our 6 month post placement visit

March 24, 2013

Friday we had our 6 month adoption post-placement visit with our social worker. These days I don’t think too much beyond the day I am living, so I hadn’t really thought about the visit. I didn’t do much to prepare other than a quick pick up of the house and made sure all the boys had shirts on. When our social worker arrived we began talking about the last several months and how Little One has been doing. Day to day life is full and busy and there isn’t much time for me to slow down and reflect on things. I don’t think about adoption or growth charts or developmental milestones or even attachment. I’m just a mom with five kids trying to make the most of the days. Adoption brought Little One into our family, but she’s not my ‘adopted daughter’. She’s just my daughter. Plain and simple.

This visit made me take a step back and think about those adoption related things again.

Our last post placement visit was one month after Little One came home. She was very, very delayed in a lot of developmental markers. Months behind where other kids her age typically fall. In fact, at 14 months she tested as a 3 month old in regards to human interaction. You’d never know that now. This time, with exception to speech, she was right on target. What a beautiful thing to witness. Right at the start of the visit our social worker began asking about Little One’s recent lip repair surgery. She asked if I miss her cleft lip. I was not prepared for that question. The instant the question fell from her lips, my eyes welled up with tears and I couldn’t speak. I just wept. I’m going to write about my feelings post surgery soon…it is just so hard to form the words that would make an ounce of sense to anyone else. Soon.

The last few weeks have been harder than normal for my sweet girl. Lots of crying and even screaming from a tiny thing that is normally pretty quiet. She is healthy. She is fed. She has all her basic and non-basic needs met and yet there is something going on in her little head and heart that is causing lots of tears. Talking with those that understand adoption, development, institutional care, etc….it just seems like she is finally letting herself grieve. I know it doesn’t make sense to many…why would a baby grieve a hard past…can she even remember that? The reality is our bodies are designed to need certain things at certain times, especially that first critical year of life. She was deprived of so much and that deprivation plays out in different ways

There are days she cries for really long periods and gets frantic if I am not holding her. In those moments, it can be so easy to feel worn out and worn down. In those moments, my mind goes back to our visit to her orphanage. She’s been home for 6 months and we are still learning each other. I’m learning what things trigger emotional responses in her, but it is a slow process. So much of her history is a blank page for me, so it is like putting together a puzzle with lots of missing pieces. Ultimately though, regardless of the missing pieces my response is the same. I will hold her through her grief. I will hold her now as a toddler when she doesn’t even know or understand the changes. I will hold her as a young girl when she faces the grief of recognizing she doesn’t look like her parents or siblings. I will hold her in grief when she understands what adoption means. I will hold her in her grief as a young woman who wrestles with questions I will never be able to answer.

I will hold her. Not because I am a great mom or because we did some noble thing by ‘rescuing her’. That is so far from reality.

I will hold her because she is my daughter.