Sunday, September 26, 2010

Waiting

I'm still waiting. I'm tired of waiting. I want to bring my daughter home. I was so sure that everything was going so smoothly up until now. Doubt is starting to creep in. I hate it. I'm getting emotional whenever I think about the adoption... that might also be due to the fact that Livi is teething and I was sick. I have to catch up on the sleep that I've been missing. Livi has been waking up at least 3 times a night due to her sore molars! Not normal for her and I am missing my sleep :(

So, where are we with the adoption? Well, I emailed my agency last week to check up on things. I'm sure they are thoroughly annoyed with my incessant questions. They told me that our Dossier is "actively being translated". Since it has been two and a half months since we submitted our Dossier to our agency and we were told that this stage of the process takes 2-3 months, I'm assuming/hoping that means it is being translated in Bulgaria. Once we are translated and accepted to adopt by the Bulgarian Ministry of Justice we officially begin waiting... or hopefully choosing.

I'm having doubts about how long the right referral is going to take though. Like I said in a previous post, they already have our homestudy and we haven't received a referral, even though I know there are waiting little girls who would fit in to our family. I've also received second hand information that the two girls we were starting to consider are being adopted. Don't get me wrong, I'm so happy for them and I hope they have incredible lives... I'm just very eager to meet our daughter.

I think the other trigger to my over emotional state is the that if we hadn't decided to adopt, we would have started trying to get pregnant around now. I'm not feeling the urge to get knocked up at all. I'm just feeling so ready to get on with this adoption! There are so many things in this adoption that are completely out of my control! I don't do well with being out of control :)

The other disheartening thing with the adoption right now is that we haven't heard from the citizenship office. There is two parts to the citizenship process. I've sent in the Part 1 application in and got a response that it would take 8 weeks for a response... That was almost 17 weeks ago. I haven't followed up because I've heard that this office is notorious for this. I will be following up this week though.

The one good adoption news I have is that the connecting agency from Bulgaria is here in Vancouver next week for a conference. Monday night I am going to a question and answer night all about adopting from Bulgaria! I hope this trip of theirs is the other reason our Dossier acceptance is taking so long.

Please pray, or do whatever you do, to help bring our child to us. I'm tired of waiting.

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Sick and Whining

I'm looking at a pretty busy week and I'm sick. Why do you always get sick at the worst times? My daughter is at the tale end of her cold too... she started it all. Jon is continuing to ward it off with a strict regiment of whiskey. It works. I forgot to take some at the onset and got sick. Jon burned those germs up with the kick of hard liquor and remains healthy. It is only a matter of time before we start giving it to Livi to keep her healthy! (Maybe I shouldn't have written that down :P)

On top of Livi being at the end of her cold, she is a little off too. My mom took her to church this morning and Livi wouldn't stay in the nursery with out her. Then when Jon took her to church tonight (I stayed home sick) she cried again, wouldn't play with the toys and ignored the other kids. This is very unlike her. She usually jumps into the nursery... or anything... without a second look back at Mom or Dad. I'm hoping this is just a short little phase because I am sick. I'm supposed to work the next three days in a row and am hoping she is okay with staying with Gramma, Marmee and Daddy. I feel so guilty leaving her when she is like this. It is so rare that I feel I should cater to it... like she needs a little extra Mommy time right now for some reason that I can't figure out. Maybe she is teething? How many molars are kids supposed to get?

Okay, this is a really boring post. I'll understand if you didn't read this far. I'm sick. I'm complaining. I'm not looking forward to working three days in a row.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Confessions of a Mom with Attachment Disorder

This article nearly made me cry. I think the possibility of not attaching to my future daughter is my biggest fear with our adoption. I can deal with "bad" behaviors, different medical issues and even her not attaching to me, but if I can't attach to her I won't want to deal with anything. This article really hit home and is a must read for any adoptive parents and anyone supporting those adopting parents.

