V. Are You Right for Adoption?, Page 2

Are You Happy in Your Marriage and Yourself?

It takes a degree of self-confidence to adopt. If you aren’t happy in your marriage or partnership (assuming you are in one, which is not actually necessary) and in yourself, you won’t be able to make it work. Adoption exposes you to a lot of scrutiny, and this close examination by professionals and the general public can continue for years if the child has problems that need outside help. Or it can get reactivated if you decide to adopt again or if your child develops problems later on. And sometimes family, friends and neighbours think they can interfere in your family in ways they wouldn’t dream of doing if you only had born-to children, as if parenting skills were something you acquired by being pregnant. The fact that there are so many children needing adoption demonstrates that just isn’t true. But if you are unhappy in yourself or your relationship you will feel more vulnerable and unsure of yourself, and that will probably affect your parenting for the worse.

Children have an instinct for finding the weak place in any parent’s personality, and children with emotional problems such as attachment disorder can home in on these like a piranha that’s smelled blood. Some adopted children will try to destroy you and your marriage in a desperate attempt to control their environment. Others will test you to your limits and beyond in order to get you to control their internal chaos, which they cannot control themselves. Others, like kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder will drive you to the limits simply because they can’t help it. It’s up to you and your marriage to stand firm, because if Mum and Dad aren’t in control, who is?

Other children have great needs: personal care, medical treatment, therapy, contact with the birth family, intensive loving. These may lessen as time goes on and the child settles in, but not always. They can impose strains on you, your partnership and any other children, emotionally and physically, as your time is divided between more people, as you spend time on the road and in professionals’ offices, as you become exhausted physically by the demands of your children. You and your partner will need to be able to do this without feeling that a wedge is being driven between you. The child belongs to both of you, after all, and rather than being a wedge dividing you he is actually a bridge bringing you closer together, as long as you can think of it that way.

All the professional books say it is vital that parents have some time together, away from the children, for each other. One evening a week, say. As if! I’d love to know where these professionals think any two parents of young children are going to get one hour to themselves, let alone a whole evening. You’ll be lucky to get one weekend a year. Who’s got the money to go out for the evening, come to that? And where are you going to find anyone willing to baby-sit? By the time you stagger upstairs to bed each night you’ll be lucky to have the energy to get your pyjamas on and brush your teeth, let alone carry on an intelligent conversation or have a sex life. The best you can realistically hope for over the next 10 years will be snatched minutes on family walks when the kids are temporarily engrossed in the chewing gum on the soles of their shoes or provoking wasps. If you have more than two children you’ll find they operate a sort of relay system, where as soon as one of them has had her temporary fill of attention and wanders off another one will home in on you.

I hope you are lucky in the way my wife and I are. I don’t put us forward as the ideal marriage; we’re probably just average. What has been our salvation is that we naturally take it in turns to have panics, go round the twist or get depressed. While one of us is emotionally AWOL the other can take over. If we didn’t have that lucky advantage I don’t know how we would cope. If you feed off each other’s ups and downs you may be in for rocky times when you’re both down an emotional crevasse and there’s no one left on top to throw a rope. More than most, adoptive parents must work as a team.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to share the same views about everything to do with the children, although that would be great. But where there are real, important differences — strict or lax discipline styles, slack or obsessive housekeeping, free spender versus tightwad — you need to sort them out now. Children home in on such differences like Exocet missiles and learn very early how to play one parent off against the other to their own advantage. You may decide to adopt a middle way between the extremes or you might decide that one of you will set the standard in one area of life, while the other takes the lead in another. But you must feel comfortable with the decision and stick to it (or properly renegotiate it), or one or both of you will chafe under it.

Your individual self-esteem is just as important. For many prospective adopters their self-esteem has already been damaged by infertility, by their perceived failure as men or women because they can’t conceive. Just how irrelevant that is to your parenting ability can be gauged by taking an hour out to sit on the bench in any town centre or busy park. Watch the parents and their children go by. Almost all of them will be biological parents. Observe the parenting: the shouting, swearing, dragging, jerking, slapping, crying, dirty faces and clothes, toddlers in push chairs being stuffed with junk food to keep them quiet. These people all have fully operational baby producing machinery; how many of them look like successful parents? Sexual reproduction does not make you a Real Man or a Whole Woman.

No man or woman is completely functional in all areas, and I’d trade my biological reproductive capacity (if I had any) for good parenting skills and someone else’s child any day, and know I was the winner hands down. The most important job in the world is raising happy, confident, independent children. Not giving birth. That only provides the raw material. The real skill, joy and rewards come later, in what you do with the raw material, and that’s just as open to adoptive parents as to biological parents.

What can really knock your self-esteem is if problems develop later on. The therapeutic professions in this country are still locked into a culture of blaming everything on parenting styles, instead of recognising that some problems really originate in the children or have a medical basis. If your child develops emotional problems you can be sure that most professionals you consult will automatically blame you. It takes a lot of self-confidence to withstand continual blame. Of course, it might really be you and your parenting. But if you have honestly examined that possibility and feel that there is another reason, you will need to be assertive and find someone else to help you.

Previous Page Next Page