“I cannot believe how beautifully she’s adjusted,” my mother said. Most people echoed her feelings. My daughter, who arrived home two weeks before her first birthday, seemed beautifully adjusted during the day. Although she at first cried if my husband or I were not in the room, when we were in the room she would sit and play and interact with adoring friends and relatives. They marveled when she crawled or babbled. Even though eleven month-olds are supposed to crawl and babble, it still seemed like a miracle—both because we were witnessing it for the first time, and because it seemed like a verification that she was “normal”, not too traumatized.
At night it was a different story. While quite content to play with these new and interesting people, when it was time to eat or sleep my daughter wanted her “umma”—her foster mother. The desire to eat soon resolved the first issue. The second one lingered—compounded by the eight-hour time difference which made my daughter’s natural sleep time 5 am—1 pm our time and had her waking up from a brief nap and 10 pm.
My daughter, like many Korean babies, had slept with her foster mother, then on a mat near her foster mother’s bed with her foster mother laying down beside her until she was asleep. We were willing to let her sleep with us to foster her sense of security and trust that we weren’t going anywhere. (Despite our social worker’s belief that sleep problems were caused by the parents’ inability to separate from the child! –We left the crib up and showed it to her when she visited.)
For about two hours each evening for the first six weeks, my daughter would scream, “Um! Um! Um!” (“Ma! Ma! Ma!”) in a panicky voice, subsiding at last to a heartbreakingly sad one. I would hold her, my husband usually sitting with me for moral support and sometimes taking her when I really needed a break. I admit we would sometimes watch TV to distract ourselves from the sadness that was so hard to stand.
I kept repeating to Meg softly, “Umma still loves you and mommy does too. Mommy and Daddy are going to take care of you now.” One thing which heartened me was that she clung to me as she wept, instead of arching away like some babies I’d seen. I knew that her bond with her foster mother, though it caused pain now, had taught her to turn to a mother figure for comfort. That was a priceless gift this wonderful woman gave to us both.
Luckily my husband had parental leave from his company which enabled him to care for our toddler at seven am after I had been up until 5 am with our new daughter. Most adoption workers advise against sleep training for an adopted child who may fear abandonment or need to know that parents will respond to her. So I knew putting my daughter down to sleep hours before she was ready would be cruel. However, I didn’t want her to get used to playing all night. I chose to keep the lights dim and interactions relatively boring so she’d get the idea that this was sleep time.
Every night before my husband went to bed, he’d tie our daughter onto my back with our traditional Korean baby carrier, a podaegi, which is essentially a quilt with tie straps. Meg and I would walk the floors in the dark for hours. It actually was a good bonding time, and I’m somewhat nostalgic about it now.
However, I still gave my husband a dagger look when he told me not to feel bad about not being able to travel with him to pick up the next baby. “You’ll have time to bond with her all night,” he said innocently.
Please see these related blogs:
Ease Your Child’s Transition: Learn Cultural Child Care Practices
Attachment Parenting-Responding
Baby Wearing and the Adopted Toddler