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Adoption in Prime Time

Sometimes after the children are asleep, I watch television, and I have noticed several adoption stories taking place on different networks and different shows. ABC has Modern Family and Grey’s Anatomy. NBC has Parenthood and now Smash. And, CBS has NCIS. Now, I am not endorsing any of these shows or suggesting you watch any of them; I just found it interesting how common an adoption story is becoming to Prime Time television.

While the most common adoption story playing out is international adoption, Parenthood has an adoptive family matched with a birth mother, and NCIS had a character find out as an adult that she was adopted. I am always intrigued to see how screenwriters are going to let the different elements of adoption play out. Scenes from different shows caught my attention. On Smash, a couple with a teenager is in the process of adopting from China. When the dad learns the shortest the wait could be is 2 years, he doesn’t want to move forward with the process anymore. The teenager overhears his parents talking and later says, “…She’s waiting for us to come and get her. What’s going to happen to her if we don’t go get her?”

Another scene that caught my eye was on Parenthood. After the birthmother gives birth to a baby boy, the nurses place the baby boy in the adoptive mother’s arms and the birthmother turns her face away in anguish. They ended the episode implying the birthmother might change her mind, but they didn’t really make that clear.

The last scene is from NCIS. Through a series of events one of the main characters discovered she’s adopted. As she wrestled with this discovery and revealed it to another character, she said, “It’s me. I’m adopted.”

In the above-mentioned scenes adoption affects more than just the adoptive parents. These particular scenes highlight the birthmother, the adopted child, and nuclear family members; adoption affects these people and many more. It will affect anyone that you do life with.

As my husband and I began our adoption process, we read a book called Adoption is a Family Affair. If you haven’t read this book, I would suggest it as a way to start thinking about how adoption is going to affect your family and friends. There might be scenarios you haven’t considered or aspects you may want to explain more or that you may want to keep confidential. Whatever your situation, it’s beneficial to think about your family and friends and how you can help educate them on the adoption process. You are going to want your family and friends to be supportive, so take some time to support them.

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Experiencing Different Textures

My oldest daughter has been in my home longer than she was in an orphanage in Vietnam. And sometimes it’s easy to convince myself that those 6 and ½ months in the orphanage didn’t have much of an effect on her, but I am often reminded that it did. As my youngest daughter, who is 8 months old, explores and crawls around our home, it triggers memories of Elise doing the same.

As my youngest crawls everywhere seamlessly transitioning from seasgrass rug to laminate flooring to carpet, a memory of Elise walking around the edge of the seagrass rug for several months comes to mind. As my youngest grabs Elise’s plush hand me down toys, it strikes me that Elise never played with that toy, but she did enjoy all things plastic. As my youngest, latches on to a lovey, a baby doll, or a stuffed purple monkey, I remember Elise not loving a stuffed animal until she was one. And since turning three in June, Elise now has many stuffed animals and a favorite blanket.

After many months, Elise learned to branch out from just plastic toys, and she stopped walking around the edge of our seagrass rug. Currently, she prefers cotton knit pants to jeans and will occasionally don a bathing suit in the winter, but that could just be three-year-old antics.

The way Elise coped with different textures is a part of sensory processing. Sensory processing is something adoptive parents should educate themselves about. Dr. Karyn Purvis talks about sensory processing in this video:

Understanding Sensory Processing from Tapestry on Vimeo.

This post also appeared on http://tapestryministry.org/blog

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Overreacting

I’m sure no other parent is guilty of overreacting. My daughter can be quite dramatic and sometimes the things she says are worrisome, “Momma my legs are sore because there’s blood all over.” There’s clearly not blood all over her legs. But what does she mean? I wanted to be thorough, so I talked to some friends who helped me rule out blood clots, remembered that her infant multi-vitamin had iron in it, and googled iron deficiencies. After all, she went through a battery of blood tests between 6 and 8 months and follow up tests at a year and 2 years to check for a specific kind of anemia. I decided she needed to add iron to her multi-vitamin since she used to take a multi-vitamin with iron as an infant.  Plus Google said her cranky attitude was a symptom of iron deficiency.  (Side note: She has been taking her multi-vitamin with iron for two weeks and her cranky attitude has not been miraculously cured.)

