My husband once asked me, “How do you get enough ideas for your blog? Our kids are just not that screwed up.” (As you can probably tell, we have one of those opposites-attract, writer-mathematician sort of marriages.)
Of course, I agreed with him—our kids are doing pretty darned good. I explained (after telling him that he should read my work more often!) that I try to write a mix of informational and personal-experience blogs, and adoption was a big subject (actually three subjects: domestic infant, foster care and international adoptions—not to mention book reviews, family dynamics, and a few dozen other things).
I also attempted to explain that blogs about my own experiences were not necessarily problem-focused but focused on the adoption process, on the (comparatively few) things we experience that non-adoptive families probably don’t, or on parent-to-parent sharing of the “here’s what one parent did when my kid asked this” nature.
I think we often create problems when we go looking for them. Nevertheless, it’s always hard to draw the line between being alert for problems and minimizing legitimate ones.
My recent review of Birth is More Than Once: The Inner World of Adopted Korean Children has me wondering now about my own children’s inner world. A couple of kids in that book were adopted as infants or toddlers and still seemed to have some painful experiences.
With that in mind, I find myself asking, is my own kids’ obsession with food normal? I never really thought about it except as a personality quirk, since they didn’t come from deprived institutional or poverty-ridden settings. Maybe it could reflect a need for nurture and security.
With my daughter who was adopted at one year old, I know that we at first assumed she had a rather introverted personality—like the rest of us, I might add. But she’s so social now that we wonder if it did take her two or three years to really get over the trauma of being moved from her foster mother into a totally new world.
And how about Meg’s frequent play in preschool where she would dress up in high heels, wheel a doll stroller up to me, and politely say, “Excuse me, but I am going out to lunch and I need someone to watch my baby. Would you watch her for me?” I remember thinking, “Good grief, people will think I go out to lunch all the time and leave my kid with near-strangers.” (In reality the kid had very seldom been left with even her grandmother!)
She was so thoroughly my child at that point that I never even considered that her behavior could be related to adoption. I assumed she must be meeting friends at preschool whose mothers spent way too much time at Junior League luncheons. But could it have had to do with abandonment, with somehow thinking that her birthmother had just left her with strangers?
I don’t want to read too much into anything. Likely many events in Meg’s play are typical of all kids her age, or have been based on things she’s experienced or heard about since her adoption. For example, it was after Hurricane Katrina that she would come around with her doll, in the same dress-up clothes and very polite adult-sounding voice, and explain that their house was washed away and could she and her baby stay with us?
Some things we may never entirely figure out. I’m the sort of person who tends to overanalyze things, but even I’ve learned that often I can trust my gut when it comes to my kids.
I guess I’ll conclude this reflection as I’ve concluded some others: as adoptive parents we should be aware of how our kids’ life experiences may be factors in their feelings and behaviors. But we shouldn’t always assume that all behaviors are rooted in adoption. Our kids are first and foremost just plain kids, after all.
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