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There will be times during your adoption journey where you will feel overwhelmed and ready to just give up or curl up in a ball and cry. That’s basically how I’m feeling right now.
My feelings right now are due in great part to the uncertainty of Sammy’s placement. We have a permanency plan meeting tomorrow where we discuss the next six months of Sammy’s placement and he is being “interviewed” in the morning to find out if he will be accepted into the program that we all want him in. Interestingly, he asked if his former foster parents would be there. I told him that they were no longer involved in his case. That did not sit well with him, which is somewhat funny considering he worked so hard to be moved from there and complained to me about them quite often.
If you have a child who has many special needs these feelings can come quite often.
They can come as well when you are in the pre-placement stages. You spend so much time waiting and being anxious about why you’re not being called, why you haven’t been chosen for a child, feeling like you will never be chosen, and so on. I still remember those days. We didn’t really have much of that with the first three kids, but we did later on. After Kory and Mackenzie were moved and before Hannah joined us, we knew we wanted to adopt again and had our home study completed, then waited…. And waited….. and waited. We were never chosen, despite numerous inquiries because, we found out later, the worker who initially did our home study wrote a negative comment on it.
We are also now getting started with the home study so we can finalize Hannah’s adoption, so I’ll be feeling those jitters with all of you. Even though we have been through home studies before, there is still a feeling of anxiousness until it is actually approved. For us it is somewhat easier because we know who our child is going to be and she can have a voice in this.
What do you do to get yourself through these times? First of all, step away from the junk food. Counseling is a much better option. I have actually started back to counseling myself. I am an advocate of parents taking good care of themselves all through the adoption process. Sometimes just being able to “vent” to someone can help you.
Visit the adoption forums. This will allow you to talk to other parents who are in the same situation as you. Whether it is pre-adoption, transitions during placement, or even after you have finalized, there is a forum out there.
Whatever you choose to do, take care of yourself.
