Six years ago we took ds6.5 directly home from the hospital as a very small infant, and in every way he’s grown up as a member of our family. Everyone in our extended family thinks of him as a sibling; no one looks at him as a foster child. As far as we’re concerned, it’s just a technical legal term.

When we had the initial conversation prior to his placement with his bio parents, they indicated they would like to visit weekly, which we warmly supported. We had always assumed we would tell ds6.5 from the time he was very young about his birth status, in conjunction with the ongoing visits. He would grow up with this being an accepted part of his life.

However, there were only two visits when he was a newborn, and then two and a half years later a very short visit. And so the conversation never happened.

As I began researching foster care and adoption trauma about six months ago, I was taken aback to learn that often babies adopted at birth show the most trauma. I couldn’t initially understand why that was. After all, if a baby has known love and security from his first weeks, how could it be possible that sometimes he was emotionally worse off than a child who was abused or neglected and only found a safe home at a later age?

I had to hesitantly tiptoe around the answer, because I lot of emotional resistance to learning more. I didn’t want that to be true. I didn’t want to think that the infant that I had raised from so early in his life, who I slept with on my chest as a tiny baby so he would feel secure and to encourage bonding, the baby I spent two years gathering mother’s milk for from various donors all over the country to keep him as healthy as possible, who we all loved in a whole-hearted way from day one – I couldn’t accept that he could emotionally be missing anything.

It was very difficult for me to listen to and read extremely negative perspectives from adults who were adopted, perspectives I had never been aware of and therefore never considered.

I may have been resistant but my nature isn’t to ignore information I don’t like.

Unborn babies begin to bond with their mothers in the womb. Thus, there is an emotional bond that is broken the moment he is born and his mother isn’t there for him. What has been termed ‘the primal wound’ is the baby’s loss of his mother; he is fully aware of this loss though he will later likely never be able to verbalize or even remember it. This pain can stay with him for life and impact his later sense of self and relationships.

Though I began doing this research because the possibility of the twins coming had been broached, I began thinking a lot about ds6.5 and what this meant for him.

I would love to think that by raising him as we have (and this is what I thought until recently) from as young an age as we did, that we took away the short term pain of the loss he experienced. What I’ve learned is the pain of that loss is forever.

What I care about most is doing what is best for him, and thus, I strongly requested through my social worker that his bio parents visit him. At our meeting, that subject was raised by the social workers and I added my voice supporting that preference. They weren’t interested; the social workers told me they don’t have a way to compel birth parents to see children if they don’t want to.

Soon after his bio father called me and I made a direct appeal, telling him that this is best for ds, that he should know who they are and have a relationship with them. He called me back a few weeks later and told me he and his wife were planning to go away to the north for a couple of days in the beginning of September and would try to visit then.

I asked him to send pictures of them both so that I could begin the process of introducing the topic to ds6.5. He did send a picture, but it took a few weeks. By the time I received it and was able to get it printed out, I had a week until their visit to break the news to ds6.5.

My stomach was in knots thinking about how to go about this.

Fortunately, dd6 made it easier for me. Being a child who came into foster care at a later age who knows her parents, our conversations about family are very different. My daughter gave birth three weeks ago and her family stayed with us until yesterday, so we got to see a lot of them. Dd wanted to know where the new baby came from before she was born, so I told her she was inside her mother’s tummy. (I realize that’s not anatomically accurate but that’s what I say to young children.)

She asked about whose tummy she was in before she was born, and I told her, her imma. I explained that her brother also was in her imma’s tummy before he was born. She was processing this, and then wanted to know which children in my family were in my tummy before they were born. (With my daughter’s family here, she was confused about who were my children and who were my grandchildren.) After clarifying which children were my daughter’s and which were mine, I told her that all of our children were in my tummy and all of my daughter’s children were in her tummy.

“What about ds11 and ds6.5?” she specified. I try not to say something not true and told her they were also my children, then changed the topic without specifically saying ds6.5 wasn’t in my tummy. She went on to ask this question a couple of times more in the last couple of weeks.

Then last week the twins had a visit with their parents and came home with balloons and scooters. Ds6.5 requested to go with them next time to their abba and imma and also get presents.

He’s heard all the conversations going on. I realized that he already has the concept that children can be born to someone else and raised in our family, and he has an association that children can visit their birth parents who will give them gifts. I realized opening up this topic with him could be very easy, that it didn’t have to be the heavy conversation it was feeling like to me.

I printed out a picture of his birth parents as well as a number of pictures of him from the day we first met him and the day we brought him home three weeks later, and put them all in an album. I sat with him and showed him the album, and when we got to their picture, he asked me who they are. I told them, “This is the lady whose tummy you were in before you were born, and then you came home from the hospital to live with Mommy and Daddy.” “Really?” “Yes, really.”

He was very positive about this and went on to show his album to everyone in the family. He showed me their picture later on and told me, “They will be my friends.”

A visit was scheduled a week ago for this afternoon at a local park. Though our home would be the easiest location, I prefer we not meet here. Though I know they’d want to see where he lives and assess all of what we do and don’t have, I want to have some distance. It’s not a reciprocal relationship; why should they know all about my life while sharing nothing about theirs?

They asked if it would be appropriate to bring a gift, and I suggested a scooter, since that’s something ds specifically hoped to get by meeting the twins’ parents. I didn’t want to tell him about this too much in advance. If it was still vacation, I would tell him as soon as he wakes up this morning and talk about it throughout the day with him. But I don’t want to tell him and then send him off to school; that’s too loaded a topic to not be present to process together with him.

I also don’t want to keep him home from school because of this. So I’m going to tell him when he gets home, and then soon after that we’ll go together to meet them.

I get a bit of a pit in my stomach thinking about the ramifications of this. Just like it was hard thinking about how to tell him and then it wasn’t a big deal, this visit could be the same. Not a big deal.

I tend to be very sensitive to his birth mother’s feelings at the expense of my own, and I’m thinking about how to hold that line.

A couple of things were recently said to me by his birth father that didn’t give me warm and fuzzy feelings. One, when I asked him if it was helpful for them to know he was doing well, he responded, “No, that makes it worse. If he’s doing well, he should be with us.”

Secondly, in the next conversation when we talked about the meeting place, I told him I saw it was hard for his wife to meet in our home in the past, and that it would be better in a neutral place. He said, “You have to understand the heart of a mother. She feels you took her child from her.”

The sheer audacity and denial implicit in that statement took my breath away. I don’t remember if I said anything in response. When we initially met they were so grateful to find us and we were the solution to their problem – a baby they weren’t going to keep and there were no suitable (to their mind) charedi families to take him, a baby left in the hospital for eight weeks until he came home with us – but in her mind as time passed, I’ve somehow become the source of her pain.

I think it’s going to be extremely hard for them to see him. We expected he would do much better if raised by us than the average family because of our parenting approach, and he has. He’s amazing. When talking with my daughter about the difficulties seeing how charming he is could present, she asked, “Isn’t there a way you could keep being so cute and smart just for that day?”

My husband trusts them to honor their commitment to us. They told us several years ago that they won’t take him back no matter what, and my husband believes they’ll keep to that even when they see he’s far more advance than they would have expected. I hope he’s right, I keep telling myself that he’s right, that they’re not going to take him away.

I’m doing this because I feel it’s right for ds, but not because this is easy for me. Personally, I would be fine with the status quo of them never seeing him if I believed that was in ds’s best interests. While the likelihood is that this meeting is going to go very well and tomorrow I’ll be able to share how well everything went, right now, I’m in emotional limbo.

Avivah