Post Adoption Grief

It took me well over a year to get past my post adoption grief, to emerge from the fog of foster care and find my feet again.

As we were approaching the adoption date, I could feel the hope and happiness coming from people close to the case. We were a success story for the department, the social workers, and so many other people working on it, and intellectually I knew that this was a win for our kiddo.

Not reunifying was a disappointment, yes, but the case was a win in other ways: she had only one foster placement instead of the average of four - us - and we were also going to be the adoptive placement. She had quickly bonded with us, and rather than facing another disruption, she would be staying with us. She had done far better than many peers who go through what she had gone through. There were lots of wins, significant ones.

However, unlike everyone else working on the case or in our village of support, my husband and I were the only ones who lived with our daughter. We were also the only ones who were tasked with supporting her in sorting out her confusion and grief. That was the experience up in my face, what I was concerned about as a mother: the sad hard parts, not the win.

No kid experiences childhood as an adult. The guideposts and markers of the foster care system, the court dates and process that give the experience shape, structure, and meaning for the adults, don’t mean anything to kids my daughter’s age at the time: toddlers and preschoolers.

Young kids have their own guideposts, their own way of experiencing and filtering their reality. What is tangible to them is different. For her, being adopted didn’t change anything - there was no tangible win. It was an amorphous thing. There was a 30 minute court date on Zoom, and daily life was exactly the same before and after.

But the shifting relationship to her family of origin, which was happening on a different timeline, was noted and notable for her. That was the tangible part, that was what she had to sit with.

As my daugher’s foster parents and then adoptive parents, we had to live in both worlds. There was the adult track: a whole slew of facts that we both cognitively processed and to which we had an emotional response. Then there was the kid track: this is where we were learning and applying knowledge and best practices from the foster and adoption world, and watching and listening to her so we could respond appropriately.

Both of these tracks took an incredible amount of bandwidth, but the second was in many ways harder, because it involved searching out appropriate resources, cognitively and emotionally digesting the information, and then figuring out how to translate all of that into our kid’s specific circumstances, world, and emotional reality, on an ongoing, ever shifting basis.

Little kids don’t digest big life changes in one sit down conversation. It takes snippets, moments, brief acknowledgements, short discussions, strung out over time. This reality requires a high degree of vigilance on the part of the parents, as the opportunities to address the issues at hand are rarely planned, or plannable - instead, one has to be ready to respond whenever an opening presents itself.

I just didn’t have much room for anything other than monitoring her reality, her trying to figure it out, for a long time.

* * *

And then one day, the clouds parted, the fog lifted. All of a sudden, I realized I was ok with what had happened. I wasn’t in the grief anymore,and I had the freedom to feel good, really, deeply good, about how the case panned out.

After months and years of persistence and vigilance and hard work and emotional labor, a foundation had come together under our family’s feet.

My daughter was safe, and happy, and loved. Full of life and vitality.

I could finally feel and embrace the victory I intellectually knew the adoption was.

I’m so grateful to the close friends who stood with me for the very long time when I wasn’t there yet. The friends who could hold space for the whole messy reality, who didn’t need me to edit out the painful parts or deliver them a sanitized story that fit a glossed over happy adoption narrative.

For the record, foster care took more than two years, and the grief after the fact a year and a season. I have no idea if that is on par with other families or not.

Admittedly, it may have taken such a long time due to other reasons - it was a year in which our family was going through other massive changes and griefs, and oh yeah, the pandemic, too. We were being hit with a rainbow of losses on lots of fronts. Everywhere we looked - more loss! It’s understandable that given how so many griefs happened in a compressed period of time, that getting through them all was a more complicated and elongated process.

It’s also worth noting that I grieved even though I fully agreed with the judge’s decision. My big fear going into foster care was not that I would be separated from a kid - a reality I fully expected - it was that I would be on a case where I felt a reunification was justified, but didn’t happen. That was what scared me - seeing a family get broken up due to an injustice, and feeling like despite my best efforts I couldn’t help. Feeling like I had worked so hard for something that was ultimately a wrongdoing.

Thank goodness that did not happen. Yet still, even though from what I could see reunification was not the right choice for this particular child, I still grieved that fact. I still saw the loss in that what was a set of parents losing their child, and a child losing their parents. There is an awfulness in that that for me could not, and cannot, be erased.

I cannot imagine how much longer I would have grieved if instead I felt that the adoption was due to an injustice.

But even so, it’s worth noting that emerging from foster care is a process unto itself, one that isn’t really discussed. We went through training to become foster parents, but there is no additional training to handle the transition to adoption, or exiting the system.

I tried to find support. We tried a support group, which wasn’t helpful at all. I sought out an adoption competent therapist, who also turned out to be not helpful at all. In many ways, just as confusing as foster care had been, the period after was even more confusing - because we were out of the system without even a map, however convoluted and confusing, to guide us.

We were just kind of ejected into the void to figure it out on our own.

We did, thankfully. After we moved we found a new organization and a new, much better support group. Given that everything in foster care and adoption is so much on a case by case basis, the help the support group provided wasn’t so much a road map as the camaraderie and humor of other people also trying to figure out their own paths.

Overall, I’m glad we didn’t force ourselves into happiness before we were ready. I’m glad we took time to grieve, and go at a our own pace. I’m glad we had the wisdom to seek out help, and quickly toss the things that weren’t helpful, and persist until we found something that did.

And now, I’m glad to be coming out of it. To be shedding the layers.

To be feeling happy and hopeful and peaceful.

It feels good to be able to enjoy my daughter, and her happiness; and the three of us together, and our happiness.

I know I probably won’t always feel this way. That there will be ups and downs. But the fact that I made it here at all, for any length of time, is a victory in and of itself.