Too young? Naw
Jul 24, 2006 Adoption
There are people surfing in here from four conversations on various adoption discussion boards. (I can see it in my stats.) And of course when I see a bunch of people coming in from a particular url, I go see what the heck is going on so I’ve been reading the responses (and in one case participated in the thread). I wanted to address some of the thoughts that have come up on the threads without “outing” anyone in particular. (In other words, I’m not flaming people’s differing opinions but just thought they were good enough general criticisms to warrant a general response.)
Criticism #1. Madison is too young to have expressed any primal wound-ish feelings; I must be projecting.
Could be. Then again most of the people reading this haven’t met Madison (not to say that if they had they’d agree with my assessment just to say that their disagreement would be rooted in more actual information). There is a lot of interesting research about infant memory and the general consensus is that babies remember but what they remember and how long they remember is hard to say. Was I projecting? Well, that was my worry but history has shown me that when I guess wrong with my kids (”I know it’s hard to leave Grandma’s house…” “Not Grandma! I’m hungry!”) they let me know. It was the change in her expression and tone that convinced me I got it right. And I don’t think she’s too young to express grief — in fact I think her age is one of the reasons it came out. She’s closer to remembering and she’s got language to discuss it (read that link and you’ll see how those two factors can play into this kind of thing).
Criticism #2. Maybe so much openness at this young an age is a mistake and too much for a toddler to handle.
This, to me, is like telling one parent in a divorce that they can’t have visitation with a child because it’s too confusing and the toddler cries every time her father has to leave again. The truth is (thank you wavybrains!) that a divorce happens and you try not to lie to your kids about it and you want to normalize it as soon as possible. Likewise with Maddie’s adoption.
One person said, and it’s an interesting thought, that perhaps seeing Jessica over and over again is a bit like ripping off a scab but I don’t think so. This assumes that Madison is still the infant she was when she first lost Jessica and it assumes a magical connection that overcomes all else. That’s just not true. Their relationship is nature and nurture. The nature part will always be true (the mirroring, the way they both hum when they’re busy, the way Madison is following in Jessica’s developmental footsteps) and it’s symbolic of their connection. (It’s also at the roots of the magical thinking part of primal wound and adoption reunions — it’s much more complicated than that and I think a great illustration of this is the essay by A. M. Homes about meeting her birth parents.)
The nurture part of their relationship is something they are creating together. In other words, the baby that Madison was who misses her first mom is part of the toddler-girl she is becoming but it is not all she is. Likewise, Jessica is her lost mom but is also regular old Jessica who comes over and is funny and teases and laughs a lot. Making sense of this — the duality of the nature/nurture first mom — is part of the developmental process for every adoptee whether the adoption is open or not. Maybe for children who have some kind of first parent contact this happens younger (because there is an actual person to make sense of) so my feeling is that it will save a lot of fantasy dismantling later but I could be wrong about that. (Like Madison knows who Jessica is — she doesn’t have a rarefied picture of the Woman Who Gave You Life and I think that’s a positive thing but heck, I could be wrong.)
Criticism #3. There is too much focus on Madison’s adoption in our home.
Well, this blog will give you a biased view of how much adoption-talk happens at our house because there is way more concentrated discussion here than there is in our real life. That said, adoption is also not segregated around here. All of that openness means that theoretically, there is a lot of adoption stuff going on but again that presupposes that anytime we bring up Jessica we do it in the context of “Madison’s birth mom.”
It’s like Brett’s parents — we see them a lot. They’re both retired and so they come by unexpectedly now and then. Their visits are welcome events but they’re not particularly special events. And when Gramps comes to weed (because Gramps is a treasure of an inlaw who not only weeds my garden but is slowly planting useful things where those weeds used to be) he doesn’t come as “Brett’s father and also grandfather to the children” — he’s just Gramps. There was a time when Noah was about three or four where he wanted to talk about all those family connections and then it did come up a bunch but otherwise, it’s just Gramps. Likewise Jessica is just Jessica.
