These are the five stages of grief, as first expressed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in 1969. She stressed that there is no order to them, that regression is common, and that grief takes time to overcome.
Grief, we have been told time and time again, is central to the whole issue of adoption. The adopted children feel it, obviously, in response to the loss of their birth families. Birth parents feel it in response to the loss of their children. And adoptive parents often have to come to terms with the loss of their 'dream' family, conceived 'naturally', before the adoption process can even begin.
Oh, yeah, and you can rocket through a bunch of grief stages when Family and Children's Services determines you don't make the grade as parents. That happened to us, tonight.
They didn't tell us "no". They told us "not yet", but made that feel so much like a "no' that right now, stuck in the first three stages of grief which I seem to be feeling simultaneously, I am pretty much unable to tell the difference.
Oh, Tom positively showered us with praise while he was cooking up that plate of bile. Our philosophy of childrearing is "sound". He likes each of us and says we're wonderful people. We're also immensely "quotable"; he has repeated some of what we've said to others. There are no anger management issues. We have empathy for children. We've put a lot of effort into the process and been very open with him. We have some degree of openness towards birth families. We seem patient and stable. We communicate. And we had great references.
All those positives are outweighed by what is obviously a huge negative: WE DON'T HAVE CHILDREN. Or rather, we have little experience with children. Tom doesn't have an adequate sense of what kind of parents we would be. Our house doesn't feel like a house with children, or that is prepared for children. Our references, great as they are, don't place us in context with children.
So our file is closed; over a hundred pages of application and supporting documentation, not to mention 35 hours of class time and nearly twenty hours of intensive homestudy, means absolutely squat. We are to get some experience with kids and come back, in a couple of years...and start the whole thing over again.
Right now, I can't tell you I have the slightest desire to go through this again. It has been grueling, completely independent of the end result; that end result just tips the scale over into total despair and acute frustration.
To me, it's as if I worked my way through many years of medical school, only to be told right near the end that I can't get my degree in medicine because, well, I haven't had any experience as a doctor.
I always seem to come up with the juicy zinger just after it would be any use. The thought I
had was: Tom, you had better get your ass in gear confiscating all the children from parents who had no experience of childrearing before they popped kids out.
This hurt me a great deal more than I would have expected, mostly, I think, because it came from so far out in left field that I never even thought to look to see it coming. I was somewhat prepared for rejection on the grounds that I was spanked as a kid, or because my family dynamics are wonky...Either excuse would have been a giant pile of bovine excrement, of course, but those were issues we had covered. This, well, it's flabbergasting. Incomprehensible.
Those first three stages of grief:
S hock
A nger
D enial
How fitting. I'm feeling pretty sad right now.
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