Hello and Welcome to the Mom's and Adoption Blog!

Everyone is welcome here. It is an open format to discuss your feelings without judgment. If you have come to judge or say something unkind to adoptive parents, please leave now (yes, I said everyone was welcome, with one exception, however). Thank you.

Otherwise, thank you so much for coming! I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your comments and feedback. I started this blog to help other adoptive parents not to feel as isolated and alone in their feelings, as I did for so many years. With this blog, I hope to bring together the adoptive community as one. This is so we do not feel so alone and judged as we so many times do; even from ourselves. Please stay, relax and enjoy yourself. If at any time you feel judged, please let me know. Again thank you for coming.

How did you hear about this blog?

Family First

Family First
We love each other!

Monday, March 22, 2010

You don't have to defend OR save her....

I have found that since we have adopted our daughter, Isabella, it has been the oddest thing how so many family members and friends we have come across have felt they have needed to defend, save or treat her differently. This has been a big problem for my husband and I because not only do we have three other children whom people treated totally differently than they treated Isabella, but it has made a detrimental impact on our attachment with her.
Our friends and family (not all of them, but too many of them) did one of a few things right from meeting Isabella. One, they would feel sorry for her and what she has been through, so they would talk to her in a very different voice even from how they talk to my other daughters. They would use this 'baby voice' even though when we adopted her she was just turning eight-years-old! Her sisters were the one's who were the babies (even now they are 2, 3, 5 and Isabella is 13)! Yet, then, they wouldn't use a baby voice on the little one's. They would actually treat them less attentively and affectionately and less warmly and lovingly than Isabella. We found this with many people who would meet her for the first time, too. Even with therapists, people from church; anyone who got wind that she had been adopted and had lived in an orphanage. It was crazy. Here we were trying to build this attachment as a family, and we were constantly being bombarded with people who were coming in and trying to jockey for this position of wanting to give her so much love and attention. This was again, people who should NOT have been doing this. It was NOT their position. They should have been helping us to build an attachment with her, or staying out of the relationship!
In hind-sight my husband and I know how detrimental this was to our attachment, but at the time, we didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings because it was our friends and family. What a mistake that was. I know now if we would have followed our instincts, we may have built a stronger bond from the beginning. I don't know. There are so many questions now. And, of course the past few days I've had even more "what-ifs," because things seem to be worse than ever. Isabella is fighting so hard to control things around her. She won't follow the rules, is doing everything the opposite of what she is supposed to, she is lying about almost everything, hiding things, breaking things, she won't talk to us about anything, and hasn't for days, won't say "good-night," you name it, she is doing it. It has been very difficult. I have no answers as to what to do. Just surviving at this point. A lot of the stuff on paper probably sounds minor to other people, but when you add it up, and you are living with it 24/7, and it is constant, it gets to be too much as the parent! There is no outlet, no one to fill your tank, no answers to fix it, nothing......

To finish the other story....
So many people around us thought they had to "save her."
Wasn't that our job as the parents? It was so infuriating as others would treat us, constantly, like we didn't know what we were doing; we were incompetent (even though they had no experience in adoption or RAD or anything near this topic), yet they had all the answers (note the sarcasm)! My husband and I were far too nice letting so many people walk on us just because they wanted to try and save Isabella.
Or, worse yet, when I would try to confide in a friend or family member I thought was a safe person, they would instantly come to Isabella's rescue as though I was attacking her. All I was doing was opening up about what was going on as things were hard right from the start. She didn't need defending. I just needed someone to talk to. I know if I had been talking about one of my biological children, no one would have come to their rescue. That still happens to this day. People still constantly think they need to rescue her, defend her, save her and everything else I discussed.
Have any of you had problems like this with friends or family?

No comments:

Post a Comment