Adoption & Attachment | How A Baby Handles Grief & Loss

Imagine for a moment that you are just beginning life. For nine months or so you grow and develop inside a warm, dark place. Your world is regulated by the rhythmic beating of a heart. Over time you begin to recognize a few voices and sounds, but one in particular is constant, a daily companion. Sometimes the beating heart races quickly, other times it slows and soothes you to sleep. Sometimes the voices are raised and animated. Other times they sound like the lapping of waves on a boat or the sweet singing of a bird.

One day you enter a strange place. Your world is suddenly bright and harsh. You cry out for that place where you were sheltered and warm. You listen for that heartbeat, that voice you came to rely on. But it's not there. Strange hands hold you. Their smell isn't comforting. You call out, but the rhythm, the warmth, the soothing lyrics are gone.

The loss I've tried to describe in that story is what every adopted child goes through at some point.

Perhaps the loss happens when they are older, but inevitably, it happens. For the adoptive family, the reality of their child's loss may not be immediately apparent. After all, they are welcoming the child into their home, gaining rather than losing. But for the child, it's important to realize that everything that was familiar is now gone. For the adoptee, loss is an experience that they may have to go through before they even have the words to describe it.

Loss as an adoptive parent

As an adoptee, I didn't grow up thinking much about my loss. I had my adoptive family and I couldn't imagine growing up in any other situation. It wasn't really until I became an adoptive parent, trying to understand my own daughters' situation that I started to think about what I'd gone through as an infant.

As part of the adoption process, we've had to read a lot of materials on adoption. It's interesting to read these as an adoptee. I've led discussions for adoptees and thought a lot about how adoption has affected my identity. But adoption training is focused on getting the parent to understand the adoptee's experience.

As a parent, of course, you want to get it all right. But I've had to process a lot of the materials as an adoptee first. Some I agree with, while some have been extremely negative and paints a terrifying picture for any family - the adoptee is a victim who will never be able to escape their "handicaps." I hope to write more about what it was like growing up as an adoptee and why I never viewed myself as a victim, but I want to focus on loss for now.

Loss as an adoptee

One thing I've gained from the training materials is that as adoptive parents, we need to understand our daughters' loss. Just because I never focused on my loss growing up, that doesn't mean I couldn't feel it. I just couldn't understand it. I didn't have the language to explain it and even if I had, I don't think I would've shared those feelings for fear of hurting my parents.

But knowing as an adult how grief affects us, many of the feelings I had as a kid make sense now.

Attachment disorder

I hesitate to use "disorder" but that is the "official" term. Children who experience severe trauma, abuse, or loss at a young age can struggle to form healthy attachments with others.

Picture what life would be like if we continued the story above. There are many scenarios that could happen next, but let's imagine that for the next two months you are held by different strangers, living in a hospital, being jabbed with needles, and surrounded by the constant beeping of hospital machinery.

This is what the twins' life looked like before they became part of our family. Their birth mother was able to visit them occasionally but she had a difficult time recovering from her C-section and she had already decided to place them for adoption. In the meantime, different shift nurses took care of them and as I've mentioned before, "agents" or human traffickers also came by to see them.

When I brought the twins home, I kept wondering how different everything must be for them. Our condo was relatively quiet apart from the steady flow of visitors. I held them often, sang to them and fed them until they were full.

But they were always on the alert. Even though they were tiny babies, their eyes darted around as they tried to figure out what might happen next. Squish especially worried a lot.

As the weeks passed, I watched as they became less stressed and started to recognize their surroundings. We celebrated when we reached the point where they'd been with us as long as they'd been in the hospital. But there were still moments of sadness. Times when the girls had everything they needed - food, a clean diaper, sleep, cuddles - but they would cry from their heart. All we could do was hold them and tell them we loved them.

A hard lesson

When the girls were about 6 months old, we had friends come over to visit. We hadn't had many visitors for several months and Matt and I had gotten into a routine of feeding the girls together. Wanting to help, our friend fed Squirt while I fed Squish. But after they left, Squirt seemed to check out. She wouldn't even look me in the eye. I held her and talked to her. Finally, I sang a song to her that I'd made up when it was just us and Matt was in the US. She responded right away and looked up at me.

The relief in her eyes to see that it was me made me want to laugh and cry at the same time. I was so glad she recognized me, but it broke my heart that it had hurt her to be fed by someone else. I don't know where her thoughts went in those moments but afterward, I wanted her to know she was safe and loved. Needless to say, we've been careful to schedule visits around feedings.

Love can grow out of loss

Thankfully, as we continue to love them consistently, the girls are forming normal, healthy attachments. They're learning to trust us and differentiate us from strangers. But loving them and helping them to understand their grief won't end anytime soon. Their grief will manifest itself in many forms and probably differently for both of them. I anticipate that when they're parents, they'll understand their grief in a new way and I hope I can be there for them.

Loss is something we all face at some point in our lives. But it's hard to imagine that a child, an infant could experience it at such a tender age. While it can present many challenges, among them distrust and an aversion/inability to form healthy attachments, walking through loss at a young age can also build a strong heart that's empathetic to others' loss.

As much as we hurt for our children when they grieve, I hope that as parents, we will cultivate strong hearts in our daughters.

If you're interested in reading the beginning of our story:

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