Special ?

A child that has been told he is “special”
will feel that he has to be perfect
in order to retain the love and acceptance
of his adoptive parents.

Whether or not the adoptive parents exert any pressure,
the child may feel a need to live up to unattainable expectations.

Unable to do so, the child may feel inadequate and worthless.

~ The Primal Wound by Nancy Newton Verrier

Sadly, some of those children will end up in need of adoption a second time. It is easy to understand how deeply disrupted this will be for their lives. Such an experience could leave the child with lifelong doubts about their worth.

To be separated from one’s original mother is always traumatic. But an adoption dissolution carries a significant risk of additional trauma to the child.

Such a child is at high risk for forming insecure attachments and will have difficulty trusting adult caregivers. May have difficulty maintaining any caring relationship once they are mature.

Is it any wonder ?

Children Playing

As with your shadow I with these did play

~ Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

I was thinking about what to write today as I read the words above. And it came to my mind, my childhood.

I thought about how my grandparents were 100% my grandparents when I was a child. In reality they were not my original grandparents. But as a child I didn’t know any difference.

To their credit, they did treat us as though we were, even though they knew the secret that we were not. I do not know in what ways they didn’t wholeheartedly feel that we were theirs. They were my grandparents because of adoption – both of my parents having been adopted in the first year of their life.

I think about how we simply accepted them as what they were called – Granny and Granddaddy and Grandmother. We played as children at their feet and minded them with all the same authority. We could not know how it might have been different because it was not.

Love Created My Family

Though adoption and other custody related separations tore my family apart, I know that each of us was conceived in an act of love between a man and a woman.

Today is Valentine’s Day and this day I celebrate that LOVE created each of us. I was born a Hart – I was once told by a psychic I chose to be born in that family as a constant reminder to myself.

When my husband and I chose to conceive our sons at an advanced age, we also cared about genealogy and so gave both of our sons the Hart name as the middle name.

Though becoming parents was a bit unconventional for us, I don’t regret our doing so. Our sons may not have us for as many years as my husband and myself had our parents but they get all the love we have to give each and every day. Every child should be loved. In our family, even the children who couldn’t be raised within the family they were born of, were loved even so.

I have heard from my newly discovered cousins that my parents who were taken away by adoption, were yet remembered and yearned for in their original families. I believe that is because they were first conceived in love.