The game “Uno” has a strange effect on our girls. We discuss it as well as what kind of questions Andrea and Linda have about their biological family and what answers we provide to them.
Foster & Adoption Parenting Podcast
Join foster parents T and W as they discuss foster care and adoption. With humor, insight and Christian faith, they share their everyday ups and downs as a foster family with hopes of adoption.
Sarah’s story really touched me and unfortunately it is not uncommon. Just this past week a child in foster care told me a similar story of his life. He was orphaned at birth and then adopted at about 3 and the parents gave him up at about 14. If foster parents’ want to adopt the entire case record is available to them, to help them decide if this is the right thing for them along with the guidance of God. Do possible adoptive parents just not take this chance to see the full scope of the child(ren) or do they think that once adopted all the problems will go away? And when they find out it will still be work, do not want to continue? Any ideas?
I too have a friend that was adopted, along with his brother, out of the foster care system and then returned. The adoptive parents claimed it was too hard on their marriage because the boys were so badly behaved and they had to keep their marriage as the priority. So back to foster care went the boys, who were eventually split up to different homes and were not adopted again.
The concept of “returning” children completely blows my mind. Not so much in the situation of a foster placement not working out but once a child is adopted I don’t know how parents can consider them to be returnable.
I wonder how this compares to international adoptions? In that case the adoptive parents don’t have the chance to get to know their child through a foster placement they simply take what they can get (which would fit their criteria). I don’t here of international returns though…
Oh, Sarah! I am so sorry. Let God wrap His loving arms around you. Remember that what they did was wrong and had NOTHING to do with you. Though, I can’t even imagine how much, it has strongly impacted you, it is their problem. Thank you so much for sharing your story and loving children through your pain. Many blessing to you.
Just wanting to address the topic of Emotional Triggers. Our adopted daughter has experienced triggers from music, color, smells and food. Even a staring contest meant to be a game created a meltdown that surprised all of us. Our senses create a mind/body connection kind of like a filing cabinet in our brain. The body experiences something, the filing cabinet opens and out comes a memory, positive or negative (or a new memory gets filed in if it’s a new experience). It happens to us all day long; most of the time unknowingly because we’ve learned to manage and cope with it.
Kids that have experienced trauma have a filing cabinet with bad memories that have highly sensitive connections. As a foster or adoptive parent, you’re lucky if you get to see in the cabinet and even luckier if you get to “read” that file via the child’s communication, outburst, etc.
We don’t avoid emotional triggers in our home. But we also don’t provoke them. We want our daughter to cope with and manage these sensitive connections because they will come up without us around to support her through it. Just like your girls may never lose that sensitive connection of playing UNO with challenging memories of their past, the hope is that one day they embrace that game as part of their story and when they play it, it becomes a symbol of the positive attributes that “Carmon” gave them, starting with their precious lives! And now every time they play that game with you, that confusing pain can evolve, little by little.