Recommended – Robyn Gobbel

She was recommended today to someone who needed help with a 6 year old who goes into a really dark depression for about two weeks after contact with their genetic parents. An adopted person notes – you can’t stop the feeling after visits (this adult adoptee admits – I STILL feel it after every visit), however you can be taught how to best help her. And then, recommended – someone like LINK>Robyn Gobbel.

Robyn Gobbel has experience as a therapist for almost 20 years, specializing in complex trauma, attachment, and adoption. So, what is it like ? – to find someone – maybe a therapist, maybe someone else – who is willing to get lost with you. And to wait for you. Wait. With certainty.

Robyn is a mental health expert and parenting coach. She reveals how all behavior, no matter how baffling, can be explained and remedied. You just need to look past the behavior and understand what’s going on inside. Robyn decodes the latest brain science into easy-to-understand principles and metaphors which will help you to become an expert in your child’s behavior. She reveals simple ways to help you regulate and connect with your child, with brain, body and sensory-based strategies to overcome day-to-day challenges.

Robyn also provides you with the knowledge to understand and regulate your own brain – so that you don’t flip your lid when your child flips theirs.

Let this be your lifeline for parenting or caring for any child with baffling behaviors and hidden challenges, including kids who have experienced adversity, or with additional needs.

Post-Partum Depression

Giving a baby after giving birth is not the end of the story for many birth mothers. To be fair, there are a lot of links about adoptive mothers suffering post-adoption depression. Mostly due to unrealistic expectations about getting what they wanted. Some become depressed because adopting didn’t fix their underlying issues. Few think about the birth mother after she gives up her baby. Post adoption depression is the depression that a woman feels when her child is adopted away from her.

The reported rate of clinical postpartum depression (PPD) among new mothers is between 10-20%. In many cases of postpartum depression occurs within four to six weeks after birth because of the extreme hormonal changes; however, symptoms can appear up to 18 months after birth. Many birth mothers believe that they can’t experience postpartum depression after adoption. However, postpartum depression after adoption is as common.

I found content at this website – LINK>Texas Adoption Center – helpful for discussing the issue. There is much more there than I have time to cover in this blog today.

What are the signs that you are experiencing post-partum depression after giving up your baby ? Postpartum depression is defined as an episode of major depression associated with childbirth. Almost 600,000 women are diagnosed with postpartum each year and many cases of PPD go undiagnosed and untreated.

The symptoms of regular and delayed PPD are the same. However, the symptoms of postpartum depression and the “baby blues” are different. The “baby blues” refers to the feelings of sadness, worry, fatigue, and self-doubt that nearly 80% of birthmothers feel after delivery. This typically only lasts for a few days or weeks and resolves on its own.

In postpartum depression, estrogen and progesterone levels decrease significantly after delivery. As you work to balance the physical and emotional demands of giving birth and placing your baby for adoption, these changes can affect the chemistry of your brain. Physical exhaustion, sleep deprivation, self-esteem issues, and the emotions of making the best decision for you and your baby play a significant role in developing delayed PPD. Postpartum depression after adoption is similar to other episodes of depression that can occur during life. While the “baby blues” typically go away within 10-14 days, PPD is characterized by a daily loss of interest and joy in life that lasts.

The most common signs include:

Loss of interest in activities you used to enjoy
Weight gain or loss that isn’t associated with your diet
Changes in your appetite
Unexplained crying or constant crying
Fatigue
Loss of energy
Feelings of guilt, worthlessness, or hopelessness
Changes in your sleep patterns
Suicidal thoughts or attempts

In addition to talking to a doctor or therapist (postpartum depression is a medical condition), you can be kind to yourself. Focus on your health and well-being. Don’t isolate yourself and be patient as you process such a major event in your lifetime.

The Adoption Mistique

Since I only became aware of this book today, I thought I’d share a bit about it. Below is an excerpt from the author’s website LINK>The Adoption Mystique.

I do not accept the notion that being adopted, like being Jewish or being female should restrict my rights as a citizen. I believe that adopted persons are entitled to full restoration of the rights that were abrogated. To me it is a matter of equality and social justice.

