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I’ll start by saying this: while adopting Beauty, we attended one in-person class where they covered child care, basic issues relevant to international adoption, CPR, and the like. It was a good class taught by a very knowledgeable social worker. While pregnant with Bear, we attended a two-day class covering the basic child care principles as well as post-partum care. Another good class, taught by a very knowledgeable nurse. See the trend here? Good class, knowledgeable instructor.
We recently completed our required hours of online training for our pending Ethiopian adoption. We took four courses and received certificates proving we had completed them as such. All these classes were also good. Overall, though? I have yet to be impressed with the set up of the adoption-related courses I’ve experienced.
I’m not denying the need for education pre-adoption (or pre-childbirth, for that matter)—far from it, in fact. However, I feel there needs to be a stronger focus—at least in all the classes I’ve encountered in our experiences—on the transitional challenges you might face as a newly-formed family. Every adoption class I’ve taken has touched on it, but I think there needs to be more time and effort focused on the issues present in the adjustment period. It’s not enough to point out that the child will grieve for what he or she has lost; there also needs to be more time spent on lowering the expectations of adoptive parents. But maybe that’s just me…
When Beauty came home, I was on Cloud Nine. My daughter, my beautiful little girl, the child I’d been nurturing in my heart since before her very birth—she was finally home and in my arms. I would give her a bottle at night and cry tears of joy over her amazing presence in our lives. It was wonderful.
But it was very, very hard as well. At nine months of age, she had very limited experience with eating from a spoon. She couldn’t hold her head up for a very long time when placed on her stomach, let alone sit up. But the nights were the worst, bar none.
Naively, I had assumed soothing Beauty would be similar to how I soothed Bear as a baby. He and I had a routine: a final feeding in the glider, he’d fall asleep in my arms to the CD of his lullabies, and I set him in the crib and tiptoe out the door. Seamless, effortless. Beauty hated being rocked. She couldn’t stand the lullabies. She needed to sleep in a semi upright position. She needed the noise of the television alongside that fuzzy, familiar glow. Many, many nights were spent with us both crying until I gave up and let her sleep in her bouncer seat in front of the television as I slept on the floor beside her. (However, let the records show my then anti-sleeper has turned into the World’s Best Sleeper: she now goes right to bed in her big girl bed with her favorite “lovies” and sleeps like a rock all night long.)
I feel like the classes prepared me enough to know she’d be grieving, to know what health issues I should look for (Mongolian spots, for example), to know how sensitive Guatemalan babies would be to the cold so as to take extra precautions when she arrived home in the dead of winter. But I don’t feel they adequately prepared me to understand how trying it might be to learn my own daughter.
At the end of the day, though, I wonder if any class could’ve adequately prepared me as such. Part of the joy (and sometimes pain) of parenthood is that it is a learning experience. Yet I definitely believe stronger focus on post-placement issues wouldn’t be a bad thing in the least. Even if you cannot fully prepare, you can most definitely be aware.
