Then You Really Might Know What It's Like

God forbid, you ever had to walk a mile in her shoes
'Cause then you really might know what it's like to have to choose.*


Adoption disruption hit the mainstream media last week. If you missed it, public attention soared when Matt Lauer interviewed An.ita T., a woman who wrote about the termination of her family's adoption of a little boy and the child's placement with a second family.

At first, I was outraged by the sound-bitiness of it all. "Woman adopted a child...(duh, dun, dun)...and gave him up." The interview was surfacy and clipped and frustrating. I gnashed my teeth and whined and whinged: It's so much more complicated than this. This is about families, real people, the child's needs and the parents' abilities, deep emotions, heart-breaking decisions, attachment and bonding, psychological damage. The hyped, sensationalized, mass media marketing, get-as-many-hits-on-the-today-show-site-as-they-can approach killed me.

I took a deep breath and read the blog post by Natalie Morales. Her first sentence comforted and impressed me: "As horrible as that headline sounds, you realize how just complicated the situation was and how agonizing the decision to give up little “D” was when you read Anita's own account. It’s a piece that will bring you to tears." The tenor of the entire post was balanced. The comments predictably reflected both compassion and outrage - sometimes vicious outrage - and though the negative comments hurt, because I've received them too, I can't call them unjustified.

Anita's original New York Times blogpost describing the disruption is moving. I identified with her struggle and her pain. I also saw (through the perfect lens of hindsight) many of the mistakes and naive assumptions that Matt and I made reflected in her mistakes.

I found myself not liking the facts of An.ita's story, trying to distinguish our situation, our family, our disruption, from Ani.ta's and I had to stop and force myself to take a good long look in the computer. We are fundamentally the same. We both adopted a child with our hearts in the right place, fully intending to make that child a part of our family forever, we both found ourselves in a place, as a parent and a person, that we couldn't handle, facing behaviors with which we couldn't cope and emotions that we knew weren't right and we both chose to find a family that better met our child's needs. We both disrupted adoptions. Same-same.

Why did it hurt so much to feel "like her." Because some people were nasty about her character, her choices and her behavior? I've written publicly about our disruption and received similar caustic criticisms. Because I'm embarrassed that I get to hide behind my relative anonymity? Because people felt it was wrong of her to write about this issue - they felt she sought only sympathy and possibly monetary gain? That made me cringe. After consideration, I strongly disagree. This is a discussion that the adoption community needs to have. I have felt for a long time that it is important to talk about the possible attachment difficulties in after-infancy adoption and all types of outcomes. I thought my motives were education, shedding some light on a difficult, painful and often hidden adoption issue. Were they? Would they be seen that way?

I guess I (mostly, okay, usually) don't care. I don't care because I receive emails from mothers living the hell of a difficult attachment and I receive emails from mothers living the hell of guilt and shame and loss after disruption and I receive emails from mothers who made it through and just appreciate communicating with someone who knows how bleak it can be in the middle. I'll leave my story "up" for them.

Reading all of the comments on Ani.ta's essay, whether uplifting, understanding, compassionate, confused, vicious, incredulous, or painfully, pointedly accusatory, was a difficult journey for me. I gratefully, but necessarily, dismissed the top 25% "good" comments that called her brave and selfless. While I understand and appreciate that sentiment and the compassion from which it springs, it isn't brave or selfless to find your family in a crisis situation of your own making and to do your best to find a solution that meets everyone's needs. It's life. I dismissed the bottom 25% "bad" comments that called her horrible names.

In the middle was an intelligent, fairly compassionate discussion of the fact that adoption doesn't always go perfectly, parenting doesn't always go perfectly, life seldom goes perfectly and what we do, how we cope, how we move forward when we find ourselves in a situation that we simply can not handle. For whatever reason. No matter how many mistakes we made or how much naivety we showed or how many stupid choices we chose on our way to that place.

After some tears, some anger, some soul-searching, I'm left feeling secure, but sad. Sad and at a loss because, as with any difficult, painful issue, either people will listen with an open heart and try to understand the complexities of the situation, or people will judge with a closed mind. Listening with an open heart doesn't mean agreeing with a person's choices, it only means recognizing the humanity in their actions and in their decisions.

I'm also left with thoughts and responses to some of the comments, some heartfelt and thoughtful, some knee-jerk and bitter, swirling and plaguing and clogging and sifting and battering at my brain. I'm putting them here, for me, so that I can lay them down and sleep better, but also for those mothers, those parents, who write to me, and finally for Ani.ta.

"How could you do this? Children aren't puppies, they aren't exchangeable!" Of course they aren't. That's cute and all and it makes you look very justifiably outraged. It's a nice sound bite. It's clever PR. But that's all it is. Of course they aren't. No one thinks they are. Not the parents who adopt and disrupt, not the second family, not the professionals involved...NO ONE thinks they are. Of all the unhelpful, asinine comments this one plagues me the most. Whatever you think of me, or An.ita, or any other family facing the horrible reality that their family is floundering and they aren't bonding with an adopted child, you can rest assured that no one thinks this. No family adopts a child thinking that they can take them back to a store, or turn them in on a shinier model. A family hits crisis mode, they talk to counselors, they agonize and cry and berate themselves and try again and hit crisis mode again and talk to professionals again and then they go through a long, well thought out, professional placement process. I would venture to guess that children caught up in bitter, difficult divorces are tossed from place to place far more casually and with far less scrutiny than a family disrupting an unattached adoption. (That statement is in no way meant to be judgmental of anyone dealing with the reality of divorce, it's only meant to make the point that there are other catastrophic family circumstances that aren't ideal for children and perhaps holding adoptive parents to a standard of perfection is unrealistic.)

