Loving an Adopted Child

For a long time Andrew and I have seriously considered adopting a child. We have been met with concerns from our friends and family, many centered around the idea that they could not imagine loving an adoptive child as much as they love their biological children. I posed this question to a friend of mine, Lisa, who has adopted two children and invited her to write a guest post about her experiences. Thank you, Lisa, for being willing to share! Here it is:

I think people worry about being able to love an adopted child because they see children around them that they are not related to, such as neighbor children, and obviously they aren't bonded to that child, so they assume it would be the same with adoption. But its not the same at all! First of all, the adoption process, especially if preceded by the longing of infertility, primes you to bond. You have waited and searched and longed for that child, just as the nine months of pregnancy gives you time to anticipate and prepare emotionally for a child, so does the adoption process. Physical pregnancy has two purposes. One is to grow the baby in the womb. But the other is to give the couple time to emotionally "expect" and prepare for a new family member. Adoptive parents go through a similar process. This has actually been documented by psychologists. Adoptive parents go through their own kind of "pregnancy" as they make the transition from thinking about having a new child come, to doing paperwork and physically preparing for that child to arrive, to opening their hearts to both the idea of a new child and a real, actual child. I have heard many stories of parents literally falling in love with a grainy photo of a baby halfway around the world when they received their official referral in an international adoption. In domestic adoptions, adoptive parents usually bond deeply with the prospective birth mother, and that too aids them in preparing to love their new child.

The other thing to remember is the fact that the child you adopt really is YOUR child just as the child you birth is your child. I think this is especially brought home being LDS and believing in premortal life. This child's existence did not begin with his or her conception in the womb of his biological mother. The child existed as a spirit in the premortal world, and you as the parent probably knew him or her. That's how I view it, anyway. I believe my kids were meant for us and sent to us just as other people's kids are...they just had to come another way. I had specific promptings telling me when my son would be conceived (though I didn't know the promptings were referring to his conception until well after the fact). So obviously, before he was even conceived, even a thought in his birthmother's mind, Heavenly Father knew he was coming to me to be my child. With my daughter, there were many miracles in the timing of her birth. We had been helping to care for my elderly mother-in-law for several years, and I had this feeling that we would not get another baby while she was still alive. She died, and literally five days later we got the call about our daughter. My daughter was born during my mother-in-law's viewing. I think that was no coincidence! I think mother-in-law had a hand in it. My daughter's birthmom didn't want to choose the family herself, so the agency workers fasted and prayed, and when they met to make the decision, all of those who were present overwhelmingly knew that we were supposed to be this baby's family. So, I have never felt like I was raising someone else's child (even though we do share them in some ways with their birth families). I am raising the children Heavenly Father meant me to have, just as other people are raising the children He meant them to have.

I think there can sometimes be differences in how the bonding and attachment happens early on, though I can't say how many of these differences are due to adoption or how many are due to individual, unique factors in the process, just as the timing of bonding can be affected by factors in the birth process. I have many, many friends who have fallen instantly, madly in love with their adopted babies. With both of my children, it has taken a bit of time, and they felt like strangers when I first met them...but I attribute this more to the unique circumstances of each of their placements. (I'm speaking of newborns here, adopting a toddler or older child is a whole different ballgame!) With my son, the first thing was that he was a boy and he was supposed to be a girl, so I had to get used to that idea. The mental picture I'd had in my mind of this person I was expecting had to be altered a bit. Then, he had a long, drawn-out, very emotional placement, so by the time we got him home to our hotel, it was 1:00 in the morning and we were too exhausted to sit and gaze into his eyes like I had anticipated. I was worried about his birthmom, and my thoughts were on her a lot, and for the first day or two I felt bonded to him more through her than just for him being himself. But bonding proceeded very quickly and smoothly, and I would say it was only a couple of weeks. When he was three weeks old, he looked me right in the face and gave me a huge, REAL grin. I also had one really profound moment of experiencing true spirit-to-spirit communication with him when he was several months old that cemented my belief that mother-child connections are primarily spiritual. Obviously God has some biological tools that he uses to help mothers who give birth, there are hormones that are released during the birth and breastfeeding processes that contribute to the feelings of happiness and joy that a mother has for her baby. But all of those same things can be felt spiritually too!

Bonding with my daughter took longer, but I think that was because she was such a surprise, arriving at such a stressful time and on such short notice. I had never allowed myself to "expect" a baby after waiting so long for our first, and while I wanted a baby, I hadn't let myself prepare emotionally as much as I should have. So I had to play some emotional catch-up. It probably took several months before I felt truly bonded to her, but again, it proceeded smoothly and now there is literally no difference. I look at me and my kids and my siblings and friends and their (biological) children, and there is absolutely no difference in the quality of the relationships. There simply is not. I am their mother, and they are my children.


The last thing I want to say is that we bond with our children because we serve them and sacrifice for them! I firmly believe that. I believe that is true for biological mothers and adoptive mothers alike. There is a poem by Carol Lynn Pearson that talks about a mother getting up in the wee hours of the morning to change her baby's diaper. She talks about these invisible threads that form every time we do something for our baby, and how those threads form this huge, tight web of connection between us and that child. I really saw that dramatically with my first child. I had never experienced it before, and so it was just amazing to see how the attachment process works, especially starting with a child who did feel like a little stranger to me the first moment I met him. Every diaper change, every nursing or bottle feeding session, every interaction, every time you hold that child, that bond increases. It's easy for babies to bond to parents, because they respond to touch and to having their needs met, a la attachment parenting. But it works for parents too. You can't help but form a deep and profound connection to someone you are serving so selflessly! And I'm willing to bet that for most people, they have never had to give themselves over so devotedly to a person as they do when they have a new child.