The airport. It’s such a culmination of joy, tears, expectation, and hope. I stepped off that plane with the baby girl we had spent over a year working to bring home. Hours spent fundraising, praying and endlessly filling out paperwork to bring our daughter home.
But there has been criticism too, of us – for adopting a child internationally, not domestically. For fundraising and bringing home a “disabled” child and adding a burden to our already large family. And the idea that what I have seen or experienced in Eastern European orphanages was somehow not reality. That the babies I held, touched and worked over, were somehow sensationalized or figments of my imagination. That what is happening to children in orphanages is not our problem and yet wrong on so many humanitarian levels. And I see the criticism for what it is; an attempt to detract from our human responsibility to respond to the children living in these hell holes.
She is home and now the real work begins. The first weeks are just this surreal blur of being amazed that she is finally here. She is sleeping in the bed that was empty for over a year. She’s sitting at the dining room table in the seat for “one more”. She is wearing the tiny clothes that have been hanging in wait, inside her closet.
She is HERE! And she screams a lot, and she is struggling, and we are struggling and she doesn’t fit right in.
I am asked a lot how I knew which children to adopt. And my answer is, I didn’t know and no child was a ‘perfect fit’ for our family. It doesn’t work that way. You are bringing a stranger into your home. Yes, even when you birth a child; you are in essence meeting a stranger. And this little girl, she was a stranger two months ago and now she is my daughter.
What I have learned over the years of parenting is that the fit of each child is different. The birth of my first child was a roller coaster of unimaginable heights of fear. Bailey was born with a congenital heart defect and colicky to boot. In those early newborn days, I never felt maternal or confident. In fact, most days I felt like a failure as she screamed all-the-day-long. I actually sweated as I tried to manage using a tiny stethoscope and count heartbeats between screams, while also administering cardiac meds that could seriously harm her if I screwed up a dose.
I felt like a failure as I thought about what every other mother must be feeling for their precious newborn; the I-can’t-stand-to-leave-them-one-moment-of-the-day. Because I was the opposite mom, I was the desperate, depressed and overwhelmed mom who was waiting on the front porch for the handoff to daddy. I was struggling, and that is not something I felt that I could admit out loud. I thought I was a failure because I was not feeling this rapturous newborn mom feeling that all the baby diaper commercials portrayed that I was watching at 2am, while feeding the baby that would not sleep. So, I silently suffered in my fears and inadequacies. I wish I had talked about it, because I would have heard that this can be normal, I was not a bad mother. Postpartum depression is real, and no one really talked about these things out loud.
When I became pregnant with my son, I was terrified that I would not be able to love him as much as I loved his older sister. You see, over time I came to have this intense love for my firstborn child. I had finally surfaced from the dark cloud of my depression, inadequacy and fear. Now I feared the love I had for my first born would be unmatched by another child. How could another child fit into our family? And deep inside, I was also scared to have another screaming ‘like-something-from-Lord-of-the-Rings’ baby.
So, funny thing with this every-child-fits-different thing; my son didn’t scream. In fact, he was happy and gurgled at me. And I loved him just as much as his sister. My fears about fit were unfounded.
The years brought more children through adoption, and I started to see this pattern emerge. All my children are wildly different and fit takes time. Each child, biological or adopted, that we have brought into our family has not been the ‘perfect fit’. We as humans have this need for a tidy, happy narrative; but with parenting in general you will always butt up against reality. What begins to emerge, is the idea that each child becomes grafted into your home; and this is not instantaneous and it’s not without pain and tears and sometimes very dark moments.
And with foster care and adoption, I have realized that we must quit looking at pre-adoption education and social workers to share the darker realities of attachment disorders, institutional delays, and post-adoption depression and start talking about them ourselves. I write because I will never paint a pretty, little fiction, when I know the reality is hard work and messy grace. I write because I was that new mom struggling with post partum depression, and then later post adoption depression. I was that mom who felt alone and scared to death that I had ruined my life. I write because I reached out to others who helped me through those rough few months, and they understood this journey I had embarked upon would never be easy, we just learn to strap ourselves in for the long ride.
I cannot rely on feelings because they are fickle. Compatibility with one’s children is more, much more than shared genes and the chemistry between parent and child is a complicated and changing thing. Adopted, biological, step, blood-related or otherwise is a thread of choice, and I know that I grew in love for each of my children. But I also know there have been moments that I have chosen to step into the heartache and the brokenness to love in spite of feelings. And that is where I’ve truly touched on how much God has loved me.
Our choosing Zorey, was less about our want, and mostly about her need. We knew that it would be hard, as only adopting-a-special-needs-child-who-was-placed-in-an-orphanage-at-birth can be. But what she never will be and never should be, is a burden or a project, or a piece to be fit. She was a stranger and is now our daughter. She was without a family, and is now the cherished baby sister. She was lost in a large system, and is now a perfect fit….regardless of nationality, race, ability, attachment, or blood lines. Our Zorey was made to be our #7, and we are sticking with her for the long road; because fit takes time. And we have learned to strap ourselves in for the long ride.
