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Deb referenced this article recently and upon reading it, I found all sorts of gems of wisdom within it. The author, Marcy Wineman Axness, is an adoptee who lives in California. She has a PhD in early human development and writes and lectures nationwide on adoption and pre and perinatal issues.
“Adoptive parents are really trying to do the right thing, and it feels like avoiding pain is the right thing, but it truly is not,” says therapist Wendy McCord.”
Many of the points made in this wonderful article are so important. The major focus of this article is that to try to always remain positive and pretend that adoption has no difficult times or down sides is not helpful to children. Trying to ignore that your child had a loss may seem like the best idea, but it really is not.
Instead of ignoring problems or issues that are often inherent in adoption, facing them head on can be a useful life lesson for our children. Always remaining cheerful and never acknowledging issues does not help people to move towards healing. It seems to make a person question themselves when they have issues that no one seems to acknowledge. They may begin to believe that they are not entitled to their feelings, or that something is wrong with them for having them.
Social worker Annette Baran, a nationally-recognized adoption expert, says, “Adoptive parents must weep with their child–’We’re sorry, too, that you didn’t grow in Mommy’s tummy.’”
This type of conversation with an adopted child cannot be an easy one, and it probably is unnecessary for many children. However, for the children who need this sort of understanding, I imagine that it is quite beneficial for them.
Marcy Axness sums up this article by saying:
When we deny adoption’s losses, we also deny ourselves its fullest blessings.
Other articles by Marcy Wineman Axness:
In Defense of the Primal Wound.
Photo courtesy of Stock.XCHNG
Social worker Annette Baran, a nationally-recognized adoption expert, says, “Adoptive parents must weep with their child–’We’re sorry, too, that you didn’t grow in Mommy’s tummy.’”
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I fully agree with this. It is only through facing and grieving our losses that we find healing. I cannot imagine telling my son that he has no right to feel loss (or whatever he feels — there are no “shoulds” when it comes to how we feel). He feels what he feels — it is how he processes his feelings that matters.
- Faith
Facing our losses is important, I think though it can become far to easy to allow them to overcome us. We have to be really careful to keep the main focus for our children the life that they are living everyday and fill it with the positives and the joy that they do have around them. Making their life fulfilling in that way will give them the maturity and ability to pull the grief out once and awhile to revisit it when they need to, and to place it aside and continue living when they are done. It will always be a part of who they are, but not the sum total.
I agree that facing grief and loss head on is critical. I just blogged tonight about another aspect of this.
Thanks for the comments, Faith and Nancy. Deb is right, as critical as facing the grief and loss are, we all hope that it does not consume us or our children. Balance – the magic key to life.