Adoption Under One Roof

Many adoptive parents, particularly those who adopted a traumatized child, have thoughts like, “My adoptive son/daughter is a nightmare,” on a regular basis. Unfortunately, because adoptive parents choose to adopt the children they do, many feel guilty about having these thoughts. I was one of them.

I cried and cried because I wanted to become a parent so badly. When I adopted, I thought I was adopting a healthy newborn baby. He was healthy at birth. However, likely because of prenatal “neglect” (no prenatal care for first six months) and “trauma” (exposure to cigarettes throughout pregnancy), my son developed both asthma and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). There are days (like today) when it does feel like raising my adoptive son is a nightmare.

When you adopt a child who has been traumatized after birth, the nightmare can become much more severe. Even though my son’s special needs present challenges, they pale in comparison to the stories I read about adoptive parents who are raising children with trauma issues, such as reactive attachment disorder (RAD). And then there are the children, such as John’s “Unfixable Child”, that have so many letters of diagnoses that I cannot imagine how he even began to parent his child.

If you are parenting an adopted child who is a nightmare, you are not alone. It is okay to talk about it. In fact, it is necessary to talk about it.

I cannot tell you how much better I feel when I hear from other parents of children with ADHD. I tend to beat myself up and assume that the issue is just my parenting abilities. When a friend told me that her ADHD kindergartener threw a broom out of a moving school bus on the second day of school, it made me feel much better about my son flashing his penis in front of the entire kindergarten class at kindergarten graduation rehearsals.

Those of us who are parenting “nightmare” children, whether they are that way from special needs at birth or became that way after experiencing trauma, need one another. We need a support system so we can bounce ideas off one another and recognize that it is not our faults that parenting “nightmare” children is hard. We also need the validation that what we are dealing with is that hard. It is not a failing on our parts as parents.

We also need one another to remind us that we are not wasting our time with these children. Even a child with severe RAD has the capacity to receive some of your love. Of course, he might never choose to receive it, but you are providing him with an opportunity that he might not otherwise have received. And who knows? Perhaps years down the road, your efforts will bear fruit.

As for my “nightmare child,” he will often have moments in which he is one of the sweetest and kindest little guys I have ever met. The love I have poured into this child is getting through. I just wish I did not have to search for it underneath his ADHD.

Photo credit: JulieC