So, been thinking for a while about sharing our story of adoption in the hope that it might help other families and because it is such an incredible journey, it feels somehow important to document. Maybe one day it will also be important for our daughter who shall remain anonymous as this is her story too and she may not want to share it. I’ll call her Angel as we called her our ‘angel child’ for the first six months of her time with us, knowing full well that as soon as she felt safe enough, a more fully rounded two-year old would emerge. She was also referred to as an ‘angel child’ by her birth mum and dad who had lost a previous pregnancy and so were very grateful when they fell pregnant with her. Angel is 9 and will be 10 in July. Right now we are what I call ‘in the cut’. We have just come out of our longest spell of equilibrium (about 3 months) and I felt a new baseline of her self-worth had been reached. It probably has but when the wound opens up, it’s incredible how deep it g
It is still a struggle but rather than punching through newspaper, Angel is going to the park every evening, sometimes twice! ‘Mummy, I need to go out,’ she mouths silently to me across the kitchen. The longer evenings help. Just keep moving. I’m not sure if we are emerging from ‘the cut’ or just learning to live in it, but change is afoot. A wise person once said that you can’t change other people, you can only change yourself. I realise I need to change. It starts with a podcast. It is an interview with a woman called Mary Joy who is a therapist specialising in helping adopters. She is also an adopter. She says there is very little provision for adopters and all the support is aimed at adoptees; that parenting children with trauma can cause secondary trauma particularly for those adopters who already have childhood trauma of their own. She finds many adopters who have coped for years reach a threshold where suddenly they can’t. She ends by saying you are not going mad, you are not