I am grateful to my parents for their patience, courage, openness, honesty, and empathy. Our family had no adoption secrets. A record of the date and story of my homecoming and the significant events of the first four years of my life were available to me at anytime. I was a curious kid. I asked many questions. They told me my birthmother was young. She ran off with someone. Her family annulled the marriage. “What was my name”? “Rebecca, maybe Roberta.” “How do you know”? They said they had papers for me in a strong box. I could have them when I was twenty-one.

The birth of my fourth child put me in touch with my heritage in a way not previously realized. This daughter had blue eyes. That meant I had to carry a blue-eyed gene. It was time to explore more fully my family of origin. It took seven months to find my birthmother.

It took ten years, however, “divine intervention,” and many false starts to complete a search for my birthfather’s side of the family.

Along the way, I found a review by Heidi Hess Saxton on WordPress – LINK>Anti-Adoption? Review of “The Adoption Mystique” by Joanne Wolf Small, MSW. She admits that “The complexity of the issues surrounding adoption, and that to seek reform in one area is not the same as wanting to eliminate the practice altogether.

She also quotes Joanne Wolf Small from a presentation titled “The Dark Side of Adoption”- “My personal experience as an adoptee was a positive one. In the social setting in which I grew up, I thought it was OK to be adopted. In later life I became involved in trying to establish my own identity, and subsequently worked with many others toward that end. We got, and still get the message, loud and clear. It is not OK to be adopted!”

One commenter on her blog wrote – Making a life-long commitment to an adoptive child is a complex endeavor. Part of it is honoring that child’s heritage. That child does in fact have another set of parents who made life possible. From a parental view it is much like a child of divorce, a step child. It does not serve the child to deny it’s other parents. In making a life-long commitment I would hope that adoptive parents would put the child’s reality and needs foremost. If the commitment is “truly forever” it must honor the origins as well.

Blogger’s note – Because there was so much adoption in my family (both parents were adoptees and both of my sisters gave up babies for adoption), I too thought it was OK to be adopted though I yearned to know about our cultural ethnicity. My mom yearned to locate her birth mother but was denied access to her adoption file, which I now possess. I also know now who all 4 of my original genetic grandparents were. I have steeped myself deeply into facing ALL of the realities around the adoptive experience since 2017 now. There seems to be no end of perspectives to learn and so I find topics for my blog here every day.

Can’t Force Relationships

It really can be heartbreaking but there really is no way to force a relationship or even communication.

One adoptee writes about meeting her biological sibling but it has not gone very well “she will be in my life for a good 1 or 2 months, then totally cut me off, and then come back…”

Another adoptee writes – “My full sister (a year older) and I met when in college. That is when she first learned about me. All was well until she stopped talking to me. Found out later that my first mom told her that she either has a sister or a mother but not both.” She adds, “Wish I could have more communication but I can’t force her.”

Someone else wisely notes – “Everyone has emotions. We can’t assume our siblings understand the void of wanting that bond, just because we feel it.” She added (which I understand from personal experience with my own relatives) “we have our own lives and I’m not mentally over thinking, just got tired asking what if’s. I know I didn’t do anything wrong, it’s ok they don’t wanna call.” Lastly, she adds – “What’s the worst that can happen? She rejects you …then you can lift the weight and move on. Or she can tell you her side and you tell your side. Then, you grow your relationship and understand one another …” It takes time and maybe sometimes time doesn’t resolve it. It just is and we have to come to accept that.

Yet another responded to the full post of the first one with – “I felt like I could have written this. I’m 39 and my sister is 40 (she was adopted) and we JUST met last month. Have been talking for several months. We seemed like instant sisters and best friends. Neither of us have any other true siblings in our lives. On text she will go several days chatting and disappear for weeks. I’m having such a hard time navigating this. I wanted so badly to have a sister and I’m trying really hard to meet her where she’s at and appreciate the smallest amount she will give me but I’m just having a hard time.”

Another adoptee writes – “I have a similar story with a brother who initially reached out to me. I wish I could say it gets easier – well. It does. But it takes a while. I’ll never know the reasons why he stepped away from me, but I’ve learned to just accept that he has his own way of processing.”

