Lots of Love!

After reading my two blogs on Adhipen's trip, alot of people got back to me via e-mail feeling really bad for him! I felt bad for him too, but really was not surprised by Uma's response. I put a post out about it on Ichild (an India adoption yahoo group that I have been a member of for about two years now) and I got an overwhelming amount of responses full of love, reassurances and sharing of similar experiences.

One thing that was really clear from most of the posts is that it is extremely important to allow the child to grieve. The orphanage has been her home. She has attachments there, not to mention her attachment to that being the only life she has known. It is natural and healthy to grieve, and I am expecting that we will go through alot of grief with her. I am already sensing her to be a very sensitive child (and Anne says that she is).

Adhipen said that some people in the orphanage told him that Uma is like this -she cries alot. Anne says that this was not true - that Uma was happy until she got put in with the older children and then she became sad. It is also possible that her response towards Adhipen was not just fear but also, in part, a both a continuation of the grief felt by an abandoned child, as well as the beginning of the grief she will experience at being taken away from the life she has grown comfortable with. They had told her that this was "her daddy." She definitely must have been sensing change with his presence and not really knowing what "daddy" meant, but knowing that he was something to her must have felt confusing and scary.

I wanted to post one of the replies I got to my ichild query. It is short (whereas many were quite long and detailed) but more or less summarizes everyone's experiences. So here it is:


This discussion is bringing back so many memories.... Our daughter screamed for almost an entire day straight when she realized that we were the only ones with her and her foster family was nowhere to be found. I remember telling myself as she was screaming in my ear "this is good, b/c it meansthat she was attached to them." But it was still hard, especially b/c with our first child there was an instant connection. I felt so guilty b/c I did not have that with our daughter. Two years later, we are about as normal as a family with a 4 and 2 year old can be :-) I like how someone called it our birth/delivery...there is pain in that experience, but just like adoption, always worth it.
Kristan