All the literature will make you feel like you’re crazy to want to adopt an almost three year-old with medical issues who has spent their entire life in an orphanage. When we were waiting to bring Lucy home I studied Reactive Attachment Disorders, ways to facilitate bonding in the first few days and months and all the potential problems. The risks were high and we both knew it. So now, with the benefit of an incredibly successful adoption behind us, I ask myself why we were so bold to go ahead with adopting Lucy, sight unseen.
As Melanie, our 22 year-old baby sitter, said to me in the spring of 2010, “we all have attachment issues, Annika.” Her comment got me to thinking: if you put either Will or myself into the literature’s matrix of whose history would cause attachment issues, we’d both be off the charts. Perhaps saying yes to Lucy was saying yes to all of us who have had rough childhoods due to absent parents. And the fact that the strong single parents that we landed with showed us enough love and stability to make it through safely might have given us such brazen confidence to continue a pattern. If we can give Lucy infinite love, then perhaps rough beginnings can beautifully become character-building and heart-expanding. (That’s a tribute to you, Tina and Poppa Dave.)
In fact, as I have been dutifully rereading my attachment in adoption books, they start making me feel like it’s a crazy and irrational thing to adopt a toddler / preschooler. And then I read further to see how to counteract all the possible issues with attachment and the answer is love. As cliché as it sounds, love is the answer, the medicine, the ‘all you need’… with a dash of patience and stability. It just goes to show that the best things in life, like Lucy, are illogical and found in following one’s heart. That, and close those books and give her a hug, and Will and Lorna and Kai.
