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School will be starting here next week, although we are not quite ready. There are supplies to be purchased, clothing to be bought, and backpacks to be packed with everything they will need. This year even my BABY will be in preschool two mornings a week, and I am feeling overwhelmed by many feelings connected with this season in our lives.
This also marks the end of the first year of my having left the workforce. I left a job of eight years at that same school last fall, to be a stay home mom. It has been a difficult transition for me, one where I do not always feel a ton of support or connection with other non-working mothers. It also reminds me of yet another challenging time I felt adrift and on my own. Oddly enough this was when I was still working and adopted my last two newborns. Part of the reason I left my job, was to give my children more of my time and energy, things that those at my job did not seem to appreciate or need half as much as my new children did.
When my second baby came home I had been working at my school for several years. Other teachers at the school were also expecting infants around the same time, but I often felt as though I was not included in their group. People did not treat me like an new mom. Adoption sometimes, in some minds, just does not put you in the same parenting boat. Often others don’t see it the same. I know I remember feeling pressure to return to work after 6 weeks or lose my position, not a real supportive thing for a new mother to feel. I also noted that a ton more understanding was afforded the other mothers at the school who had given birth to their children.
I just remember feeling as though I was not being treated as a mother of a newborn baby, perhaps because my baby came to me through adoption. When I talked about the frustrations and challenges of newborn care, my concerns were passed off as just my own inability to connect to this strange baby. I was also reminded how my newborn came to me the “easy” way, no nine months, no stretch marks, no intense labor. What was I complaining about? I should be able to keep doing all the things that I did before, after all I was not recovering from a delivery or a c-section, right?
What people failed to realize is that although I did not endure the “before” birth labor, I was certainly experiencing the after effects. I was going through ALL the trials and tribulations of caring for a newborn. . . and then some things they could not hope to understand.
To begin with we had welcomed two newborns in an eighteen month time period. Each time we learned of the possible placement, we had just thirty days till the baby was born and home with us. Once the baby was home, we had all the normal new baby issues, no sleep, tons of work and worry, and late night feedings. From our perspective things were challenging, emotional and draining, just like any new parents might experience.
Then things really get more difficult, because our newborns also had birthparents, and extended birthfamily. At the same time we were learning to form connections with our new children, we were doing the same with their birthfamilies. I admit that this alone was probably one of the most challenging things, something the other new moms I knew did not have a clue about.
While most parents need only worry about bonding and getting to know a new baby, we also had to get to know the birthfamily, and try not to let jealousy and insecurity cloud the budding relationships with our children or them. At some point all of these things became more than I could endure, and still work outside the home, and so I gave my resignation.
I wish I could say that I stayed home each time I welcomed a new baby, if I could go back I would definitely change that about my experience. I was so anxious to do what I though other people expected me to do, that I returned to work six weeks after each child was born. What I can see now though, is that other people we not looking at me the same way as if I had birthed my infants, so they did not see a need for me to be less available at work. The truth is I needed to be more available to my children, and from the very start. While that might not be every new mother’s story, it is mine, and it was learned a bit to late.
So now I have been home for a full year. In some ways this is what I should have done for myself, and my children, from the time they entered our family. As adoptees they needed more from me than I was be providing at the time. As an adoptive mother, looking back I see I had MORE need to be cut some slack, than I might have even if I had given birth. Adoption is harder, and the labor pains never completely go away.
Now I spend to much of my time fixing things that have developed (attachment) partly because I was not with my babies full time, and giving them my all, and partly because I hold such anger inside with myself over my own guilt. I think with every new child that is born, a guilty new mother will grow along with that child. I wish I could have known how much leaving my job back then would mean to who my children are today. I also hope, having finally left it, that some things can be mended, and some salvaged. Their childhoods are moving forward, the start of school is yet another milestone, one that I hope will be made more positive because I was working for my children this time.
Open Adoption, Letting Go, And The Mother Of All Wet Blankets
Although I have never adopted, it would seem completely logical to me that parents who do adopt need more free time to bond with their children than someone who goes through a pregnancy. Every day of my pregnancy was a bonding day with my child. Once he was born, I had only to hold him to my chest where he heard a familiar heartbeat that would soothe him. It seems to me that parents who adopt have to play quite a bit of catch-up. I’m so sorry your co-workers were so wrapped up in themselves that they didn’t see what you were going through.
Thank you for sharing all that you have in this blog for other parents.