Parenting After Adoption

I promise, only a few more days of the letter A!

Today I will cover two A’s. They are not really intertwined, yet they both have slightly shorter explanations. The first is alcohol.

From my own personal experience, most uneducated people believe all birth mothers are alcoholics. (I cannot tell you how many people asked me about alcohol use.) This is not true. Speaking only from my personal experience, most of the birth mothers I have come in contact with made the decision they did out of love for their newborn child. They would have never made a choice during the pregnancy to harm that life. Please don’t assume just because a woman chooses to place her child for adoption, she also chose not to care for the child in utero. It’s just not true. (It may be true some of the time, just not as frequently as some believe.)

The second term is attachment. I have to confess, I don’t know a lot about attachment. I did a little reading, but I was not too concerned because we were adopting an infant. Attachment is vitally important when adopting an older child. Especially a child that was abused, neglected, or left in an orphanage. They often need help learning to love and attach. For me, I chose to use some forms of attachment. I fed skin to skin as often as I could. I would sit for hours in my hotel room in only my bra cuddling Cameron, clad only in diaper, to my chest. I also chose to have my husband and I do all tasks related to his personal care. For the first few weeks, we did every bottle, bath, diaper, clothing change. All of it. Which was very hard on my mom because she thought she was finally going to get to feed a newborn. (She was not able to feed my sister’s kids because she was breast feeding.) But, I stuck to my guns and would not allow anyone else to do it. And I think it worked. Within a few days, Cameron was turning towards my voice trying to find me when I was not holding him. He is completely attached to both me and my husband and us to him.

I have only one more A left! Stay tuned…