Putting Down Roots

I was so moved as I caught up on Amy’s blog (“Catching Butterflies“) and read the posts she and her husband have written from China. My heart went out to them as I read how difficult the transition with their newly adopted four year old, Sarah, has been so far. Amy wrote that she could not go out in public with her new daughter without carrying a note explaining, in Chinese, that she was not kidnapping the child, but had legally adopted her, so that when her daughter would scream terrified things in perfect Chinese to passing people, they wouldn’t misunderstand and think the child was being kidnapped. For the first time, I realized how much WORSE our receiving Doug into our own family could have been…it could have been at an airport in Taiwan, instead of America. At least we were with a crowd of strangers who comprehended we were not doing anything terrible to our child when we had to literally pick him up and carry him as he flailed his little body and kicked his legs, trying to get away, screaming frantically in Chinese between hysterical sobs.
Adopting older children can be so much more challenging…the road is just so much rockier and the barriers greater to surmount…and trust and love come so much more slowly with an older child than with an infant. I also have been reading the blogs of another Amy (“To Bring My Daughter Home” and “Lakeshore Ladies“). She recently brought her six year old daughter, Eleanor, home from China. They, too, are in the (all too often frustrating and discouraging) adjustment period.

This July will mark three years since we brought our own son, home. Three years. That sounds so long…and, in so many ways, it FEELS like we have ALWAYS had Doug. Yet, in other ways, sometimes it feels like he may never fully root into our family. I don’t want any of my children to be transplants. The girls are not transplanted. In their own hearts and minds they belong as totally in our family as they would have if they had been carried in my womb…sprung from their father and my own chromosomes. They belong. They have long ago settled comfortably and securely into this family. Then there is our son. It is hard for me to sort out how much is due to his older age and prior life experiences versus how much stems from his own personal challenges, the lingering residual of the severe head injury he sustained as an infant. Whatever the contributing factors, I never would have believed that his transition into our family would take so long and still not be complete. He feels transplanted….to my own heart. I LOVE him as deeply and completely as I love my daughters. (THAT did not come, either, as quickly as I would have anticipated it would. I still remember the anguish of KNOWING that I did NOT love him as deeply as I loved his sisters. It took a year--maybe even a bit longer than that--for my heart to attach to him as deeply as it had to his sisters before him.) Doug’s rooting into our family has been such a slow, rocky process. His needs have been so consuming, that, at times (especially in that first year) we were left frustrated and so drained, day after day. Though we still struggle with his memory impairment, severe language/speech impairment, impulsivity, and inability to focus as we seek to guide him and shape him, we are accustomed, now, to his challenges…his presence in our family is no longer traumatizing to our family unit. We are used to his challenges now, and he is growing up…slowly, but surely. It sounds horrific to say your child is “traumatizing” to your family unit…but it is the cold, hard, truth. I think it is the truth more often than folks would like to admit, even to themselves, when an older child or a child with extra needs enters the family.

I will always remember a phone conversation I had when we were in the process of adopting Doug. I had become acquainted with the woman through an adoption group. I don’t remember her name, any longer…and that conversation between us was our first and our last. Just one passing conversation so long ago with a stranger…but her words will haunt my heart as long as I live. She had domestically adopted a six year old child four years earlier. As she poured out her heart (so much easier to do with a total stranger than with your own friends and family, sometimes), she told me she wished desperately she had never adopted the child. The child had disrupted their entire family. Four years later, the child was still unhappy and her brothers, sisters, and parents had given up on her ever “being one of them”. They just wished they had never brought her into their family. They felt trapped. What they had entered with joyful hearts and idealistic anticipation had turned out so awful. She warned me against adopting an older child and said she wished someone had been there to tell her what it would really be like before she and her husband had entered their own adoption four years earlier. I hung up the phone with a shiver in my own heart. I didn’t want to ever talk to that woman, again. And my heart just felt so sad, not just for her (for the despair and guilt that now haunted her), but especially for the child she had adopted. Before that, I had heard of “disrupted adoptions”…a socially correct, gentle way of saying that somewhere along the line of the adoption process (even AFTER the adoption is already final), the parents have changed their mind and the child is put back up for adoption once more. I had thought, “How could you EVER reject the child you adopted?” I guess I still do not understand, but I no longer view parents who have had “disrupted adoptions” the same way. I used to think that was the most terrible outcome of an adoption process possible. That was before I began hearing stories from others, though. Stories of an adopted sibling who never really rooted into the family and did not maintain steady contact with their families after they were grown. Grown adoptees without family roots. Casual mention of such occurrences still evokes such a strong , convulsing response in my own stomach…and such sorrow. Would those children that could not root into their adoptive families maybe have been able to root into a subsequent family, a family with different dynamics? Or, were they just too incapable of ever trusting and DEPENDING/RELYING in their own hearts on any family, to have ever rooted in anywhere? If the former was true, the well-meaning family did the child a disservice by not “disrupting “ the adoption. But, if the latter was true, it is a blessing that the child had that family, even if they never were able to open their hearts up completely (to be vulnerable enough) to let their family fully in. There is so much we can never know. We can never see into fully into another’s heart…though we seldom realize this. When I realize how blindly I would stumble through this life if I had to rely on my own wisdom and knowledge, it makes me more grateful than I could ever put into words that I do not have to know all the answers…that GOD knows and He watches over my footsteps, whispering in my heart which way to turn whenever I pause long enough from my own wisdom to listen.

