this woman’s work

A follow up

Oct 7, 2006 Adoption

I’ve been meaning to write a follow-up to my (now infamous — at least on some message boards) Primal Wound at Our House post. (Conveniently linked for anyone who missed it.) I wanted to update it because I’ve seen positive changes since it happened and I’m hoping that people will find it encouraging instead of daunting. (I know how daunting it can look before you’re actually in it.)

So Jessica came over today and it’s been awhile since she was here because she’s been working. It’s not the first time she’s been over since that visit but it’s the first time we’ve gotten to spend more than an hour or two hanging out. Madison (and Noah) were both very excited to see her and they spent the hour before her visit hanging out in the front yard going like this every time a car went by, “Is that her? No. Is that her?? No.”

Since that fateful day, Madison has been much calmer and more open about Jessica. Not that I noticed her being particularly closed before; if we hadn’t had this moment, I likely would not have thought of her as someone particularly hemmed up about her adoption. But since that breakdown/breakout, she’s more apt to bring Jessica up and to talk about her in an everyday way. She also got interested not just in pregnancy (like a typical 2-year old) but in her pregnancy story. She got really into her photo album with her brand new Madison pictures and she wanted to hear about us meeting her and bringing her home. She wanted to hear that story pretty often. And I saw her get more comfortable with it. She brought it up with visitors the way Noah brought up his baby pictures and she could say concretely, this is how it happened.

I also noticed Jessica get more comfortable and more confident since I told her about it all, which has been gratifying.

Anyway, today at the visit they were looking at the picture of Madison that Jessica has on her keychain (it’s one of the pictures they took in the hospital) and Madison says, “Hey, why you put that thing on my belly button?”

I realized she was talking about the clampy thing the hospital put on her umbilical cord. She was confused because she knows the cord connects a baby to its mama and she can see in a couple of her hospital pictures that there’s this plastic thing stuck on there. So we got out the photo album and explained that the cord was what connected Madison (and here Jessica did a neat little riff about why the cord connects the baby and what kinds of foods she craved and how Madison would kick “because you didn’t like it when I ate that!”) and the clampy thing is something the doctor’s put on (in that hospital it’s also where they have trigger so you can’t steal babies so it was stupid huge). Then Madison flipped through the album with Jessica and explained all the pictures to her. (I got a great photo of them looking at it together and you can see the album is open to the picture of Jessica giving Madison her first bottle. Their heads are together looking down at those pages and it’s the best picture I got today out of a lot of great pictures.) She stopped at a picture of her belly button still dark (before her umbilical cord totally fell off) and then pulled up her shirt to show off her now stellar belly button.

Madison would say, “There you are again and there I am and here is brother …” It was very nice.

Then later Madison was at the sink (scrubbing paint off of her hands) and she said, laughing, “Do you remember that I was in your uterus and brother was in mommy’s uterus?”

Then later she brought up that sad “primal wound-y” day herself.

“Remember that I missed you and I cried and I wanted you to come back? Remember that? I was sad.”

And Jessica said, “You can tell me when you’re sad and I’ll come over and play. You can always call me.”

I feel like it needed to come out into the open for Madison — not just the story (”You have another mother…”) but the feelings (”…and sometimes you miss her”) and now that it’s out, she’s free to feel the good parts, too. I don’t think, “Wow, glad that’s over!” like their relationship is officially A-OK and that we can put those difficult adoption feelings behind us, just that all of us grown-ups have let Madison know that she can feel how she wants to feel and that we all love her and that we can handle it. And she’s getting the message that she doesn’t have to reject one mother to get the other mother.

(At one point we were both fiddling with her at the same time — I was messing with her hair trying to pull it back and Jessica was trying to wipe her nose — and she was hollering at us to stop and I think that right at that minute she was thinking that two mothers was two too many but she’ll just have to deal! Heh.)

It was a great visit.

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