Confessions of a Mom with Attachment Disorder
That's right, I have attachment disorder, not my daughter
September 01,2010 / Dawn Choate
Maybe I should have left my name off this one. Perhaps I could have been one of the anonymous writers who change their name to protect their identity. I will probably open my inbox to find I've been booted off a Yahoo adoption group or two after this confession. I'm sure I won't be invited to the next LifeBook creation group or called up by the Discovery Channel to cover my next adoption. But, I'm not really confessing this to win any popularity contests anyway. The truth is, I am quite certain that what I am about to confess is a dark, deeply held secret of other adoptive parents out there and I am just the one with the big enough mouth to say it. Okay, here I go.

I have attachment issues.


Yes, me. Not my daughter (our second adoption), although she has her own set of attachment issues, too. But I am talking about me. After a year and a half, my heart still struggles to latch on firmly, to feel free and open with her, to feel the wonderful bonded feeling of being completely attached in heart and spirit to another person. I still catch myself looking blankly at her, wondering if I even know her yet. I am still more easily frustrated by her, less patient, slower to forgive and recover after she misbehaves. I still have to fight feelings of wanting to pay more attention to the children with whom it is easier to feel close. And sometimes I am the one who can go without contact with her and not feel like I even miss her absence.

Before you lynch me, before you throw me to the Yahoo group trash bin, before you black list my name to every agency on planet earth and turn me in to Dr. Phil and his evil message boards.
Let me leave you with some thoughts just in case this strange phenomenon ever lurks its way into your adoption fantasy and threatens to turn it into a nightmare.

Why Adoptive Parents Face Difficulties in Bonding
There are many reasons an adoptive parent may experience difficulty in bonding with their new child. Post-adoption depression is actually a term used now by many therapists and experts in the field. Below are some possible reasons a parent might struggle with bonding:
  • Unresolved grief over a previous child-related issue (such as miscarriages, inability to conceive, previous adoptions that fell through or previous difficulties with an adoption)
  • Previous experiences with attachment issues with an adopted child
  • Adopting an older child who no longer exhibits the natural baby/toddler development stages that promote bonding with a parent
  • Adopting out of birth order (this can make navigating the baby of the family developmental stage tricky)
  • Attachment issues in the child that cause the parent to feel rejected
  • Inability to communicate adequately with the child (language difficulties, speech issues, special needs issues)
This is, of course, only a partial list of the myriad of possible reasons a parent may feel that block that prevents the free-flow of emotion from parent to child. It is a list that we could mark off multiple items that relate to our experience. When we adopted our daughter, she was 3.5 years old. While she still had much of the baby look to her rounded cheeks and pixie face, her behaviors were not in any way like a baby. When I tried to follow the advice of re-parenting her (treating the new child like a baby in certain ways), it only became a source of frustration for us both. She would bite the bottles or pacifiers until she chewed them off, she would regress and wet her pants since she thought that was what I wanted her to do (behave like her little sister), and all the effort didn't produce any real feelings of change in either one of us because she seemed to grasp that she was really not a baby and didn't particularly want to be treated like one.

Another issue we faced was that it was an out-of-birth-order adoption. Although there are many successful cases of this type of adoption and we do not regret having done it ourselves, it certainly presented us with challenges. Our younger daughter still needed to be babied in some ways, and it was tough to make sure that our new daughter was receiving the amount of attention she needed. In addition, you really can't trick your mind into seeing a child who is not the baby as a baby. We were learning firsthand how those critical baby years form that soft foundation of bonding before you have to face the more difficult toddler years with a child. Yet we had missed all of that with her and were thrown head-first into the tougher toddler years.

Communication was also a great hurdle for us as our daughter came to us not only as an older child who had learned over 3 years of Mandarin, but as a child with cleft lip and palate that severely impaired her ability to speak at all. Once again, I was startled to realize something we take for granted in parenting other children that is such a vital key to successful bonding was missing in our relationship with her. Even now, if you ask her why she is crying, she can rarely answer you. All you get is, Um..um..I'm crying! Language and communication are the cornerstones of relationships and it is very tough to find alternate ways of communicating with a child who is impaired in a way that truly brings understanding and the ability to form bonds and attachments.

