By Karen Peters, Registered Clinical Counsellor and Adoptive Mom
The decision to adopt isn’t simple, even if you’ve always wanted to go that path to grow your family. The lead up is filled with complex and carefully weighed questions, years worth of paperwork, meetings and waiting. It is most often an emotional rollercoaster with endless turns on the track you couldn’t have anticipated. And then the call comes in. The point at which everything you’ve worked towards and waited for has finally arrived. In all that preparation, you’ve been anchored to this future moment. But once you have your child in your arms, you need new and ongoing anchors that bring your focus to keeping meaningful and growing relationships at the forefront.
15 years ago, Chris and I got married. While dating, one of the things that became quickly clear to us was that we were on the same page about how we wanted to grow a family. Adoption was on both our hearts. A painless decision making process really. Not long after we tied the knot we researched how we could make this dream come true. And that’s when reality started to hit. The classes we attended highlighted things that poked hard at my husband’s anxiety, and it temporarily but painfully knocked us off our common route. To navigate this, we had to learn new ways of communicating and tolerating the stress of being “off” in our connection when we considered ourselves still in the honeymoon phase. And then came the role division, which we really didn’t talk about… it just sorta happened. My way of coping with the inundation of forms, rules and regulations was to go into hyper-speed tunnel mode, losing sight of holding other important things in focus, and Chris’ way was to avoid it. If you had asked us if we wanted to adopt at that point, we still would have both said yes. It wasn’t really about our commitment to the process and outcome, it was more about how we were learning the ways in which each of us responded to overwhelming stress. We got through that phase too, and then there were the conversations about moving homes to a space that would be more suitable for growing a family, how we’d restructure financial goals to afford the adoption fees and what our career futures would look like when we – with little warning, and in who knows how long down the road – became parents. Not small things to navigate when you’ve only been together for a couple of years. At some point we decided to share the news with friends and family about what we were planning and I gotta say, it was met with mixed reviews. We expected excitement and joy, we expected others to align with how we felt about it. But instead people pricked holes in our helium balloons with warnings about why we shouldn’t go that route. Part of the process of applying to adopt is having a physical done by your doctor. My GP said to me, “amazing….you guys are going to make great parents.” Chris’ doctor said to him, “why would you do this? I’m not sure I’ll endorse this form because you shouldn’t take babies from other parents who can’t have kids”. Family members offered up all their personal anecdotes about “adoptions gone wrong” in an effort to get us to rethink things and realize the risk would be too high and why not take the “easier” route. No one was short on opinions, but nothing came up that we hadn’t already heard or thought through. Our decision was unwavering, but the feedback still felt deflating.
Then came this period of waiting, which felt like an eternity, mostly because even when that call comes in a relatively short amount of time, it’s unpredictable, leaving you to wait in a state of endless wondering. There’s no known finish line – it’s a race without knowing when you’ll be done and with every bend, there’s a new stretch. We used that time to go into baby-prep mode, researching strollers, choosing baby room colors, running names by one another hoping that that perfect one would emerge from a very long list of possibilities. It somehow kept us distracted from the pain of waiting.
3 years after our first daughter came home, we were well into our second process, and had several matches where the birthparent(s) had a change of heart or situation just at or after the birth of their babies. In one case, baby showers had already been thrown for us, I had applied for work leave and we had chosen his name. The flights were purchased and when the phone rang we assumed it was the social worker telling us to get on that flight. Instead, it was to cry with us at 3am after delivering the news of a changed decision. That grief runs deep. It’s devastating, actually, and takes more than just time to heal from. When your sense of loss is triggered, it can make you less than gracious in how you relate to others, you can withdraw and shut down. For me, I lived with nausea for weeks and fell apart emotionally in random moments including half way down aisle 8 of the grocery store. For Chris, he describes that period of time as feeling completely numb and detached, leaving us hungry for secure reconnection with one another. When you are a couple, it’s these heartbreaks that can make or break your relationship. We bumbled along through those years, refocusing our attention on our then toddler, setting aside our overwhelming sadness in bouts so that we could play with her, read to her, and enjoy her while she fell asleep in our arms.
This is just a tiny glimpse into our adoption journey as a family. There’s so, so much more I could share. What I want to highlight is this: our couples relationships matter and they require some serious scaffolding to weather the predictably unpredictable stress of the adoption process. If I could go back in time and do it over, I would still get excited about baby names and room colors, but I would pay much, much more attention to investing in the bones of our couples relationship – how we were going to hold one another up and through tough hardships, how we would commit to turning toward one another instead of retreating to our individual coping strategies, how we’d balance our roles to foster long term stability and wellness rather than fall into automatic patterns that would take way more work to undo after years of parenting. Figure out what we each needed for self care and how to allow and provide space for that when needed. When resentment started to creep in and our emotional resources were spent, how were we going to find ways to start hard conversations softly and really hear one another when we felt frayed.
In 2019 I was certified as a Bringing Baby Home educator through the well known Gottman Institute. It’s a course preparing new parents for the amazing but stressful life phase ahead and it doesn’t focus on caring for your baby. It focuses on couplehood – how to build and strengthen your couples relationship to handle the inevitable stressors of being new parents. It got me pumped – stoked to bring these research-based skills and concepts to couples who could still implement this in their early parenting years. On the 5 hour drive home from the training, I thought through all the material I had learned but this time through the lens of the adoptive family experience. There are unique challenges for couples who are growing their families through non-biological means, and I wanted to reach those couples too. Topics like grief and loss, parenting from a trauma-informed lens, preparing for open relationships with birthfamilies, learning around interracial dynamics and cultural inclusion, and so much more.
The skills needed to buffer the storms that inevitably come with the territory of parenting are so well researched by Dr. Gottman and his team. They are valuable throughout the course of any long term couples relationship, not just when you first have children. The best time, however, to learn these skills and maximize their benefits is before you bring additions into your family fold. The dynamics and patterns you set now will set the stage for solid co-parenting, strong and secure attachments and help you keep your feet on the ground when the stress ramps up. You’re better when you operate together, and who doesn’t have that as a primary goal when raising a family?
While a few of us counsellors at ThriveLife Counselling & Wellness offer the Bringing Baby Home course, we’ve had to suspend the group classes in the community until Covid-19 safety guidelines open up. In the meantime, I’m using this opportunity to create a uniquely adapted version of the concepts and materials meant specifically for couples who are waiting to adopt or who have recently adopted children of any age. It’s called “Adoption: What to do While You Wait”, and it will be available online so you can access it easily and do it at your own pace.
If you want to learn more, you can subscribe to my Living Room Learning page for updates about when it’s available and details about what we’ll cover: https://www.my.thrive-life.ca/lrlseries
If you’d like some at home reading to explore this topic further, I’d encourage you to read Dr. John & Julie Gottman’s book, And Baby Makes Three.
If you’re in a holding pattern, waiting for that long awaited call, strength to you. If you’ve recently adopted and are looking to be intentional about your couples relationship, I am excited for you – it’s well worth your investment and I wish you well as you continue to learn and grow together.
About the Author