Though I’m not an adoptee, I am the child of 2 adoptees who has located my extended genetic family for all 4 lines (the children or relatives of my 2 grandmothers and 2 grandfathers). It isn’t easy when decades of each other’s lives do not overlap, when you do not share those familial commonalities and histories. All we can do is be available and willing . . . with no small amount of patience for the processes of time and the occasional contact.

Review – I Am Sam

I learned about this movie from my all things adoption group and I wrote an initial blog on July 19th titled I Am Sam. I promised to come back with a review and last night I actually watched the movie on dvd from Netflix. Sean Penn and Dakota Fanning are both remarkable in their performances for this movie.

It is easy to understand the attraction of this movie to the all things adoption and foster care group because the core story is the lived experience of many members of that group. Not so much having a mentally challenged (ie as the movie says explicitly more than once – retarded) parent but as in the Division of Family and Child Welfare taking a child or children from the parents. In fact, when my sons were young, I did worry that our parenting might be adversely challenged by so do-gooder. Thankfully, my sons are now almost grown (one is already 20 and the other one is 17) and beyond such concerns in our own family. It is also true to the lived experience of so many that foster parents often do eventually want to adopt a child placed in their care. However, the movie is enlightened to the trends now occurring in adoptionland that family reunification and in the case of this movie, an eventual recognition on the part of the parent that he is lacking something (a mother – the child’s mother abandoned the child to the father shortly after birth) brings into the resolution a kind of co-parenting solution that is satisfying to watch (I don’t think that saying this is a spoiler for this movie as the ending leaves as many questions as it answers).

The movie was very progressive for its time in the portrayal of people with a variety of cognitive disabilities. In fact, I recognized that I do know one woman who has effectively lost her children due to just such a challenge. The take-away message for me was how incredibly hard it is parent a child regardless of the circumstances. This is clearly portrayed in the contrasting and yet similar parenting challenges of the main character and his lawyer. Every parent needs support of some kind at some time or other.

In an LA Times review, the writer shares this story – “I’m smart enough to know when I need help, I ask for it,” a 46-year-old mother with a learning disability told me recently. She receives support from a parents-with-special-needs program. If she needs help with parenting skills of any kind, a parent counselor is just a call away. If she feels frustrated, she attends the program’s parents support group.

Also from that LA Times review, In one critical scene of the movie, Sam is questioned by state agency officials about why he thinks he has the ability to be a father. He responds, “It’s about constancy and it’s about patience. And it’s about listening and it’s about pretending to listen when you can’t listen any more, and it’s about love.” In the case of parents with special needs, we must provide the kind of support services that will offer practical help and an ear to listen. Parents with special needs benefit from help with tutoring, after-school activities, transportation, budgeting money and, like every parent in the universe, a little baby-sitting now and then.

The movie helps everyone who watches it to understand “that persons with disabilities have needs and desires just like everyone else,” as the parent with a disability mentioned above explained. “They need to take care of someone and love someone else.”

Too Old ?

It is still Foster Care Awareness Month and today, the questions was asked – Should someone in their 50s be able to adopt infants and toddlers from foster care ?

I encounter this as an older mom from time to time. I responded – Recently, visiting my primary care doctor, my youngest son came up and she asked – how old is he ? I said 16-1/2. She did the math quickly – you had him at 50 ? I said, yep. I know this is about adoption and foster care but honestly, it really depends on so many factors. My grandmothers both lost their YOUNG mothers when one of them was 3 mos old and the other one when she was 11 yrs old. The length on any life is simply not guaranteed. I do think health matters. I was put through a whole battery of tests including a heart stress test before being allowed to conceive my last son at such an advanced age. Agencies could require additional health assessments for older persons.

Just before I responded, I was happy to see someone else reply – I was 50 when I had a newborn placed with me for a weekend due to an abuse allegation on a foster parent. I adopted him at 53.

One wrote – While I don’t agree with anyone over 55 adopting (I don’t agree with adopting at all) my state allows people to foster and adopt well into 65.

And of course, it is very common these days to see grandparents raising their grandchildren. I know at least one in that category. So this answer did not surprise me – I fostered my 3 grandchildren (4 & under) at age 53 and adopted them at 56…no way I was letting them go to strangers.