That visit we had (the one that brought up all this ruckus) is the first time Madison brought up Jessica’s birth mom status to her and I think that’s significant. Her mind just made that leap from thought (”she is familiar to me somehow, she is special somehow”) to language (”I was in her uterus”). That’s a big leap.
And this leap came about not because of all of our particular adoption talk; it came up (I think) because of her toddler-interest in all things procreative. (She was playing naked in the sprinkler with her girl-cousin yesterday and she squatted down and said, “Yook! You have a booba [vulva]!” Her girl-cousin is not of the age to much care so she wanted to just play but Madison was insistent, “See? Booba!” It’s the age.) We have told her story before — that she was in Jessica’s uterus — the same way we said to Noah at the same age that he was in my uterus. That’s not an adoption thing; that speaks to our sex education positive philosophy. (Not one everyone shares but just to say it’s not adoption-centric.) Then, as I said, our friend is pregnant and again another leap for Madison. Babies really do somehow get jammed in there (we looked at an illustration after our friend left because Madison couldn’t stop talking about it). It’s not so surprising that the connections avalanched for her. But this is not an adoption story; this is Madison’s story. And as I said before, Madison is not Adopted Madison — she is Madison who was adopted. There’s a difference.
July 24th, 2006 at 6:45 pm
I’ve been following this discussion with interest because of the long-lasting emotional fallout I experienced due to my parents’ divorce. Not so much their divorce but the particular set of circumstances. Between the ages of 2-4 I lived with my mother. My pot-smoking, drifter mother. Who sent me to my grandparents’ house alone in a cab when I was 3 (that’s when they started making arrangements to take her to court for custody).
Anyway, for years and years and years I had this big hole in my life and in my heart. There are very few baby pictures of me. My mom would disappear for years from my life, only to show up high, two months late for my birthday party, with a car full of stuffed animals she got from who-knows-where.
I’m 36 and have only gotten over all of this in the past 5 years (yay therapy). It wasn’t so much my mom’s idiotic behavior that was difficult to deal with, I’d pretty much made my peace with that. It was feeling as though I didn’t exist until I was 4 years old.
It’s not a direct parallel, but what you’re writing about primal wound theory is striking a chord deep within me. One of the things that made my feelings so difficult to deal with is we never, ever talked about my life before I lived with my grandparents. There are no wedding pictures from my parents’ wedding (shotgun, of course). No birth picture of me. Maybe 6 pictures of me with my parents. And no context from my grandparents. In contrast, I think you’re handling all this openly and wonderfully.
July 25th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
You can NEVER be too open or too truthful. Questions need to be answered and feelings validated or children feel invisible. Period. Too much adoption talk? I have friends who STILL in this day and age ask me if we are going to tell our daughter she was adopted???????? I think you handled the situation with Madison beautifully and I only hope I can do as well (my daughter is almost 2 but with no birth mom around no real catalyst for those feelings. I have noticed she LOVES the book HUG because it is about a monkey looking for his mommy. I always say where’s your Mama - she points to me and we hug and then I say — whether she gets it or not - and you have a birth Mommy in China. Too much? Maybe but why not?)
DS-L
July 26th, 2006 at 3:43 am
I have to agree with Debbie.
We have little birth mother contact, but we have three photos hanging over Nat’s bed, one of each of her moms holding her as a tiny newborn and she has developed her own ritual of pointing to each before bed and having us name them: “Mama Shannon and Baby Nat, Cole-Mom and Baby Nat, Mama Rose and Baby Nat” and we say “God Bless Mama Rose and her family” first in our bedtime prayers. She knows Rose is a mother to her because we call her mama and she knows what a mother is because of our mothering her.
Lately she’s really developed a special interest in Rose and in seeing her “life book” which tells the story of how we prepared for her adoption and how Rose prepared for her birth with pictures of everyone.
She may be too young to really know what adoption or birth mean (though we are already talking vulvas and uteruses too–sharing your philosophy) but she does know what a mama is and that Rose is one of hers. And I am so glad she has that as a matter of fact, right from the start.