I Have Your Socks

You've outgrown your socks again. I noticed them riding just above the bottom of your heel this morning.

The socks you wore new the first day of school. The socks thrust forward as you practice your front kick. The socks you stained like pitch when you "rescued" a snail from a mulch bed in a rainstorm and snuck out a few minutes later - forgetting your shoes - because you were worried there might be others out there that wouldn't survive the storm.

I love your socks.

I love them because they're yours. I love them because they touch you and hold you and shape to you.

I have your socks.

I wonder if your first mom wishes she did.

Back to blogging

After a loooong time away I'm blogging again. Here and also at I Was a Much Better Parent Before I Had Kids.

I'm looking forward to connecting/re-connecting with you!

Best-selling Adoption Book on Sale (Kindle)

The Amazon Kindle e-book version of What I Want My Adopted Child to Know: An Adoptive Parent's Perspective is available for just $2.99 during the month of November.

Sally

Frozen (adoption-style)

I wrote this post sometime this past spring, and I didn't post it until now because I've been... well, frozen.

I've been frozen for too long. Frozen because any movement is risky. Frozen because most everything I see and hear and read and feel in Adoptoland makes sense enough until I move in any direction. The slightest shift springs a crack that splits into 2, then 4, then 8, which spread like a spider army marching, marching, marching in all directions at once, until everything cracks and nothing bears weight and I'm drowning once again. I'm bone weary of talking about adoption.

I stay out of the adoption cybersphere for months, and then on a brisk, sunny day in early spring I'm pulled back in by Claudia's piece about Gaslighting. I love reading Claudia's thoughts. And I'm jealous. Jealous because the whole world gets to know what Claudia thinks and feels, and I don't get to know squat about my kids' first moms. Oh sure, I know demographic details, I know superficial things about them and their families, but I don't know anything that matters. I don't know how they feel when they look at the pictures we send. I don't know what blogs they read. I don't know if they're planting a garden, taking a class, resenting me...  I know more what strangers think and feel than I do my own kids' first moms. That's messed up. Frozen.

Jeni's Gone

The world has lost an amazing force and friend. I'm too sad. Sally

Open Note to Absent First Mothers

Despite the impression the media likes to give, it's not always the adoptive parents who break off the relationship.

Sometimes we do everything we can to stay connected, and after 2, 3, several years it's the first mother who drops off the radar; doesn't return calls; ignores emails; stops sending pictures and letters; no-shows our get-togethers. Takes herself out of the child's life.

I "get" (as well as I can) a first mother's need to do that. But it's upsetting for the child. As abandonment issues go, it's pretty high on the pain scale.

I'm not asking anyone to justify their feelings or actions.

I'm just saying.
Sally

Casey's Story

When John Brooks first emailed me I didn't respond. I read his request to share his family's story here, and for a while, I just did nothing. It's summer vacation, and my kids and I are living the life with trail hikes and fresh berries, fireflies and flying kites, we're painting rocks and rocking out in our wading pool air band, and it's nothing about adoption or adoptive parenting or having been adopted, and then here's this stranger... this, this father... and I know he's trying to help other people heal, but his experience as an adoptive parent was (thankfully) very different from my own. It's awfully sad, and I think about how each time I slip down the slope it takes more out of me, and I'm afraid one of these times I won't be able to climb back up, so I don't write back. 


But his story tugs like a plaintive child. And I think of Myst and Von and Christina and Amanda and Linda Lou Who and Ariel and Jeni and other people who reveal adoption's disturbing underbelly... and the children I know who were adopted from orphanages. And Casey. So here it is: Casey's Story by guest blogger John Brooks, with gratitude to him for reaching out and telling it.  


Casey's Story

Ours was a familiar story. My wife, Erika, and I turned to adoption in 1991. We thought surely there were millions of babies out there in need of two loving people desperate to be parents. Then we learned about the realities of adoption. A foreign adoption seemed our best bet, but options were limited then. To improve our chances, we’d need to be open to an “older” or “special needs” child. This was not how we envisioned starting a family, but we wanted to be parents.

A chance encounter with another adoptive family steered us to an adoption attorney in Warsaw, Poland. Erika was of Polish descent and spoke the language. Maybe this was our chance. In a late night phone call to Warsaw from our home in Connecticut, the attorney was sympathetic but discouraging. She had a long backlog of clients and available children were scarce. What about an “older” or “special needs” child, Erika asked. It was then that we first heard about a fourteen-month-old girl in a rural orphanage. In a matter of five short months, we’d rushed through home studies and background checks before boarding a LOT flight to Poland to receive our daughter, who we’d named Casey. It was nothing less than a miracle.

Casey was an unwanted pregnancy, a three-pound preemie whose twin sister had been stillborn. She went straight from the delivery room to an incubator to an orphanage in Mrągowo in Poland’s northern lake district. At fourteen months, she was withdrawn, listless, unable to sit, crawl or feed herself. Medical records were scant. But to us she was perfect; nothing that two able bodied Americans couldn’t fix with love.

Indeed in the years that followed, it seemed that a loving home was all Casey needed. We moved from Connecticut to the San Francisco Bay Area where she transformed into a bright, spirited, charming little girl. 

 But in the privacy of our home, things were often different - violent tantrums, crying jags, defiance. We looked for answers from friends, pediatricians, therapists, counselors and pastors, but were assured repeatedly that Casey was just high-strung; she’d grow out of it. In the meantime, we had to be tough with her. Though fully aware of her abandonment and adoption, the professionals never explored the matter.

At seventeen, Casey gained early admission to Bennington College in Vermont with a bright future ahead. She wanted to make a difference in the world.

But she never made it.

Just five months shy of her high school graduation, she took the keys to our car, drove to the Golden Gate Bridge and jumped.

Drowning in grief, I looked for answers. How could this have happened? What did everyone miss? What could we have done differently? I went to the library and scoured the Internet for everything I could find on adoption, something I’d never thought to do before. I learned about attachment disorders that can have a devastating effect on orphaned children. It explained everything – the angel at school and the tyrant at home, the tantrums, crying jags, low self-esteem and defiance, things that she kept carefully hidden behind a suit of armor from parents, therapists and friends. 

 How could everyone have been so blind?

I connected with other parents of children adopted from foreign orphanages and heard similar stories. Some stumbled onto appropriate treatments whereas others, like us, were left in the dark. Adoption and attachment experts shared with me the therapies and parenting techniques that have proven effective in dealing with the unique emotional needs of orphaned children. This information was in the public domain, yet everyone involved in Casey’s short life missed it.

I can’t have another Casey, a do-over. She was one of a kind. But regardless of the tragic outcome, I’ll always consider myself the luckiest guy in the world to have been her dad for sixteen of her seventeen years. 

 

From her death we learned that adoptees can be exposed to disorders that are still misunderstood by many professionals. Not every adoptee has attachment issues, but for those who do, treatment can be illusive.

Other adoptive parents who may struggle with what we did can use our story as a learning experience. Acknowledge your child’s loss, parent her in a way that may not be intuitive to you, get her the right kind of help. Just “loving her enough” may not be enough.

Hopefully, that will save a precious life.

About the Author

John Brooks is a former senior media financial executive who has turned to writing, suicide and adoption advocacy since Casey’s death in 2008. He recently completed a memoir about his experience as an adoptive father and his journey to understand his daughter’s suicide, titled The Girl Behind The Door: My Journey Into The Mysteries Of Attachment. He also writes a blog, Parenting and Attachment. 

Sally