Perhaps the most critical key to understanding my struggle to bond to my daughter, however, is to understand the struggle we had to get our first daughter to attach to us and how that struggle impacted and scarred my parental psyche. Over time, I have learned and recognized that the awesome weight I bore in the journey to help our first daughter through her struggles left me far more emotionally exhausted and wounded than I had realized at the time we completed our second adoption. After all, Hannah was doing great by the time we adopted again and was getting better everyday. The battle was over (for the most part) and now our new daughter was quiet, gentle and much easier to care for than Hannah had been. How could I not be okay and bond instantly with her?

Yet when the first crying jags started, even though they were not nearly as wild and uncontrollable as had been Hannah's, I found myself holding my new daughter up by her shoulders as she wailed and shrieked, looking her straight in the eyes, and pleading with her, I'M NOT GOING TO DO THIS AGAIN!!! I CAN'T DO THIS AGAIN!!! Red flags should go off at that point. Someone with a megaphone might as well have been screaming at me, SECONDARY POST-TRAUMATIC SYNDROME!!! Of course, I had no idea what that even was at the time. It took a few late nights of internet searching before I recognized it several months after it began to surface. My heart had been greatly wounded before, and now my emotions and spirit were struggling to bear up under another child's journey through grief.

Strategies for Navigating the Journey to Attach with Your Child
After months of agonizing over the lack of attachment I felt towards my daughter, we slowly began to piece together some strategies that we hoped would eventually build the necessary bonds between us. Over time, we noticed small changes that eventually led to even more significant changes. Though the process is slow, the effort and energy we have expended has always eventually paid off. Here are some of the strategies we used that have contributed to the growing bonds between us:
  1. If your child is out of birth order, separate time out specifically for that child away from the children who are younger. Find an activity that suits the new child's age and personality and make it a special event between you. For example, my daughter is very domestic (unlike her wild, Harley-riding sister). So, when I bake an apple pie (okay, this is a rare activity), I bring her alongside of me to help instead of Hannah (distracting Hannah by telling her she can go swing from the trees with her brothers, an activity she would prefer anyway).
  2. Do not feel like you have to follow all of the tips of re-parenting if you adopt an older child. When we tried many of the suggestions (giving a bottle, pacifier, etc.), we found it just frustrated us and did not build any connections with her. Those methods may work well with some children, but our daughter did not respond to them, so we had to move on and treat her like the age that she is instead of trying to regress her. She was happier when we did and we found connections with her easier when we did not try to treat her like something she wasn't.
  3. Work hard to find skills, personality traits, and talents unique to your new child. We tried many things until we discovered what a great swimmer our new daughter was. So we spent extra time developing that in her, praising her for that skill, and used the time in the water as a way to attach to her. Some of my best interactions with her and most affectionate times are in the water.
  4. Give yourself permission to not have to feel all gushy about your new child. It is okay if it is not a fairytale. It does not make you a bad parent or evil. It is what it is. Many days I told myself that I was just going to be a good babysitter that day and gave myself permission to not have to force myself to feel anything else.
  5. Work through any unresolved emotional issues you may have that are blocking your ability to bond. If you have issues of grief, resentment of previous failed adoptions or attempts to bond, or secondary post-traumatic issues, it can really impede your ability to connect with a new child. Get help if necessary.
  6. Find at least one person other than your spouse that you can be completely honest with about your struggles . You might need to air some feelings that can cause some to judge you. But if you don't have at least one safe, outside place to vent, the pressure can build and cause further damage to your relationship with your child.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, no matter how you feel, no matter what your emotions tell you, after all is said and done and you have done everything you can to change your feelings.just keep moving forward anyway. This may sound simple, trite or ignorant of your needs. I certainly stress the need for you to have time away, time for yourself and time to vent to others. But in the midst of all that, there are many days you have to just realize that you made a choice to bring this child in and whatever you do or do not feel towards that child, love is a choice.

