A catalyst for change

I spent most of the week in the Florida Keys. A vacation with my Mom and sister, that we’d talked about doing for nearly a decade. It was the first time I’d traveled on an airplane in almost 2 years, and since our son was placed with us. He was born in Florida and we all came here then — my folks, husband, and daughter — after not flying for nearly 2 years because of Covid. Traveling brings up a lot of anxiety and uneasy feelings for me. The (over) packing, arriving 2 hours before the flight, being corralled like cattle through security, on to trains and into planes. The small spaces of planes and the people everywhere chaos of airports. I wish I liked it more, but the truth is I don’t think I do, at least anymore. 

Traveling with myself, only, was WAY easier than the last time we traveled, or with small children in general. Traveling again, and back to Florida, I have found myself thinking a lot about our adventure to meet our son. Our journey to adoption (and the process and wait) is for another post. When we finally got the call that we had been chosen it was a late Thursday afternoon heading into Easter weekend. We were given some details about his situation and our agency said they’d send over the paperwork for us to review to make a decision. He was set to be delivered via induction in a few weeks. We were so excited! We told our closest family and friends and started thinking about travel, lodging and just generally planning. Monday we were getting ready to send our signed paperwork back to our agency when we got a call saying he’d arrived early. Frantically, I thought we’d hop on a plane that day, but we were advised to wait until his first Momma signed. It was still during the height of the pandemic so our case worker was not allowed in the hospital and communication was hard to come by with his first Momma. We also knew that his first Daddy was really sad about placing him. So we waited. It wasn’t until the Friday after he was born that we were told we could make our way to him. At this point we had more information on his health but there were a lot of unknowns and we didn’t know what we were walking into — having never been placed with a child, had a child in the NICU nor dealt with the complications he was facing. 

The travel to him was tense but we needed to keep things light for our daughter. We weren’t ready to tell her anything yet until we were officially placed and knew he’d be going home with us. She thought we were just going on vacation and was as happy as could be. My anxiety was through the roof and my nervous system was so fired up. I’ve always thought I was really good in crisis or stressful situations. I still think that’s true to some degree — I’m intellectually collected and navigate the situation well. What I also know now is that my nervous system is ripe for stressful situations. What I mean is that the heightened state of stress and response is a default mode I can naturally step into. My nervous system is conditioned to be in a state of stress.  We’re programed as animals to recognize these big stress situations, that can cause harm or death, in order to keep us alive. The problem is, if every situations is fight, flight, freeze or fawn, then we’re constantly in a state of stress arousal. The latter description is me. I might be able to navigate the situations and seem collected to the world, but on the inside, my nervous system and body are like a raging forest fire. Today, I’m much more aware of this raging forest fire, and I have tools to help my body return to a safe state of being.

We stayed near a beach so that my folks could take Norah each day, and get out of the house we were renting, while my husband and I were with our son in the NICU. My folks helped make the whole thing “normal” for our daughter. For that, I’m forever grateful. The NICU was a 30-60 minute drive, depending on traffic, from our rental house. It left a lot of time to think. Usually on the way there I’d be wondering what kind of a night he had and how his day would go. Would we try to bottle feed him? Did he gain weight? Could he come off of some of the medications he was on?  On the way home I often wondered about his first Momma and Daddy. What were they doing? How were they doing? Were we passing them this very moment and didn’t even know it?

Adoption is wonderful. It helps create and grow families for those that would otherwise be unable. It helps children find homes that would otherwise not have them. It helps parents find loving families for the children they cannot care for enough themselves. I think these are the basis for adoption. Having been through it, I’m now left with many more questions, for my son, but also for his first Momma and Daddy. For them, will they work through the trauma of placing a child? Do they have support from throughout the year during special occasions (his birthday, holidays and family gatherings) and year after year. Do they wonder about us? Does their family wonder about us? We have an open adoption and have had some communication with both his first Momma and Daddy. We hope we’ll have much, much more. For our son, my hope is that he feels loved and wanted. He answered our desires for growing our family, but will he see his adoption as positive as we do? 

We talk a lot about adoption in our house. I tell him how much his first Momma and Daddy loved him, how special he is to both sets of Mommas and Daddys. How they asked us to be his forever family. Our daughter is so proud to be his sister and his forever family — she talks about it a lot, actually! Our goal is to normalize the discussions as much as possible so that as he get older anything related can be an open conversation. No secrets. It’s his story. 

I think that the beach, palm trees, salty air and the ocean will always remind me of our journey to meet our son. It was such a happy time for us. It was also such a stressful and traumatic time. Both of which we thought we were prepared for. I’ve tried to not let the stressful parts cloud the happy parts, but the truth is I cannot fully do that. Moment to moment is how we lived during that time. We’d be submerged in medical terms and conditions and NICU schedules for hours yet spend the evening and then wake up in toddler land with our daughter. Looking for some semblance of our old normal when it no longer existed. Finding a middle ground was nearly impossible. For me, I remained in a state of stress with my nervous system heightened nearly 24/7. It wasn’t until we came back home that I started to come down from that state. It all hit me hard. I was so exhausted — more than the “I have a newborn” exhausted. This is when I started to realize that I really wasn’t managing things well internally and within my internal systems. I negatively criticized myself and ignored any queues, justifying that thist was what I had wished for and that this phase of life was hard, but temporary. Those things were actually true! But, there was this underlying cry from my own self to help me try to navigate life differently. Some days I listened a little, long enough for me to start get curious. Other days I stuffed it down and away.

That summer and early fall were a blur. Getting our son set up with all of the professionals he needed for care, terrible sleep, starting back to work. It was all so different from the first time around — and as it should be. A second child is much different than the first. Our second child needed extra care from the beginning and we didn’t know what to expect for his growth and development. I wanted to make our daughter’s life as normal as possible, too, which was also changed instantly being that she wasn’t the one and only any longer. I felt a lot of pressure to keep it all straight and keep everyone happy at the same time. As I coped with the stress in unhelpful ways, it also became a major turning point, for myself, in my journey toward what I wanted my future to look like. It’s also when I started getting serious about stopping drinking, which I did shortly before my 40th birthday. There was no way I could raise two kids and not be the best version of myself. Perfect? Hell no! Just the best version of me, working hard to understand more about myself and my habits and making changes to my reactions and responses, regardless of the size of the circumstance. This includes many of the topics I’ve written on already. I knew that my family deserved more of me and I FINALLY realized that I deserved more of me.

So, when I think about our journey to meet our son, it turns into a journey of meeting myself, too. There is so much emotion wrapped up in this time that when a memory is triggered there is an intense flooding of all of these different angles of change that happened at once. I know he was meant to be with us, regardless of whether I may have eventually found my journey to joy. But, he was the catalyst for me to start. His coming into our family started a chain reaction of things for everyone in our family. Changes — good ones, hard ones and happy ones. I’ll be eternally grateful that his first Momma chose us to be his forever family and that his first Daddy loved him so much, making every effort to stay in touch with us. This boy is so loved. I hope he feels this, now and forever.