Sometimes Love Takes Time: One Mom’s Story of Heartbreak and Growth

By Chris F., Celebrate Adoption Cincinnati member and mother of four adopted children

For us, it was a growing attachment. It’s hard to imagine now.

I sit on one side of the room holding my two year old son and I look across to the couch where my big girl sits with her beloved Saraphina, the pink unicorn she made on a Daddy Date at Build-a-Bear. She is combing Saraphina’s tail, attaching pink bows to her horn. “Hold still. Don’t move your head,” she tells it.

These are the same words I say to her as I plait her hair every Saturday morning. It’s a long process that takes an hour, sometimes two or three if we use beads. She looks over at me, catches me watching her, and she winks at me. It is the wink of understanding. This is a loving care-giver’s role: to gently comb out those tangles, to tame the wildness that wants to break forth.

My long-awaited daughter, the answer to months of sorrow and hourly prayers, came kicking and screaming into my life.

Our first daughter was almost two when we decided to update our homestudy and plan to adopt a second child. Our first experience was fairly smooth and filled with anxiety but truly only wonderful memories. We had been prepared for the difficulty of a birthmother’s change of heart that first time around, and we felt blessed that we hadn’t experienced it. We weren’t prepared the second time around.

Adoption is not for the weak, my husband always says. He is so right. We were matched with a birthmother very quickly and we spent three months with her before the relationship ended. We hadn’t wanted it to end. We loved the baby in her womb and we loved her, too, even though she was not easy to love. She used foul language and racial slurs. But I had held her hand during her labor pains. I had placed my hand on her swollen abdomen, waiting to feel a kick. We had named the unborn baby together.

The same afternoon that she ended our relationship, before I ever got to see her baby’s face, we were told about another little one. A baby girl 9 days old, waiting for a family. We heard her history, saw her picture, and made plans to bring her home.

I don’t remember much of the meeting with our social worker. I was emotionally overloaded to the point of feeling numb. I had expended so much energy trying to hold onto a child I had no right to hold that I couldn’t get ahold of any one of the many emotions I knew must be racing through me: anger, hurt, grief, betrayal. Just give me my baby, was all I could think. I know it’s not PC. I’m educated enough about adoption to know that you’re not supposed to feel that way. And if you do, you don’t want to admit it. But that was the consistent thought running in my mind until we drove our baby girl home three long days later. We got her in our house, took some pictures for the baby book and all went to sleep. We were exhausted.

I was so unprepared for what I was experiencing. As I struggled with the loss of the baby I never held, I assumed this child, my child, would bring comfort as she lay in my arms. I assumed she’d want my comfort.

My daughter is a fighter. Each night as I rocked her, held her, snuggled her, she screamed at a volume I had no idea an infant could reach. She was enraged. She wanted comfort I am sure. But not from me. She had her own grief of loss going on. I didn’t know it at the time.

I thought it was all me: I’m not doing this right.

Later: She knows I’m thinking about that other baby.

And then: Is this the wrong child for us?

I’m embarrassed to admit I thought that. I hadn’t yet learned that sometimes love takes time. Sometimes you have to earn it through trust. It’s one of the things my daughter has taught me. She’s also taught me that not knowing how to do it all perfectly right away is a forgiveable sin, especially if you keep on trying.

One night, after enduring several weeks of power struggles with her, I cried myself to sleep. I want to be a good mom to her, I thought as I fell asleep. I just don’t know how to do it right. Maybe she needs more individual attention. Maybe she’s not sure I love her enough. At 3:00 am, I heard her calling to me from her room. Determined to show her how much I adored her, I sat at her bedside and rubbed her back. She looked up at me, gave me that wise smile she has and said, “You’re a good mom.” I wanted to cry and ask, “Do you really think so?” But I hugged her and said “And you’re a good daughter.”

She’s almost 4 now. She is smart. She likes to be in charge. At dinner, she’ll watch me put a forkful of food in my mouth and then ask me a question. As soon as I start to answer, she’ll interrupt me with, “Mom, don’t talk with your mouth full.”

There are some things I’ll always grieve: that I wasn’t the one to give birth to her, that I wasn’t the first to hold her, that it wasn’t my arms she cried for those first weeks, that I didn’t know everything about being the best mom the first day I saw her.

What I do not grieve is that she is not the child I expected. She is a child of intensity. She follows me around the house telling me how to vacuum, that I missed a spot when I wiped the table; but she’s the best helper I have at home. Her screams pierce my ears; but she gives the best bear hugs I’ve ever experienced.

We have a connection so deep I cannot adequately describe it. But I know she feels it just like I do. It’s in the wink. Together we’ve learned to trust, to open our most vulnerable selves to love. She pushes me to be a better mom to her. And I’ll gratefully spend the rest of my years earning the title of her mom.