You would never give away a biological child that "wasn't bonding." This misses the whole point. It isn't about biological children versus adoptive children. It is about unattached families and children versus attached families and children. You are right, no one would consider placing their child, biological or adopted, with another family if a strong parental-child attachment has formed. Whether people want to understand it or not, whether people want to admit it or not, whether we talk about it or not, whether it hurts or not, in many cases attachment (at least with a child past infancy) is difficult. It isn't always the case that a one-year-old or a five-year-old with history and trauma and ingrained behaviors walks into your home and you fall down on your knees and feel an immediate, incredible unbreakable bond to the child. Attachment takes time. It takes work. It goes both ways. The parent must attach to the child and the child must attach to the parent. When there are significant barriers it is even harder. Many children who have spent time in institutions or have experienced early neglect or trauma have psychological barriers to attachment. In addition, some families and children have dynamics that create barriers. For instance, in our case, my focus on protecting smaller children in my home from negative attachment related jealousy and acting out prevented me from bonding with our older child.

Unattached children are not happy children. Families that aren't bonding are families in crisis. There are ways of healing - therapy, hard work. But sometimes, it's not enough. And when it's not enough it can be in the best interest of the child to find a family where some of the barriers are removed. It can be in the best interest of the child.

All adopted children fear is abandonment and now you've abandoned them a second time. It's a painful fact. Adopted children have been abandoned once. There is no getting around it. I disagree that abandonment is all they fear or even that it is their greatest fear, especially older adopted children. They fear attaching to another person who might hurt them or abandon them. That resistance to attachment can be brutal, emotionally grueling, physically dangerous. Some families, for different reasons, can't cope. They can't break through. It is better in some cases for a child that is not attaching to be removed and placed in a family with more resources, emotional or otherwise, than to grow up unattached.

You are selfish. Maybe. We tried not to be. We tried hard to understand how to balance everyone's needs. But yes, our family wasn't functioning and we found a way to make things better that we hoped met all needs, including our son and our other children and ourselves.

How dare you quit when things got hard, did you think everything would be perfect? No. We didn't. We thought it would be really hard. We read about attachment and attachment disorders. We failed. We failed our son because we failed to understand how it would feel to have to deal with attachment related behaviors and parent younger children. We were naive and foolish and we fucked up. We should not have adopted out of birth order and we should certainly not have adopted an older, traumatized boy. But, we did. And we owned it and we talked to everyone we could and we read everything we could and we made a decision that we felt, therapists felt and his second family felt was the best for him, under the circumstances. We put him in those circumstances, no question. And there are legitimate questions about whether that was good or bad for him. Life in Haiti after 16 years in an orphanage is no picnic. I won't say it was unequivocally good for him, but I won't say it was the worst thing that could have possibly happened to him either.

What will you tell your other children? How will your daughter ever trust you? I will tell all of my children, and especially my daughter, the truth. The same thing I would have told her if we had adopted her alone. Love is rarely instant. It takes time. I thought her picture was beautiful. We wanted her so much. We love her so much, so equally, so fully, it takes my breath and makes me feel endlessly lucky. I'm honored to be her mother. But, we had to attach, us to her and her to us and it was a process. I wondered if she would ever stop going to other adults for comfort. I wondered if I would ever stop doubting my heart. I have and she has. We are a forever family.

I will tell her never to imagine that love is easy. I'm sorry she lost that first and more effortless (but not always instant) bond, the one that starts in the womb. That is a loss, a loss to grieve. I'm sorry we had to find our way to love a different way, over months, through rocking and eye contact and rules about others holding her. I won't make excuses for it. It was. We did the work. We're there. Things stood between our older son and I and prevented it from happening. I'm sorry for that too. He found a mommy that didn't have other babies to make him jealous to do the work with him.

Will you tell your children that there is no limit to the amount of pain and anguish a family member can cause others? Will you encourage them to stay in relationships that are emotionally or physically damaging to them? I hope when the time comes to talk to my daughter fully about our history, that she will understand that our goal was to find a solution that let everyone grow up in a safe and emotionally healthy home, without fear and with unconditional love.

I know Anita and her family made some missteps. I know with 20/20 hindsight, it seems obvious she was getting in over her head. I know our story looks the same. My heart is with Anita as she bears the brunt of public opinion, especially uninformed public opinion. I often felt like a monster while I tried to parent our son. I felt like my anger in response to his behavior was monstrous. I felt like my inability to put him before my other children was monstrous. I felt like my rage in the face of his rage was monstrous. My inability to love no matter what was monstrous. I know people thought it when we disrupted our adoption and placed our son with another family. Monsters. Who does that?

We did and we aren't monsters. Monsters feel rage towards a child and lash out, they don't sit on the front porch and cry. Monsters realize they aren't meeting a child's needs and do nothing, out of shame, or embarrassment or stubbornness. Monsters blame the child, make him a scapegoat. We did none of those things. We sought help, we learned, we found a safe and loving solution and we changed a situation that was not working. We are parents. Parents are human.

*With thanks to Everlast.