Differences

This is an essay I wrote for an adoption website, which is why it has a slightly different tone than my usual writing. It's gently arguing a point and it assumes that readers don't know my family at all, unlike my friends who read my thoughts on this blog and are so consistently gentle with my heart. It is, I think, my response to comments that I have read countless times around the internet when adoption disruption comes up. The comments that say: How dare she. She WOULD NEVER "give away" a biological child.

I'm posting it here because I get emails from frightened parents struggling to attach with a child. I want them to hear, over and over, that they are not alone. That if they make it, and most of them do, they have my awe, and if they don't, I know their grief.

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My daughter threw a four-hour temper tantrum the other night from midnight until four a.m.

She wasn’t sick. She wasn’t frightened. She doesn’t suffer from night terrors. She’s generally a sound sleeper. She was angry that we put her to bed fifteen minutes early (a common consequence in our house) and she knew exactly when her displeasure would make the most impact.

I don’t say that casually. I try hard not to attribute adult motives to my children’s behavior, but I know my daughter and she knew, at a four-year-old level, what she was doing. It was a long night and I worked hard, very hard, harder than I can ever convey in black and white type, to control my irritation, to react to her from love, but with consistency and firmness.

Over three hours, I gave her several options for letting out her emotions. I gave her three warnings about disrupting the sleep of her siblings and then I removed her to a safe room on a different floor of the house with a blanket and pillow where, robbed of control over our family’s sleep, she cried for a while and fell asleep.

My boys - I have three boys - My boys do not behave this way. So what, right? Your daughter is hard? She has some emotional issues? Sounds like you deal with it all right. Thanks. I try.

What if I told you that my adopted daughter threw a four-hour tantrum? My biological boys do not behave this way. Gasp. Whisper. Awful. How could she? How could she compare them that way?

Every once in while, a conversation about my family, my amazing family with birth and adopted children about the same age, will tiptoe around the question that I think about a lot. I will see it on the tip of someone’s tongue and see them swallow it. It might be the most taboo question of adoption, certainly of families with birth and adopted children.

Is it different?

You know what? Brace yourselves because this generally isn’t allowed in polite, “PC” discussions of adoption: It is different. Parenting my adopted child is different than parenting my biological children. It is more difficult. It is more delicate. It is less intuitive. It is sometimes a struggle. Bonding with my fourteen-month-old adopted daughter was very different than bonding with my infant sons. It was much slower; it involved some difficult emotions; it required deliberate choices. Three years later, though we are definitely attached, the process is still on-going in some ways.

But, that’s not the whole answer. The problem is that the comparison “adopted to biological” is useless because it isn’t my daughter’s “adoptedness” that makes her harder for me to parent. Not at all.

The word “adopted” is merely used as an incorrect, cover-all substitute for issues that often, although not exclusively, occur in adoptive families. If I unpack the word “adopted” and call the differences by their correct names, I find that adoption is not where the difference lays.

Parenting a child with a history of institutionalization is different and often more difficult than parenting a child that has never experienced an orphanage. Parenting a child with a history of trauma is different in every way than parenting a child with no trauma history. Bonding with a child who first met you at fourteen-months-old is different from bonding with a child from conception.

There’s nothing wrong with different. Parenting a child with significant medical issues is different than parenting a child without such issues. Parenting a shy child is different from parenting an aggressive child. Parenting a fourth child is different from parenting a first child.

We do, however, need to stop dancing around this question and look the differences square in the face so that adoptive parents are prepared, educated and supported. Because there is one difference that tears families apart. Parenting an unattached child. Attachment, which is a two-way process, child to parent and parent to child, makes all the differences in successful families no matter how they came to be families.

I remember the exact moment that I knew our oldest son shouldn’t stay in our home. He was five years old and he had been home just six months. We were on hour three of a four-hour screaming tantrum. My lip was puffy and bleeding where he had unintentionally smashed his head into my face, wild with fear and rage. He lay beside me, restrained as gently as I could manage to prevent injuries.

My two eighteen-month-old children, my adopted daughter, also home with us six months, and my biological son, hid behind a chair, eyes wide and bewildered. I kept my face blank so that he wouldn’t see my anger, my fear, my dislike, as I stared at my babies crouched down and huddled together. I put out a hand to my younger son and said, “it’s all right, your brother is mad, but we’ll be all right.” I didn’t fool a single person in the room. My barely walking children didn’t believe me. I could see it in their eyes.

In my heart, right at that moment – and it was not our oldest son’s worst moment, not by far – I put them first. I wanted the fear erased from their eyes and I was willing to sacrifice my son’s needs to do it. I put him in his room and shut the door that afternoon. I walked away and played with my babies while he raged and drooled and tore his bed apart and sobbed. I knew it wasn’t what he needed. I knew that the most important thing in the world was for him to bond with parents. For him to feel safe and loved through his rage and fear and I couldn’t give it to him.

For over a week, I survived the days by keeping him separated from my younger children, and also from me, and then I looked my husband in the eye and told him that I was not, in any capacity, meeting this child’s needs. I was not prioritizing him, as a mother would, not even sometimes. I was not the mother that he needed, one devoted completely to his care, his comfort and his bonding.

I could look down the road, five, ten, twenty years and see a boy, a teen, a young man, who felt marginalized and bitter, who didn’t understand the concept of family, who had a certain amount of loathing and disdain for women. I could see, clearly and painfully, the damage my choice could do.

When someone really wants to hurt me, they’ll ask or comment that they don’t understand how my daughter can ever trust me. How she can ever know that she is a part of our family forever after “what we did,” in disrupting our adoption of our oldest son and finding a home where he was prioritized, not managed. What will you do if she is difficult? If she is rageful? If she acts out?

My daughter is difficult. She does act out. She has post-institutionalized and mild attachment disorder behaviors. She is manipulative at times. She throws the occasional four-hour tantrum in the middle of the night. Tantrums that I am able to support her through, with (mostly) patience and consistency. We set calm and careful limits and enforce them with love.

The difference is that we are bonded. She is attached to us and we are attached to her. Her needs are equally important to me as those of my other children. It wasn’t always easy getting there, but it was worth it.

That is the difference that attachment makes. Attached children and parents make it. Parents finding their way through the attachment process need support and understanding. In those instances when significant barriers to the attachment process exist in a home, scathing condemnation of the family for not viewing their adopted child “the same” misses the point. Parenting an unattached child is not the same. Parent and child relationships that don’t attach aren’t necessarily the best choice for anyone involved and that is why, in some cases, adoption is not forever.