And this view from experience – My parents were that old and I did fine. Only disappointment was that all of my older siblings were my biological mom’s age or older. At 28, all my siblings are old enough to be my kids grandparents. Because they are in their late 40s, early 50s now. Other than that, I still did everything – with sports, dance, went on vacations. They kept up. With me and my little sister who they adopted when she was 1. And I was 6 at the time. Maybe they should have just stopped with me. But I wanted a little sister. So, when she was literally dropped at our door and the mother terminated her rights, they adopted my little sister too.

A concern was expressed but this smacks of ableism to me – I see it every day at work, as soon as our older ladies step in with the kids (especially the toddlers), the children do not get the kind of engagement they need from the caregiver. Toddlers and kids need someone who can physically be involved in their play and in their development. From my experience, older women and men are not usually able to do that for them. That’s not to say the kids don’t love the older ladies, but they know they can’t ask them to play or help because of their limitations. I’m very old school (you know, “get over it and go play”.)

I remember my mom always sent us outside to play – without her !! Out of hair and need for giving us attention – though we knew she loved us. It was just how she was (she had me at age 16 and my youngest sister at 22, so she wasn’t old). I would add until very recently, I will be 67 later this month, there were no physical limitations on the “play” part and we did “play” with our kids. I’ll admit my knees have crapped out a bit, so I can’t do the long hikes anymore. My husband just turned 69 this year and he runs every day – so the physical stuff he can still do with his sons – and he is always willing to have fun. The older one is now 20 and not so much into “play”, actually for that matter the 16-1/2 yr old isn’t either. They are pretty independent of us for entertainment. My husband does like to joke with the youngest one that he’ll be changing his dad’s diapers some day. It really isn’t funny – experienced this stuff with my in-law’s before they died and with my dad after my mom died. It happens. It’s reality.

One commented – How embarrassing would it be at your high school graduation having to explain to your friends that the old lady with a walker is your mom? Yet, I think, would they say this about a person in a wheelchair. In this week’s Time magazine is a feature on Rebekah Taussig – a disabled mom who has paralyzed legs. And she writes about such everyday things as learning to lift him (her baby born during the pandemic) from the floor to her lap, or in and out of his crib, or up and over the baby gate on her own.

I suppose appearances matter a lot when your life is determined by your peers. Maybe we’ve avoided a lot of that comparison angst because our sons are educated at home because we have a home based business and are here all the time anyway. They have grown up with mature conversations and exposure to people of all ages – from babies to people much older than us up in their 80s or 90s.

Of course, I liked this response too –

I’m 50 and have such an issue with this. I’m going to ask that you give your age with your response. I’m tired of people implying that I am too old to do anything. I ran a half marathon in February, I work a full time job and a part time job and just hiked for 4 days straight – over 20,000 steps a day. How dare you all restrict women and what they can do at any age! I am a teacher and an owner of child care centers. I have more patience and experience and knowledge than the vast majority of 20-30 year olds.

I had my daughter when I was 19. I find this too. I may have behaved more like a child with her than I have with my sons but I have gained so much from years of living that is also an advantage over how I was when I was that young.

Another one wrote – My grandma (just found out, not even biological, through 23 & Me) started raising me when she was 60 and I had the best life and upbringing I could have ever asked for. She never missed a beat and was way cooler than all of my friend’s parents. To this day she’s my best friend.

I think I’ll just end it here. There is no one size fits all on this kind of issue. One argument the person who asked the original question made – in response to the above was – Adoptees already have so much stacked against them, that older parents just add more layers. Fair but . . . . again, no one size fits all . . . . even with the experience an adoptee has in their circumstances. I’ll make my anti-ageism stand here.

Cousins Through Adoption

My aunt called me last night to tell me that her only son, my cousin Allan, had died this last Saturday. It was a bit of a shock and not a shock because for several years she would often ask me to pray for him due to some health challenge. When I mentioned his poor health to her, she said he was actually doing better lately and she worried about him less. He was a security dog trainer and he was doing a meet and greet with a potential new client when he literally dropped dead, with his wife nearby waiting for him in their car. The ambulance arriving was what alerted her that something had happened. So, he died instantly without pain doing what he loved.

