this woman’s work

I mentioned that the conference made me glad about some parenting choices we’ve made specifically in regards to parenting an adopted child. I’m going to share them here with the caveat that I don’t think that we did it “right” and anyone who does it differently is “wrong.” I’m sharing it to say that as I travel this road, it’s nice to look back at certain choices and say, “I feel good about that.” I talk a lot about the things that I don’t feel good about (when I look critically at adoption you can assume that the place I look at first and most critically is our own adoption) so I’m going to give myself a break here and talk about the things that don’t inspire even a modicum of guilt. Some of these are also choices we made for Noah and I’m glad about that, too.

• Not changing Madison’s name. I’m glad we didn’t do it even thought it meant neither of my kids was ever going to be able to take for granted that they’re the only people in a group with that particular name. (Both of them are hanging in the top ten lists for some years now.) I’m glad that she was born Madison Michael and remains Madison Michael. (And Pennie put our last name on the birth certificate so both birth certificates read the same name.)
• Carrying her everywhere until she decided to get down and move and even after although she was heavy right from the start and sometimes it wasn’t easy. I’m glad we used various slings and our beloved ellaroo wrap to keep her close. She took most of her afternoon naps tied to me even when she was a great big heavy toddler.
• Co-sleeping. I’m a huge fan of the family bed. I kinda want to write about my own memories around my transitional object (my beloved Pooh Bear) but I feel like it’d be unhelpful. Suffice to say that I wanted Brett and myself to be the main comfort to our kids until they choose otherwise and we have been. I’m glad about that.
• Feeding her every bottle while she was cradled in arms. My mom — who bottlefed the three of us but mourned that she didn’t breastfeed — told me early on that I should never let Madison hold her own bottle and that made sense to me because I figured I’d want it to be as close to nursing as possible. I took it pretty far — like I would take her hands off the bottle and put it on my hand holding the bottle because I wanted her to have skin-to-skin contact, not skin-to-plastic contact. But at the conference one of the presenters said that lactose in milk acts on the opiate center of the brain. That kind of good-feeling? I wanted Madison to get in the arms of her parents. (There was a time when I wanted to feed every bottle — and I did feed her most of them — but I lightened up and Brett did his share of feeding, too.) But we fed her cradled in our arms, cheek against our chest so she could hear our heartbeats. We both feel pretty good about that. (She still gets the occasional bottle, especially for bedtime and that’s fine by us because Noah was still nursing once a day at this age, too. Although for him his once a day was first thing in the morning.)

Like I said, I don’t think that if we’d done things differently that it would have been wrong or that Madison wouldn’t be thriving. More than a decade into this parenting gig I’m not convinced that kids are that fragile. And I also think parenting sanity is at a premium and that when we make choices we have to do that balancing our kids’ needs and our needs and our values and expectations as a family. But these are things that I feel good about and I feel met our values and expectations and that I look back on and still feel good about. Your mileage may vary.