Choosing to love your child mentally even when you do not feel it emotionally is a powerful step in the journey to bonding with your child. The rewards for that choice may not surface immediately. The process may be very slow and lacking in immediate gratification. But every day that my daughter laughs a full belly laugh instead of a weak giggle, every time she spontaneously comes to me with arms open for a kiss and says, I love you, Mommy, every time she comes running to see me when I return home with a giant yell, MOMMY'S HOOOOME!!!, I realize that though the journey is long, we will get there. Though I have doubted at times, I know it is true. What you reap, you will sow and one day I know there will be a bountiful harvest in my relationship with my daughter.

This is not an adoption that was microwavable. I could not create insta-attachment for her or for me. No, this is a relationship that is in a long, long simmer. Every once in awhile I get a whiff of what it will eventually be. I cannot wait to taste it fully, but until then, I will keep kissing her good-night, brushing her long, beautiful hair, biting my tongue when I'm frustrated, and hugging her just as fully as I do my other children. She's worth the wait. I hope she thinks I am, too.

(I took this from HERE)

Saturday, September 11, 2010

End of Summer

I've been slacking on my updates because I'm still in vacation mode! I haven't felt like blogging, so there is going to be a lot of updates in this post!

The weekend of Livi's birthday party we also went to the PNE. It was such a fun day! Livi was an angel even with out her nap. She did fall asleep in the car on the way home though :) Livi, of course, loved seeing all the farm animals and the interactive Farm course was an awesome idea! Livi got to milk a cow, feel different kinds of grains, collect eggs, collect produce, sell everything she collected at the market then go to the store and buy a chocolate milk! She was a little young to really learn anything but she had fun!

The other highlight of the day, other than the mini donuts, was Superdogs! We all had fun but Livi and Jon were giddy! Livi was laughing, clapping pointing and dancing the whole time. It was pretty cute :)


The following weekend we packed up and went to "the cabin" for some camping. It was the first time we've slept over there since Dad passed away. We really enjoyed ourselves except that it was SO cold! We are definitely going up earlier in the season next year. The cold actually cut our trip short. It was Livi's first camping trip and she LOVED it! She loved being dirty and could usually be found rolling around on the ground.

We brought our dear friends the BK's with us and we all ended up sleeping in the tent trailer instead of setting up the tents. Sleeping was interesting. It was the kids first time both of the kids had slept with anyone but their parents. They didn't do too bad considering, but nap time was definitely a big game time.
Not sleeping.

 Saying Goodbye for another year :(

Later that week we also went one last time to Dinotown before it closed its doors for good. I had gone to Dinotown often as a child, back in the day when it was still called Flinstone Park. I think it must have been better then because we could definitely see why it was going out of business. Livi had fun though!

During the rest of Jon's vacation we went swimming at the new rec center once, did some yard work, spent lots of time relaxing and played in our back yard when it wasn't raining! I love our back yard :) We have lots on our schedule for the fall and can't wait to see how Livi continues to develop and amaze us! We have plans to finish up some yard work in preparation for next year and to get Livi and her new sister's room finished! We are thinking of starting to do night time potty training since she is totally trained during the day now. The only thing holding me back is the fact that she is still in a crib. I was going to wait to move her to a big girl bed until she was in her new room but I'm now thinking of just taking one side off her crib and having that be a transition for her. A friend told me it was easier to do night time training immediately following day time training. We'll see!

We are still eagerly waiting word on being registered in Bulgaria which could come any day now! So, if you pray, please pray that that happens VERY soon and that we can make the right decision on which child to bring home! We had decided from early on to wait until after we were registered to make a decision on which child to adopt but I am ready to commit now!