Bringing Home Baby

Okay, I think I'm feeling a little more confident after some encouragement from those who know me best and beginning to read a new book on the very issues that concern me the most. Of course, this is all theory until the rubber meets the road, so to speak, but I'm gaining some tools that I find exciting and make sense. When we brought all three of our biological kids home from the hospital we relied a lot on instinct and experience...with the last two at least. It was trial and error, mistakes were made and we all learned..together. Adopting will have its learning curves too. But the stakes are much higher. Max won't come home to us knowing my voice, having heard it for 9 months prior to his birth. He will come with specific traumas, many of which I will never know about and will never fully understand. He will come to me, his mom, with a long list of loved and lost caregivers. He will be prepared to lose me as well. He will likely assume, for many, many, months, no matter how much I want to believe differently, that I am just one more of those caregivers. Every time I pass him to another adult to be with he will assume that person equal with me, just another. When he clings to me it won't be because he is so fond of me but I am at least more familiar than the stranger I might be handing him to. Connecting takes months and years. It involves every aspect of his life, and ours. I wonder as I prepare for him who he will be. Will he be the child that just chooses to go to sleep and thus, in his mind, disappear from the stress of this "big change" he has experienced? Will he be the child that looks through me but doesn't really see because he can't see, there's been to much stress? There are other possibilities too but as the adult, as the one who knows what connecting means I have to be the one to recognize and understand the great amount of stress we are placing on him. Is it for his good? I believe so, does that make it less traumatic, being pulled from all that you have known, being involuntarily immersed into a new language, a new culture and a new family, no...it will be the last (hopefully) great trauma of his life, but it will be trauma.

So I am preparing now for what is to come. I am preparing my kids that this isn't a romantic story of bringing home a beautiful boy and him melting into our loving arms and all goes beautifully. The story will, prayerfully, end beautifully, but it will require vast amounts of work. He will learn that we are here to stay, that he will be with us until we are all very old. He will learn that I am his mommy, not just another nice caregiver. We realize that part of helping him understand this will be limiting his exposure to other adults that he might confuse for caregivers. This will be difficult at times, and limiting for me, but we chose to bring him home not the other way around. The sacrifices must be ours. He will learn that our home is his home and that his stress and hurt are our stress and hurt. And eventually our family will become one story. Eventually his identity will include a birth mom who gave him up, an orphanage in Thailand that cared for him the best they could, and a Christian family that now belong to him.

Of course, all of this is moot until we bring our boy home, so I write to remember what I am feeling and what I am learning. For now we'll continue to pray for a referral and prepare intellectually, emotionally and spiritually for this addition to our family.