I became closer to my two aunts – both from the paternal side – after my mom died and then my dad died 4 months later. I really didn’t have much contact with them for decades until that happened. It is like they came to fill a bit of a void for me of connection to something childhood. In fact, I told my husband – cousins are a childhood thing. They connect us to when we were children. My husband remembers meeting this cousin and I remember it was when we visited my aunt at her parents home in Pennsylvania before we had children. In fact, I wasn’t seriously close to this cousin had it not been a reuniting with this aunt by telephone and hearing constant updates on him. My aunt will be 90 this coming December and my cousin and his wife had just celebrated their 27th wedding anniversary on April 2nd. I don’t even have a photo of him, though I do have a recent photo of my aunt that she sent me one Christmas not long ago.

My adoptive family relations became more complicated for me once I discovered who my original grandparents were (both of my parents were adopted and their siblings were adopted except my dad’s step-sister who is the biological genetic daughter of my dad’s second adoptive father – yes, he was adopted twice in childhood after his adoptive mother divorced – as my youngest son said not too long ago, “you have a very complicated family”, well yes) and started having reunions with my genetic cousins with whom I have no shared life history but through whom I acquired insight into my original, genetic biological grandparents. I also acquired digital copies of photographs of my genetic family members. It is difficult to build relationships with decades of not knowing you existed between the two of you. I take a patient perspective on it and allow it to be whatever it will be. My genetic biological family is important to me and made me whole but there are still these other people with whom I have life history and I have begun to reintegrate them into my life as well.

So, while I was on the phone with my aunt, I thought of my cousin Christy. She is the daughter of the other aunt (that step sister by adoption) I’ve become closer to with the death of my parents. She recently turned 80. I remember my youngest sister sharing with me that she, Christy and Allan used to get into mischief at my Granny’s house (my dad’s adoptive mother). So I told my aunt, I would call and let Christy know and my middle sister as well. My youngest sister ? I am estranged from her, due to the severity of her paranoid schizophrenia which created a wedge between us due to cruel treatment by her towards me as I tried to administer my deceased parents’ estate and create some kind of ongoing support for her now that there are no parents to provide that.

My memories of my now deceased cousin are complicated in ways I would rather not share publicly. He is part of the story of why Thanksgiving was wrecked for my family. My uncle died due to the complications of Lou Gehring’s Disease during a holiday football game on TV as my dad and uncle’s family awaited Thanksgiving dinner to be served. There was always that watching of football games as part of my family’s holiday. The dinner was interrupted and the holiday ever after a reminder of his death. My cousin was only a child when his father died. This cousin was strikingly similar in appearance to his dad and I believe my paternal adoptive grandparents came to relate to him like a replacement for the son they lost that Thanksgiving Day.

RIP Allan Hart. May your dear wife, Christine, find comfort in the closeness of her own mother. They were living on the same property with her at the time of his death. I can truly say of ALL my cousins – God made us cousins. No truer words could ever be said since none of us are genetically, biologically related.

Check Your Privilege

It is hard for some people to understand, what it feels like not to know what ought to be yours to know. Like what your family health history is, who you were born to, where and when, why you were surrendered to adoption.

If you weren’t adopted, you make have the privilege of not having this uncertainty in your life. If you are judging an adoptee for being angry/disgusted at the entire world, don’t tell them to “get help”. Chances are they already have seen some therapist or counselor. Most do.

Each of us can only do, whatever we can with the hand life has dealt us. For some people, it’s a really hard hand. It’s not your job to put someone else in the place you think they should be. Doing so tells others more about you than whoever you are trying to fix.

Why do people use the phrase “you’re so angry” as a negative connotation ? Maybe there is a good reason. Why does someone else having something to be angry about have to be their problem to fix ? If my anger affects them in some way, they best start looking within for why it is triggering them.

I’ve been feeling a lot of anger from my oldest son lately. It is a frustration with life – not directed at anyone else and not hurting anyone else. If anything, he punishes himself which as a mom does hurt my own heart. A song’s lyrics keep coming to me and I don’t have the answer to the question it asks – maybe it is hormones and emotional immaturity still. Fooling Yourself by Styx.

