Adoption and trauma parenting raises a lot of insecurities but requires you to check ego at the door. Although I believe that to be true for all parents, adoptive parenting can often mean sharing your child with the memories of a birth family, the physical presence of one, or most difficult, the longing for the presence or memories of a birth family never met. Because of these losses and the need to build healthy attachment, grief and trauma parenting can be extremely counter intuitive. For months, I could not discipline my children, I had chronic back pain as I had to handle two growing toddlers like newborns, we were isolated from our families and friends not able to let anyone into our bubble until each child attached to at least one parent. To this day, we still hold back on allowing even our immediate family to feed our children, pick them up, and we rarely allow anyone to put them to bed or have sleepovers.
There are mutual emotions and challenges that come with parenthood. One of my personal pain points though, is when our children are compared to children who have been raised and nurtured by their birth parents. “All kids do that.” False. It is not the same. My children are not the same. I am not the same, how we parent is not the same, how my children’s brains are developing is not the same. Our experience as a family, it is not the same. And I simply do not have the time or capacity to educate every person on why.
Grief management and the necessity for a heightened awareness of daily triggers is a full-time journey that demands a level of learned emotional intelligence. It is intense and top of mind all. of. the. time. Triggers often cannot be identified because they happen at a brain level. You see the change in behaviour, you can experience significant regression, or a regular cry becomes an emotional grief cry; you can’t necessarily pinpoint what caused it. Sounds, smells, food, music, seasons, friends, teachers, school, language, birthdays, holidays, vacations, anything, and everything can individually and collectively trigger a child who has endured trauma. A change or transition requires thoughtful planning, but no matter how good you are as the grief manager, big emotions are guaranteed and unpredictable.
