OT: Another Question for Those Who Have Adopted

I have four children by adoption but not from foster care.They were ages 3, 10, 5 and 23 months (in that order at adoption). I highly recommend older child adoption. No one wants to adopt the older children. Or the ones who have medical needs. And in my opinion, people are missing out, and no, it hasn’t been easy here either.

For those of us who feel led to our children from other countries, often NO HISTORY will ever be known. I guess call us naive or whatever, but we just went on faith for that part. As hard as it might have been for DH and I to go into this knowing we wouldn’t know anything about maternal abuses during pregnancy, genetic factors, etc. imagine how hard it is for our children.

EVERY SINGLE TIME I take one of them to a doctor, I (and our older son) are reminded of the void in their lives, of the great loss and trauma. Whether a child from adoption has been traumatized on purpose or not, there is ALWAYS TRAUMA in adoption. It is not natural for a child to not live with his or her birthparents. This alone is enough to cause deep grief in a child.

I will also just say that the fears are TOTALLY normal. I’ve BTDT with all four of our adoptions. DH too. I agree wholeheartedly they are attacks, but I also believe going into adoption with EYES WIDE OPEN is necessary. I think it is very helpful to hear REAL stories from those who’ve gone before just like have been shared here.

When we brought our two sons home, ages 10 and 5 at the time of adoption, we put MANY protections in place in our home, all but one are still in place. We had no way of knowing what our sons had beeen exposed to or even worse, and we have been very thankful to witness their innocence in many regards but we didn’t know bringing them into our home. So we made great effort to protect our children already home and our new sons as well. We did adopt out of birth order, adopted two unrelated children at the same time (with no prior history together) AND we twinned at the same time. We broke all the “rules” with our SW’s approval (it was not w/out much thought, prayer, meetings, extra coursework, etc.), and it ws HARD, HARD, HARD.

I have written extensively on this on a website that you might find useful. While it is dedicated to advocating for adoption of children from China’s special needs program, a lot of what is written there pertains to attachment issues, grief and loss in adoption, which is universal, and blending into the family.

This post in particular I wrote covers questions I’m often asked about older child adoption as well as disrupting birth order and twinning (adopting child same age or close to age of another child; ours are 4 months difference in age but were adopted 21 months apart).

http://www.nohandsbutours.com/2012/02/29/adopting-the-older-child-questions-answered/

I don’t have time to read all the other posts yet, so pardon me if I’m redundant….

We’ve adopted five times and also have five bio kids.  Two things that I tell people to keep in mind when you’re going through this process:

— Never doubt in the darkness what you’ve been given in the light.  This is a tough road, but if this is what God has called you to, do not allow Satan (who is often in disguise) to get you off track.

–You usually make the decision to have a biological child once, with adoption it is 100 decisions.  Yes, I’m going to fill out this paperwork.  Yes, I’m going to that meeting/court hearing/ support group, etc.  Yes, I’m going to go get my fingerprints taken (again) and on and on.  At every point in the process you need to make the decision to go forward, and unlike pregnancy, you can stop at any time.  It’s exhausting, much more so than pregnancy.  Do it anyway.  The rewards are wonderful and eternal.