I was so prepared, intellectually, for adopting an 11 month old baby from Guatemala, and the work it would take to create a secure bond with her. I did so much reading, researching, reflecting.
And I do know, in my heart, that what we’re going through is normal, expected, and temporary. But.
Some days are like glorious rays of sunshine. She’s happy, we’re well-rested, we have an easy and free-flowing family dynamic that lets us spend time in various combinations of parent-and-child, parents-awake-with-children-asleep, one-parent-alone-and-the-other-with-both-kids, giving us a balance of bonding time and time alone. Things feel great.
Other nights and days she’s nearly inconsolable, whining all the time and having a hard time staying asleep, screaming in terror when she does wake up. We hold her as long as we can bear, then pass her off to the other exhausted parent. Things feel hopeless.
We know that this is all a part of her attachment process, and that she’s experiencing grief at losing the foster family she knew, and that everything is different here: sights, sounds, smells, temperature, rhythm, sunlight, everything. It has to be terrifying. So there are nights, or days, or, like today, nights followed by days when she just cannot be soothed by us, because we are not soothing to her.
All I can think is that this must be what it feels like to have a baby with colic. We love her. We want her to be comforted by us. And we just can’t bear the crying. It’s… adoption-colic.
We did make it out to the pumpkin farm today. The weather was gorgeous, if chilly. We picked out four nice pumpkins and enjoyed looking at the small area of farm animals, mostly noisy ducks and turkeys. But I had in my mind’s eye one perfect picture of brother and sister sitting in the pumpkin patch. That was not meant to be. While she was whiny in the sling, set down among the cold pumpkins the tears turned immediately on. All I can hold onto is that one day we’ll look back at this series of photos and laugh, and marvel at how far we’ve come.
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