God led us to bring Doug home. It was God who burned into our hearts that JenGwo was OUR son, long before we brought him home. So many times over the last three years, THAT has been the comfort and serenity I have leaned into. It is a deep KNOWING. And if he is my SON, then a million other questions that might otherwise haunt me, shed effortlessly off. There is no doubting, “Did we do the right thing for him by adopting him?…Did we do the right thing for us?” I know we did, because I know he is my son. He is not my “adopted “ son. He is my son. I could have chosen NOT to adopt him, but that would not have made him not my son, in God’s eyes…I would have just been giving up one of my children, if I had not adopted him. I know that with utter certainty--now just as deeply as I did in the those anguishing months when we were completing his adoption, when our hearts were heavy with the unknowns of who this little boy named JenGwo really was and how his needs would impact the futures of the children we already knew and loved. Now we know who this son of ours is. His generous spirit and tender heart and intuitive nature are familiar to us. He is our son.

Yet, it has been three years now and he has still not rooted into our family the same way both his sisters did so long ago. His roots go DEEPER now, than they did two years ago and even one year ago…but, it weighs on my heart that his roots are not fully established, even now. It is harder to love a child who does not trust you unconditionally, who does not rest securely in the embrace of your love. Love is a reciprocal thing. We love our child first….and they soon love us in return….that being so much more evident in the adoptive process than in a biological birth, but none the truer. That process can come so much more slowly with an older child or a child with difficult past life experiences. A child who cannot REST effortlessly in your love, cannot fully love you in return. A child that has not yet learned how to REST effortlessly in your love is therefore more challenging to love. In the adoption of an older child, I comprehend more clearly than in any other example how God reaches out to us, but we fear trusting Him, relying on ourselves instead of resting in HIS goodness and trusting Him to guide us. And I get a glimpse of the DEPTH of His love for me…a love that is unconditional and unrelenting whether I can “feel” it or not, and whether or not I love Him in return. How I want our son to feel our love and comprehend our love for him. How my heart aches for the day when he will rest as comfortably and securely in his place in this family as his two sisters do. He still does not trust us the way they do. He still does not let us into his heart the way they do. He trusts us more and he lets us in more now, than he used to…but I just see how far his trust/love for us falls short. He is still waiting for “good-by”. He is still bracing for the moment when he will be ripped out of this family and placed with the next family, as happened to him so often before. We are still just a temporary stop in his heart. He loves us and he wants to stay with us, but he doesn’t trust us not to leave him, like everyone before has. So, he clings….to me, if it is just our family home, or if there is a visitor in our home, he rejects me to cling to them. He clings physically and emotionally. Ever clinging, but never satisfied…ever hungry. If I am typing on the computer, he is leaning against me, bumping my elbow every few seconds as he fidgets about. If I am making supper, he is constantly getting tangled under my feet…an eight year old reminding me so much of an insecure toddler. I work only one day each week…Saturday. This is our routine. It seldom varies. Yet it is a trauma that Doug begins obsessing over days in advance. Asking me over and over again, “Work, Mom? Work?” as we begin the countdown through the week once more. My going to work figures into his prayers every night. He stews and worries over it. His clinginess exacerbates on Friday evenings and typically ends in silent tears streaming down his face around bedtime…as he asks over and over again if I will be coming home after work. Saturday mornings, he awakens earlier than usual and occasionally has a quiet, emotional meltdown as I am trying to slip out of the house to go to work. I remember when he first joined our family…each time we would leave to run a quick errand away from home, he would hurriedly stuff all his most treasured belongings into his little green backpack to take with him…as though he might lose them if he didn’t keep them on his person, because, who knows how long his stay with us was to be. Maybe we were SAYING “we are just going to the grocery store, Doug,” but we were REALLY planning on dropping him off with the next family in line for him to live with. He feels safe leaving the house now, without all his possessions….but, he still does not rest comfortably in this family. There is still a profound anxiety in his heart that will not let him free to relax into his place in this family, to BELONG utterly, unquestioningly, like his sisters so easily do. And he still holds his father and I at an arm’s length emotionally. Grant only sees Doug’s rejection of him…but I can see his rejection of me, too…a funny kind of rejection that drives him to CLING to me even as he is shutting his heart up against me, not trusting me enough to let me in very far. I wonder how long it will take before his heart truly comprehends that he is our son…that he will always be our son, no matter what. I cannot bear to consider that his heart may never comprehend the truth.

After I wrote those last words, I realized something that I was missing looking at. (So often, it easier to see how far Doug has left to go, than to realize how far he has already come.) Doug's heart may not yet fully trust his father's love for him and my own love for him...but, when it comes to his sisters, his heart is totally rooted in them, and theirs in him. With the children, there is no feeling of a transplant in the midst. They accept each other completely and the belongingness that I long for his heart to have with us, his parents, is already there with his siblings. I would say that is a very good sign, indeed. Love and trust take time. He's still a little boy. We still have time.