through exploring or
understanding. I have noticed this
shift both in parenting and in my professional realm.
When I wrote “Adoption Ghosts,” I was describing my process
of “making sense” of things as Jackson’s mom and in my narrower role as his
adoptive mom. As I write today, it
seems I am in a different process of accepting that there is no “right” way to
make sense of any of my observations of and interactions with my son. His sensitivity and “slow to warm” personality could be a
genetic marker from Tony or it could be that his experiences as our first child
led him this way, or it could be a mixture of those two things and many other
unknown factors. When he gets
angry and pushes me away, I could analyze it, as I did in the previous article,
and worry myself into a frenzy that he is re-experiencing his early days of
life…or I could wonder about his development, e.g., the normality of an 18 month
old to get angry at mommy when she leaves him in a contained area, the
difficulty of a toddler at his age to calm himself quickly, and the expected ambivalence
he is beginning to experience in his relationship with mommy. When he shows a particular skill, such
as putting together puzzles, I could attribute this to his biological father
enjoying and excelling at puzzles or I could wonder if he learned to love them
because we provided so many opportunities for him to enjoy them or I might hope
that he has already begun to internalize his mommy’s intense persistence at
tasks until mastery is accomplished.
Since child development is not linear, it is not possible to ever really
know what makes them the way that they are. As parents, and as therapists, we take guesses. We follow threads back and try to
figure out where they began. In
figuring out where they began, we can avoid feeling as overwhelmed by these “threads”
of emotions, beliefs and behaviors that inevitably become tangled within
relationships and begin to look messy.
The problem is, even when we have it “figured out,” there is no way to
know if we are right. As
professionals, we talk about our ideas so assuredly, as if our clinical
hypotheses are reality. As
parents, we often talk about our children’s traits as if we can see a causal
link between daddy’s years playing basketball in high school and his daughter’s
love for basketball: “She gets that from her daddy.” It makes us feel like at least some things are
predictable. What I am learning is
that they aren’t actually predictable, and when we expect them to be, we might
become disappointed.
Since bringing Jackson home, I have noticed a shift from
needing to know and understand (and conquer) to allowing myself to entertain
and explore. In the end, does it
matter why Jackson has a difficult time saying goodbye or why he seems
particularly drawn to art?
Even if I made guesses, the answers would be just that: guesses. There is no way to ever prove my hunches. He is who he is. Whether he gets his incredible charm
from Tony or Molly or my husband or me, it doesn’t matter. I just love it. Whether his anger boils over and he
reminds me of myself at times and also triggers my worry related to his
biological family history of mental illness, it doesn’t actually matter in that
moment. I still have to figure out
a way to respond appropriately and to support him through it. To do that, I have to be right
with him in those moments. If I
allowed my head to go to analyzing in the midst of those interactions (my
common response to fear) then I would leave him behind, which is exactly what I
would never want to do. It is incredibly freeing to realize that
I can’t know these things, and therefore don’t need to search for the answers. I
can just be me. I can just be his
mom; and he can just be Jackson, my sweet baby boy. We can live in the moment together. This is not to say that
the many threads that weave together to make us unique are not worth
exploring. They absolutely
are. When we pick a thread of
ourselves, study it, feel it, notice where it is damaged and frayed and then
notice where it glimmers in the light, we know our whole selves a little bit
more. When we do this for our children, or for the children and caregivers we
serve, we help them to know themselves a little bit more. The danger lies in moving from observing,
noticing, exploring and wondering to knowing and doing, and then getting stuck
there. I
have especially noticed this tendency in adoptive parents. We can become so focused on the
adoption thread, that other threads seem to fade into the background: the child’s temperament, our own
histories and personalities, environmental influences since their birth or
placement with us, and many other pieces that come together to make our
children who they are and make our relationships what they end up being. It can be tempting to look for and find
the adoption strand in many interactions with our children. While it is important to hold the
adoption theme in mind, it is also important to hold our minds and hearts open
to exploring other important pieces of the whole picture.
As I experience this shift in thinking, I can’t help but
notice the parallel to our work with children and families. There is a development of the
professional that starts with an intense need to “know,” to convince others of
our “knowing” and then to fix what it is we think we know. In our beautiful field of infant mental
health, we talk about the importance of just “being with,” but I know I
struggled with this concept for years.
I still do, if I am being honest.
However, my experience in adopting my son and entering a world that was
so foreign to me - only to be led down a path of unknowns towards my son, who
is perfect just the way he is, has given me the gift of learning what it really
means to “be with.” Similarly,
it is possible for clinicians to become so focused on one piece of the story,
that other pieces of the story seem to disappear – it can be a parent’s or
child’s trauma history, particular ghosts that appear in the story, and/or the
interactions in the present that seem particularly problematic, even critical,
needs for focus and response. While
we are so focused on seeing and fixing this one important piece, we fail to notice
others, such as beautiful moments of connection between the parent and child,
particular strengths the parent has demonstrated despite their traumatic
history, or possibly our own history and how it has become intertwined with the
family’s story. What I have learned to practice and promote as an infant mental
health specialist and mentor is no less important in my life as a mommy.
So, can I do this? A
reflection…
Adoption is a leap of faith. Some might argue that adoption is a slightly larger leap
than is made when having children through birth, due to all of the unknowns
that accompany an adoption situation.
Adoptive parents spend so much time before actually receiving our child
trying to wrap our brains and hearts around who will soon come to us and how we
will manage it. Then the baby (if the child is placed during infancy)
is placed in our arms and what we worried about before that seems
inconsequential when compared to the “bigness” of that moment. Isn’t that how attachment begins? It is this intense desire to know
another, and along the way we learn to know ourselves a little more deeply. Jackson came with all of his
systems ready to attach. How could
I not fall in love? Even if it did
not happen immediately, that was ok. Writing now, I have the benefit of time with him. With enough time, our relationship has
had opportunities to wrestle with rupture and to be strengthened by
repair. Within all of those hard
moments, those awe inspiring moments, and those ordinary-every-day moments, we
learned that we are ok together.
We are confident in who we are within ourselves and who we are to each
other. Sure, there will be more to
come. I could worry about how he
will come to understand his story as he grows older or how I will find the
right words (because if I use the right words, it will hurt less, right?) to explain
to him how he came to us. However,
when I feel my heart going down that road, I remind myself of our solid
relationship and our intense love for each other right now. Similarly, I
wonder if that might be the gift we bring to the families we meet professionally
and have the opportunity to be with and know? We see them in this moment, and we feel tenderness for them
in this moment. We may not love what
came before this moment and who knows what will come after it. But when I sit here, in your kitchen,
and we talk about the kind of mom you want to be for your baby, I am holding
you and caring for you. So maybe
this concept of “holding” that Winnicott so beautifully gave us has an anchor
in being present in the moment.
With this concept as anchor, every step taken forward into tomorrow is
taken together. Our todays and
tomorrows become intertwined, even after we leave those relationships. Our time
together will always have “happened.” Maybe that is
what I find so comforting and so grounding about my relationship with Jackson –
the past three-and-a-half years of loving and liking (and sometimes not
liking!) each other will always have happened. Our paths toward the future are forever united. Why would I ever want to untangle that
and try to analyze what makes him him? Or what makes us us? He will show me what I need to
know, when I need to know it, if I can only stay present and pay
attention.
I can do that.