You see the world through your cynical eyes
You’re a troubled young man I can tell
You’ve got it all in the palm of your hand

Why must you be such an angry young man
When your future looks quite bright to me

Get up, get back on your feet
You’re the one they can’t beat and you know it
Come on, let’s see what you’ve got

Mental health support is a human need and it is a privilege unfortunately. It should be accessible to anyone. Competent mental health guidance and compassion can be life changing. I googled Emotional Maturity – at what age ?

LOL

The term “mature” usually refers to a person’s mental state. Someone who is mature behaves in a way that is considered appropriately adult. Emotional maturity is the ability to function in an effective, healthy way concerning one’s emotions. This means being able to express emotions accurately and appropriately, possessing some amount of self-control, and being able to think of others despite feeling strong emotions.

According to a study conducted in the United Kingdom, men do not become emotionally mature until the age of 43. This was not a scientific evaluation of maturity because that is largely dependent on social constructs. The study relied on surveys to determine what men and women considered mature, how they felt about their maturity, and whether or not they believed the opposite gender was mature at a certain age. Wondering what that surveyed age was for women ? Generally 32. This actually matches what is seen in school age children as well. Generally, the girls do mature earlier than the boys.

Emotional maturity is not a simple matter of checking off boxes. Some mental health professionals do not uphold the notion of age-based maturity. They assert that maturity has more to do with your background, values, and even biology than the number of years lived. How you mature, and the things you consider mature will vary based on the way you were raised, your neurological development, and your cultural framework. Some cultures value autonomy more than emotional depth, and maturity will be marked by the ability to take care of oneself. Other cultures value emotional depth, and dependence is not seen as a pitfall, but a lack of emotional intelligence.

Sometimes, it is anger that supplies the passion for change. I am very much the kind of person who puts up with stuff and adjusts my own self not to make waves. However, I can actually appreciate that dis-satisfaction can be the first step towards making a meaningful change that will make everything better.

For some adoptees and former foster youth, it was their well-deserved anger and fighting spirit that kept them safe in a lot of shitty situations. We have not walked in another person’s shoes and we can’t know what is going on inside of another person but we can be compassionate about the distress anytime we are aware of it or in proximity to it. Tolerance and patience helps, even for this mom.

Hedging Parenthood Bets

I don’t know anything about this publication but it fits my mood coming into today’s essay.

Read where one woman wrote – “We spent the last 1.5 yrs going thru the foster care process to be told during the home study that we are not eligible since we are still trying to conceive thru IVF. Either way, we still want to foster and adopt and really don’t want to wait much longer. We are 43/44 yrs old and have also been trying IVF for close to 5 yrs. Does anyone know a group that would allow us to foster or adopt while we continue IVF?”

I can honestly relate. I conceived my oldest son at 46 thanks to IVF and another son at 49. I won’t say it was the perfect way to have children but they would not be who they are or exist otherwise. I love them dearly and so, can’t regret the effort behind having them. While I had to give up passing on my own genetics to conceive them (I had actually already been there, done that, with my daughter, so it was perhaps easier for me to accept, than it is for some people), I do believe the route we took was far better than adoption. I’ve had lots of opportunity to observe adoptees (both of my own parents) and birth mothers who gave up babies to adoption (both of my sisters).

The comments coming back to the woman above (the comments by others are not in response to my own situation) were not kind.

One wrote – what it sounds like to me is time is running out for us so we want to collect as many as possible to fill our desires before it’s not possible anymore! Also problematic because I’ve heard many adoptees talk about how they were raised by older parents and the huge generational gap caused even further issues. Older people expect old fashioned things, they don’t fit to be parenting in these times, let alone parenting traumatized children.

Well, we are older parents. However, what I find comparing my two lives (parent at 19 and then in my late 40s) is that we are more willing to give up our own desires to meet our children’s desires where they express themselves. There is a lot of wisdom and sometimes patience and often an intolerance for what doesn’t seem needed but we are there 24/7 for our boys. I would not call my sons traumatized the way adopted children always are. They do know the full truth of their origins.