This is just an example of me trying to track down a logical explanation to something my daughter said. Sometimes she’s being dramatic, sometimes she’s avoiding clean up time, and sometimes there is an adoption related issue. Now, I don’t think every parent should overreact or overthink a situation like me, but if you do have questions about nutritionhttp://adoptionnutrition.org is a great resource. Tapestry blogged about the website in this blog post, “Focusing on Food and Nutrition.”

In my defense, iron deficiency is possible in children from Vietnam, but at the end of the day, I was just trying to grasp a reason as to why my daughter is so cranky and why she says there’s blood all over. I’m not sure I’ll ever know what she meant by that statement (or eradicate all her cranky attitudes), but at least she likes her new vitamins.

This post also appeared on http://tapestryministry.org/blog

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Fear

When we made our annual trip to Horn Creek Colorado this past August, I signed up for the high ropes course. I had tried things out like this in my teenage years, but I was not prepared to feel so scared.

As I was climbing up the pole to begin the course, I kept thinking why am I doing this? And then once I was up, my heart started pounding, but I didn’t want to give up. I had to sing “Oh God, you are my God, and I will ever praise you REPEAT And step by step you’ll lead me, and I will follow you all of my days,” just to get across the ropes from one platform to the next. I never looked down, and I just kept singing those words to myself over and over again. When I finally made it to the zipline and touched the ground again, I felt so relieved. I was immediately aware that my heart was still pounding; I was thirsty, hungry, and exhausted. I got some water, a snack, and took some deep breaths until I calmed my body back down, and then I rested.

I was with some families from Tapestry, so we joked about how we needed the some of the strategies we learned in Empowered to Connect to help us through the high ropes course. But the reality is, my body and mind went through a fear response and recovered from it because I knew how to recognize what my body needed. Some of our children can deal with fear responses everyday if not constantly. Their hearts can always be racing as they struggle to feel felt safety. I had never realized how taxing a condition of fear could be until I experienced it for about 20-30 minutes. Is it any wonder some of our kids can have epic meltdowns? If they feel scared or threatened by a situation, we have no idea how long their hearts and adrenaline have been pounding especially if your child is unaware of their need and doesn’t have the tools to help themselves.

Empowered to Connect has some videos made by Dr. Karyn Purvis. Listen to Dr. Purvis talk about impact of fear.

This post also appeared on http://tapestryministry.org/blog.

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Things Were Better Before You Came

I recently read “Things Were Better Before You Came.” It’s a memoir written by Doug Walker, an adoptee.

Doug always knew he was adopted; he says, “The knowledge of my adoption was an extremely significant factor contributing to my self-worth. I had never been given any reason to doubt my parents’ love for me because I believed had been chosen.” Then one day in a moment of frustration Doug’s mother said the words that became the title of this book, “Things were better before you came.” As Doug works through how this statement affected him, he reflects a lot on his relationship with his mother.

What I found most interesting was how Doug considered how his mother’s past affected her parenting. He says, “I am now also able to acknowledge how much pain she had endured and how …[it]… contributed to her struggles as a parent.” Doug’s story is a good reminder to us deal with our pasts so we can better connect with our children. This is something Dr. Purvis talks about in her book “The Connected Child,” and in this video Looking at Ourselves to Help Our Children Heal.

Looking at Ourselves to Help Our Children Heal from Tapestry on Vimeo.

For more from Dr. Karyn Purvis visit http://www.empoweredtoconnect.org

To learn more about Doug Walker’s book visit http://thingswerebetter.com and learn more about Doug visit The Fellowship of the Parks.

This post also appeared on http://tapestryministry.org/blog.