Most of you who know me and who interact with me on a regular basis get your fill of hearing about adoption and what I do for a living. I'm pretty darn passionate about what I do and so I like to talk about my job when given the opportunity to do so. I would say that about 98% of the time I get very positive feedback and interest in the career path that I've chosen and I usually hear comments like "wow, that must be very rewarding" or "it must feel so good to know that you are finding homes for children in need". And yes, there are parts of my job that make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside and I feel as if I was able to assist a family or a child with a particular struggle that they might be going through. But before coming to my current job I was employed as an adoption preservation therapist. Think about that title for a few minutes. My job was to help preserve families who were formed through adoption. That means that for some reason a family was in danger of no longer being a family. Does that sound like the "ideal job"? :-)
While I support adoption 100% as a great way to find a home for a child who does not have a home, it's a LIFETIME commitment that requires more than just love. I love my biological children with all of my heart, but does parenting them require more than just love? You betcha. And parenting an adopted child comes with it's own unique and difficult challenges on top of "typical" parenting tasks. So that's why my agency is developing and creating a more expansive post adoption unit to assist adoptive parents and adoptees with additional support groups, resources, educational workshops, adoption-competent counseling and my favorite-a summer camp! I worked for many years on the "other end" of adoption-the happy placement period where I watched so many families be united with their babies and they felt as if their lives were now complete. Well, now several years later those same happy families are the ones calling us for additional support. They now realize that the issues we told them about in pre-adoption training were REAL issues and not just ones that we made up so that we would have something to talk about during our 3 hour home study interview....sorry, pardon my sarcasm. I do, however, appreciate that those same families are actually seeking out services to help their family versus sending their child back to Russia on a plane alone with a note that says they can't handle their child anymore.
So, where am I going with this? I guess more than anything is to be aware that adoption is not always those joyous occasions in which you see a Korean child placed for the first time into the arms of his expectant mother at the airport and they all lived happily ever after. What you don't see is that child crying for several days after being placed into his new mother's arms because he is mourning the loss of the foster mother who cared for him in Korea for six months of his life. You don't see the adoptive mother crying by herself in the bathroom because she is feeling like a failure for not being able to soothe her child. What you don't see is that child at age 5 asking why he was abandoned by his birth mother and why she didn't love him.
Now that I've got you seriously re-thinking adoption and the process....just know that there is hope. Adoption agencies, therapists, schools, girl scout groups and after school programs are becoming much more aware of the deep need for post adoption services. I am so excited to be able to teach kids with our WISE Up program that they have choices in how they respond to questions about adoption. I am ecstatic about our adoption summer camp in which kids can share with one another their adoption stories, questions that they have about their birthparents, cry about their losses and learn how to express their feelings in a healthy and appropriate way. I know that our parent education workshops will assist adoptive parents in developing tools to help them identify when their child is going through a typical developmental issue or when they are having questions about adoption. I can't wait to watch movies with adoption themes and have a discussion afterwards so that families can use those as a catapult for a great conversation with their child.
So, while my job is probably not the "happy go lucky" job that you imagined it was, I still look forward to going to work every day because I want to assist families, educate them and give them the support that they need so that there is no reason that the words adoption disruption are ever uttered.
http://www.sunnyridge.org/
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