I do remember my own OMG moment related to age – when I turned 60, my youngest was 10. I thought when I turn 70, he’ll only be 20. That startled me, though at 50 giving birth to him did not. And one other thought about older parents – I know a lot of parents who died when their children were young. These parents were not old. Truth is we are all born to die, we are not guaranteed a particular length of life. Life is what it is and no two lives are the same. Also many of us live distantly from our offspring. I don’t always see my grown daughter or grandchildren even once a year. Money just isn’t there, though the visits when I am lucky enough to have one, are always precious.

One woman assessed the story above this way – #1 they are likely trying to find a child to ease their pain from infertility and replace the child they can’t have, #2 they are likely hopeful adoptive parents and will sabotage reunification from the git go which is part of any foster care effort and #3 they are likely only accepting 0-3 year olds.

Another noted – It’s really sad that you cannot conceive, but please don’t traumatize an entire family of people with a lot less privilege than you have in order to satisfy your fantasy of a perfect life. If you want kids so much, divorce your partner, and marry a single parent with a child.

On that note, when my husband wanted to have children and I discovered how low my own odds of successfully conceiving were, I was privately sobbing, you need to marry a younger woman, but that was not what he wanted to do.

And finally, I do agree with this point of view – nobody should be trying to adopt or foster and do fertility treatments. Foster kids and adoptees aren’t backup plans. Also, nobody should try to do domestic adoption and foster to adopt. This is why therapy should be a requirement. There’s no reason to continue IVF if you want to adopt. I’ve seen couples do IVF literally weeks after adopting. They shouldn’t adopt.

Sadly Needing A Second Chance

It is a sad fact but more common than anyone could ever wish for that some adoptions fail and give rise to attempts to have someone else re-adopt a child. What are the issues?

Audrey recently turned 8 and was adopted domestically when she was 6. She has a very strained, competitive relationship with the other child in her adopted family and has failed to form a healthy attachment to the family. They feel that Audrey will be happier, calmer and more likely to attach to a family who has no other children in the home under the age of 12 (a mature child). A family who is familiar with attachment issues would be a plus! Her family is willing to consider a single parent without other children to take their focus away from Audrey, as well as a 2-parent family.

Yet, consistently, these second chance “offerings” go on to describe the child in very glowing terms.

Audrey’s adopted parents describe her as creative, funny, sometimes stubborn, flexible, playful, helpful and artistic. She enjoys playing with Barbies and practicing her mothering skills with her Baby Alive doll. She is a great helper when she is one-on-one with someone. She likes to help with food prep, cleaning, and laundry, and likes to hear that she’s done a good job. Audrey has a set bedtime and falls asleep quickly. She sometimes likes to read a book before lights out. She enjoys painting and often uses drawing as a means of communicating her feelings and memories. She loves to play board and card games. She can be very funny and sweet, especially when she feels that you are giving her your full attention. She is a mix of girlie-girl and tomboy—she likes dressing up in her mom’s high heels and wearing makeup; but will also play in the mud, climb trees and ride her bike. She is keen on taking off her training wheels soon so she can ride her bike independently!

Audrey has a good imagination and can easily entertain herself. She is a fairly organized child—neither messy nor overly organized. She likes to read and is currently enjoying Fancy Nancy and Dr. Seuss books. She is obsessed with unicorns, so if she can find a book about those, she will read it too! Her favorite foods are peanut butter, pizza and Indian food. She has a different favorite color for every day! Her adopted mom will say, “What’s your favorite color today?”

Audrey is in the 2nd grade, does very well in school and loves school. She gets mostly A’s. She loves the structure, the friends, the teachers and the social aspect. She attends a private school with a small teacher/student ratio and she thrives in this environment. Math is her favorite subject; she enjoys the challenge of solving problems. Her teachers report that she is “a joy to have in class—wonderful and sweet!” She is a worker bee—she loves to be given a task to accomplish for the teacher.

What is it about adoption that causes such a contradiction in the description of a child’s personality? It is the fact that trauma is present and too often adoptive parents don’t want to work through the core issues with patience and tolerance. They only want harmony and so if an adopted child is seen by them as the source of disharmony in their family – then they will seek to be rid of the child as though human beings can simply be thrown away if their use is not satisfying.