ADOPTION CORNER - THE GIFT OF UNDERSTANDING by Adriana Netsen - SUMMER 2011

ADOPTION CORNER

THE GIFT OF UNDERSTANDING

by Adriana Netsen

I knew that bringing a child into our lives would force me to face some previously ignored skeletons in the closet of my own childhood. What I didn’t realize was that merely filling out the adoption application form would start to jiggle that closet’s doorknob.

My husband and I have been together for three and a half years, and married for just under one of those years. Both in our thirties, we have decided that if we are going to raise a child, the time to start working towards that goal is now. Kudos to those folks who are willing to raise children in their senior years; I do not have such an inclination. We both felt drawn to adoption for several reasons. We want to give a child a home who may otherwise not have one, neither of us has a burning desire to have “our own” because we both recognize that any child we are raising will be ours, and, for me, the idea of pregnancy and childbirth, while natural and beautiful, is terrifying.

Once our decision was made, we contacted our provincial authority and began to complete the required forms to adopt a child. On the application form, you are required to review detailed lists of specific special needs and various situations that the children available for adoption might have endured, and either enter a check mark in the box next to each item listed, meaning that you would be willing to accept a child with that condition or previous life experience, or leave the box blank. By the end of those few pages, you feel like a terrible person. All those blank boxes weighed on my conscience. I was laden with guilt because of all the boxes I had whited out, or worse, not checked at all. I’m not saying that I would have felt better had I checked more boxes – bringing a child into our lives that we were not equipped to handle would have been a disservice to the child and to us – but some of those boxes were difficult to look at all the same.

As expected, some of the items listed next to the little boxes were new to me. I understood the individual words, of course, but I was certain that the stringing together of those words meant something I was unfamiliar with. Because I did not want to leave any stone unturned, or potentially miss out on a wonderful child for us because we neglected to enter a check mark in a certain box, I launched my internet browser and researched for days on end. By the time we were finished with these sections of the application form, I had done so much research on each individual special need that I felt quite confident in my ability to pass a university-level exam on many of the subjects I had studied!

Surprisingly, I realized that some of the behavioural issues I had explored looked familiar to me. They looked familiar to me because they were behaviours I myself had exhibited during my own troubled childhood. There was one list in particular that shook me up to the point that I had to go and iron clothes for a while (and I’ll do just about anything to not have to iron) just to mentally process what I had read. On this list, I quickly identified seven out of the ten mentioned behaviours that I used to display during my childhood and later teen years. Of course, back then, no one would have considered that those behaviours were emerging because of the issues I was dealing with at home. It was just considered bad behaviour in those days.

A new question started to emerge in my mind: Was I able, or even willing, to take a chance on a child who was just like me? Of course, from what I’ve learned, it’s never a good idea to put yourself in a situation where the issues that your adopted child is dealing with could lead to your own past emotional issues re-surfacing unexpectedly. I have to wonder, though: if someone is quite confident that these issues have been resolved, would it not then be beneficial to be able to relate to his or her child from a place of true empathy?

I’m no expert, and I do not purport to know the answers to these questions. Like most expectant parents, I wonder if I’ll be a good mother. I know there are supports in place to assist us: courses, the guidance of our assigned social worker, and financial help if we need it. The fact that the child who will be placed with us will have been “matched” to us also comes as a sort of comfort. It almost seems like we are being put in a better position to be good parents, a position to succeed even, given all the up-front education we will be receiving. With all of this support, both in advance of being matched and after our child comes home, I can’t help but feel like we will be at least somewhat prepared to deal with what we will face as a family throughout our child’s upbringing.

In addition to the assistance given to all adoptive parents in the public system, I believe I also have the gift of understanding through shared experience to offer my child. While the situations many of these children have faced are horrendous, and I could never truly comprehend the scope of their pain, I can understand what it’s like to live in fear and to act out in strange ways because you can’t make sense of any of what you go through in your home life. I can get my head around not wanting to go home, ever, and to feeling like an outcast everywhere because you can’t tell anyone about what’s going on; you love your parents, after all, and you feel guilty even thinking about getting them into trouble. There are a lot of things I could never relate to, but there are a number of things I can and do relate to which I believe I will use to serve my child’s healing process.

There are no accidents in adoption. You don’t get surprised one month and realize your entire life is about to change because you were a bit careless a few weeks earlier. Of course adoption is varied and you may find yourself adopting children who are related to you and whose parents are unable to care for them for a whole host of reasons, but for those of us looking to adopt from our provincial authorities, the odds are quite good that this is something we have been considering for some time. It’s not a quick decision, and not one made without a considerable amount of soul-searching taking place before application forms are filled out and initial telephone calls are made. My own soul-searching included ample self-reflection on what sort of parent I thought I wanted to be. My parents did some things right, but they also did a whole lot of things wrong, and understanding what they did wrong specifically has helped me considerably in determining how I want to parent when I am fortunate enough to be placed in that position.

I would not have been equipped to do this level of analysis ten years ago. In my twenties, I would have simply accepted a great deal of my parents’ methods as having served to toughen me up. I turned out alright, I thought, so my parenting methods would have been largely modeled after my parents’ way of doing things. As convoluted and overwhelming as the adoption process can be, it has already given me a precious gift. I have been forced to reconsider a number of previously held truths in my life, to uncover them and see that they were not what they appeared to be at all. Already, without any formal training, I am going to be a better parent. I can identify and understand how my parents’ behaviour shaped my own, and I can apply those lessons to the upbringing of my own child. For this, I feel so richly blessed by what adoption has already done to benefit our future family life.

So here I am, in my thirties, wanting a child very badly, and doing work on myself that I thought was already done. I know that the waiting portion of the adoption process, now underway, will give me the time I need to do further self-reflection in this area. Beyond wanting to be a good parent overall, the fact that we could be bringing a child home who has special needs makes one thing all the more important to me: to make certain that my own issues are resolved so I’m ready to help my child with his or hers. When all is said and done, and our child is at home, I think we’re both going to be okay.