Ok, better now, but still...

Orientation was tough. One of the toughest things I have every gone through. And what made it worse was my husband wasn't there. He is not able to get the time off of work to attend the orientation and training (not happy about that - but that's another blog post). This means extra work on his end, but still, having him there would have been better. I would have had a hand to hold onto when I was upset. Seems apropos doesn't it?

The main lesson I walked away with was that these children are damaged. Damaged in such a way that, for some, no matter what you, as the adoptive parents, do you may never be enough. You may never get the child's love; you may never get a hug; you just may never... Hearing that repeated over and over again was hard. The worse part of that was knowing that these children are like this because the adults in their life have, at best, failed them. These are the children that we will be asked to bring into our home, to welcome them to our family, to raise them and love them and not expect anything in return.

There was a slide show, with audio. Children reading off the sentences on the slides. The child would start to read and then stop - mostly not reading the really graphic sentences. But in my head, the voice continued & I don't think I was alone in this. I heard all those words being said by a child. And it hurt. It hurt my heart so bad that these kids, any kid, would be put through situations like this. It certainly had a powerful effect. I just want to make sure we're doing this for the right reasons.

I also got a better sense of how the process works. That was the biggest question in my head. How do you get matched with a child? There's many layers to this process and just as many, if not more, situations for these kids. Some may need to be placed far from their place of origin, some will have siblings and other family they want to stay close to or at least get the adoptive family to agree to allow visits. Some of the kids have not had parental rights terminated and are going through the legal process. All of this occurring while the child is in a foster home. The logistics of it all, I can't imagine a more complicated system.

Re: parenting. We did get some basics on parenting an adopted, older child. From a parent of a 9 year old, I don't agree with everything that was said. But I'm not the expert and as we were told, many MANY times, these children are damaged. That means normal expectations do not apply. I want to get a better handle on the literature and go through the training before I start to analyze my reaction to this. I may be missing something. Right now, all I know is we are to expect a challenge.