When It All Comes Crashing Down

I just didn’t know. I really had no idea, even though I had been a part of the adoption world for almost 20 years. We had said that we were ‘done’ adopting a few times before, but this ‘one last time’ we decided to adopt a child from dissolution, meaning a child that had already been adopted, but whose family was trying to find a second placement for their them. We would end up bringing our son home within a handful of months after starting down this path, but during that journey I uncovered a world that I could not have imagined truly existed, or at least not to the degree or frequency that I discovered it to be. 

With very little understanding of dissolution, or why families decided to dissolve, I guess I imagined like most people that the first adoptive family had expectations that had just not been met, that they hadn’t done enough preparation beforehand, that they just couldn’t take it like some of us could. As I began talking with some of these families, though, and hearing their stories, I found out that the majority of the time that those simple reasons are very far from the reality of why the dissolution is taking place. 

My first eye opener was a mom who was looking for a family for her six year old daughter. She was a darling little girl, and I could just imagine her running around our home, playing with the other children. Then she said the words I would here many, many times in the future, but that were new to my ears at the time. “She needs to go to a home with no younger children.” I couldn’t imagine why. Was she jealous of younger children and acted out because of this? No, she herself had been sexually abused as a young child and after her adoption she had continued the abuse with her new young siblings. Even the respite family that she had gone to for a time was not working out because she was trying the same thing with their children. I had heard of sexual abuse in the adoption world before, especially in the U.S. foster system where many children are exposed to it in some form. I had read about it in books, as well. But those were books! Those were the rare instances that stories were made of! I wasn’t expecting to find it seeping into the crevices of adoption, the innocent victim becoming the next perpetrator. 

My next glimpse into the nightmarish world of adoption gone bad was from a wonderful family who had adopted other special needs children in the past, and had felt led to bring home a little boy who was incapable of walking. Not long after he came home, though, he not only acquired the ability to walk, but also quickly learned to speak English. With these newly developed skills he soon became a terror to his family, threatening in a demonic voice to kill one of his siblings by suffocation.  He carried this behavior over into his school by trying to choke a fellow student, and later informing his teacher that he was going to "nail her to a cross.” This is a beautiful mom with beautiful children, but she continues to live with this living terror because of fear. Fear that she will be condemned, that the adoptive community will basically try to ‘nail her to the cross’ for sharing something less than beautiful in adoption. Afraid she won’t be believed. Afraid her other children might be taken away because of this one child they opened up their lives to. 

This continued to be the trend of stories I would hear over the next months. Once I began talking to these families, I couldn’t just stop listening to them and move on with my life. My heart ached so deeply for them, and I could see very little hope in their futures. Rape of younger siblings, purposeful and strategic urination and defecation, destruction to the home, or even threats to burn down the home. With no help in sight some of these families who have tried to hold it all together for too long suddenly find that they have completely fallen apart. Parents and children are psychologically and/or physically scarred for life.  Some lose their marriages. Some even become ‘monsters’ in the eyes of the world. They had been in hiding for too long, afraid of judgment and rejection from their own families and friends as well as the adoption community. Many also had a very real fear of the systems that were supposed to help protect them and their children, that somehow in a very twisted scenario, all of their children could be removed from their home because of one child’s conduct. Not only did they need help, but their stories needed to be heard so that others living their nightmare would know they weren’t alone. So that families considering adoption could become prepared for all possibilities. So that the system that is supposed to help families post-adoption could begin doing just that.

These families need support, they need to be heard. They need more resources once they are home. Most families don’t go into adoption with the amount of physical and emotional effort it takes to adopt thinking that it might all go bad. Most went down the path dreaming and planning for their child just as any other adoptive parent has. Putting cameras in the home and alarms on the doors and living in fear was never even a possibility in their minds. For most families adoption is a beautiful thing, sometimes filled with struggles, as most families are. But for those families that are living through something way beyond the struggles, our system needs to catch up to be in place for them when it all comes crashing down.