Finally home after a busy weekend. I’m sure glad I have tomorrow off from work.
This afternoon’s session was quite powerful. A woman who was adopted from South Korea by a Rochester NY family told us her story and we were all on the edge of our seats for an hour and a half. She went thru all the issues being raised as an Asian in a Caucasian town – from being called all the racist names, to not being able to use the same makeup as her Caucasian friends to dating. She made a trip to Korea some years ago to do some teaching and chose not to look for her birth parents and doesn’t regret doing that. She answered a lot of questions that we all had and was probably the highlight of the weekend. She said that adoption is not part of her everyday life - she lives as a person, not an adopted person. She only really thinks or discusses adoption when she does events like this CB seminar.
We also had a session on attachment issues. One of the biggest immediate issues we’ll have as we return is having the child attach and bond with us. The speaker explained the 3 different reactions we’ll get when we meet our child.
o Screaming, hollering, and not wanting anything to do with us. That’s good. It means she’s already bonded with someone else and she does have the capability of making an attachment. This will involve a heavy grieving period for her (and probably a hellish trip for us)
o Shut down. She won’t show any reaction and will be unresponsive. This is difficult as we really don’t know how she’s reacting.
o Bonding and going to anyone and a happy-go-lucky kid. This is bad as this shows that she’ll bond to anyone. In order to have her bond to us, we’ll need to isolate her from the outside world much more than we’d want so that a solid relationship will be formed by the parents and kid. The good thing with this situation is that the trip might be quite pleasant as she’ll probably be well adjusted on the trip.
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