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Post adoption depression

February 12, 2019 by Wemadeawish Leave a Comment

Mind reports that 1 in 4 people in the UK experience a mental health problem each year. Around 3 in every 100 people suffer from depression. Despite the large number of people that are affected by it, mental health still seems to be something of a taboo.

The traditional British approach is to keep calm and carry on. Just get on with it and it will go away. A lot of people still view illnesses such as depression as something you can snap out of. “Just pull yourself together” are words that are still uttered by some. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t say that to someone if they’d broken their leg. “Just pull yourself together and go for a run.” Clearly it isn’t physically possible for them to do that. However much you want the pain to go away and the bone to heal, it won’t without time and treatment.

Depression can affect you at any stage of your life. For some it is genetic with sufferers experiencing symptoms on a regular basis. Some might not have suffered from it before, but then it hits them out of the blue as a result of a life experience. Like becoming a parent.

Becoming a parent, whether you’re a birth parent, step parent or an adoptive parent, is tough. Its full of challenges that are often difficult to face. It’s 24/7, 365 days of the year. Unpaid with no holidays. It’s also blooming amazing and filled with incredible highs. It’s no surprise that a lot of new parents suffer from some form of depression. Mind reports that 1 in 5 woman suffer from a mental health problem during pregnancy or the first year following the birth of their child.

I was aware of post natal depression but not post adoption depression. I assumed depression after becoming a parent only affected woman who gave birth to their children and was something connected to hormones and giving birth. Clearly it’s not. Becoming a parent, however it happens for you, is a massive thing. You’re charged with the care of a real human being. The younger they are when you meet them, the more they rely on you. A baby is obviously unable to care for itself. You therefore have to tend to it’s every need. To make sure it is clean, fed, stimulated and safe. That is a big ask.

When you become a parent via adoption, there’s a whole new layer of pressure on you. You’re learning to be a parent and getting to know your child in what can feel like a goldfish bowl. You’re being watched and monitored by social services and health care professionals to make sure there are no concerns. Of course that’s how it should be. Children who are in care have already suffered trauma and loss. Social services have a duty to make sure the people those children are placed with, are getting it (mostly) right. It’s a lot of pressure though.

Most people who become adoptive parents have endured a lot of heartache and pain due to infertility. I think because of that, we put ourselves under even more pressure when we do become parents, to be perfect. After everything we’ve gone through to become parents, surely we should be the happiest people alive? Our dream has been realised and we’re parents so we should be living every day with a grateful smile on our face.

Parenting isn’t like that. It’s an amazing privilege to be a parent, but it’s also very challenging. Trying to work out why your child has screamed none stop for 2 hours is tough. Trying to keep a 2 year old occupied while you cook food is tough. Actually, doing pretty much anything with a 2 year old can seem tough. Their brain is working faster than their body and they’re getting frustrated with everything around them.

Finding out that the realities of parenthood aren’t quite what you’d built them up to be, can be hard. There are days when you’ll feel like you’ve accomplished nothing other than helping your child sleep / feed / clean them. In the early days after baby sister was placed, I felt like I was in a constant groundhog day. The words from Fatboy Slim’s “Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat” resonated with me except the lyrics should have been “Eat, Don’t Sleep, Clean up Sh*t, Repeat!” Every weekday, there was about an hour and 15 minutes where I could actually get out of the house and do something exciting like go to the shops. The rest of the time was feeding / dressing / school run / nap / eat / play / eat / school run.

I started to feel quite low and my get up and go had got up and left. Post adoption depression isn’t something that was covered in our preparation course and isn’t something our social worker had talked to us about. Luckily, I had read about it so I was aware of it. I’m not someone who’s prone to depression, but it was on my radar. I found talking to those around me and squeezing in a bit of me time, started to help. I forced myself to get out in the fresh air as being cooped up inside really gets to me. Exercise also helped. Recognising the signs and a bit of self care have so far been enough to keep my low moods at bay. Like anyone, I have bad days, but they don’t feel like they’re getting the better of me like they were.

Adoption UK has created this useful factsheet about post adoption depression. There’s also a lot of helpful information on the Mind website about depression and mental health issues after becoming a parent. I think it’s something that all adopters should be aware of and given information about. There’s nothing to be ashamed or embarrassed about if you have post adoption depression, just like there’s no shame in breaking your arm. It’s something that is very common and needs to be talked about a lot more so that any stigma around it is banished. If talking to friends and family doesn’t help, speak to your social worker or GP. Don’t suffer in silence.

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Meeting baby sister

November 22, 2018 by Wemadeawish Leave a Comment

My goodness what a few weeks it’s been. Baby sister has been home for 6 weeks and it’s been a rollercoaster ride so far. We’ve known about her since the spring. However, we only went to panel in the middle of September so until then, I don’t think I really believed it was going to happen. After that we only had 2 weeks until introductions started so it’s all felt like a bit of a blur.

Because there was uncertainty for so long, I hadn’t really let myself think about baby sister. My first ever blog post was about how it took me a long time to love little Miss. I knew it would come, but it wasn’t there as quickly as I thought it would be. We’ve had a stressful year and I was worried that and the uncertainty around panel would mean I’d feel the same way about baby sister. I’d dealt with the uncertainty by not allowing myself to really think about or develop and feelings for her.

Little Miss started school in September and I’d decided last year I was going to take a month off work to try and make the transition a bit easier for us both. Having the month to just focus on her was amazing. It also gave me time to think a lot about what we were about to embark on. I’ll be honest, I started to have a lot of doubts. Life felt very settled and I didn’t want that to change. Little Miss was loving having all of my attention and me dropping her off and collecting her every day.

When we agreed to be assessed as adopters for baby sister, we’d said the timing of any placement had to be in the best interests of little Miss. Starting school is a big thing for any child and we were expecting it to be massive for her. She struggles with any type of change and became very unsettled every time she moved up a class at nursery. We’d therefore said she’d need a bit of time to settle first. We felt October half term would be the best time for introductions and placement.

I was really angry and disappointed when it became clear that in the end, our views around timing of the placement hadn’t been taken into account. By that point though, I didn’t have the energy to fight it. So, I was really nervous as we headed towards introductions. Little Miss was coping brilliantly with school but I couldn’t help thinking that all of that would change once she met her sister.

Last time we did introductions, we didn’t have a clue what to expect. I actually think that is better. Knowing what we were facing made me more nervous. Baby sister was with the same foster carers as little Miss which was a massive positive. The family are lovely so from that point of view it was good. But it didn’t change the fact that introductions are incredibly demanding and emotionally draining.

I don’t know how it feels to prepare to give birth to a child because I’ve never experienced it. I don’t know whether preparing to give birth for a second, or third time is better or worse than the first time. However you come to meet your child, I guess you experience a whole host of emotions. The few days before we met baby sister, I mainly felt panic. Panic that we had made the wrong decision and that we were about to take on more than we could cope with.

Meeting little Miss felt like an anti-climax. It had been such a long journey for us to find her that I’d built it up into something it was never going to be. This time round, I think it actually helped that my expectations were very low. I didn’t except to love baby sister. I excepted to feel nothing for her. On the first day of introductions we were late for the planning meeting because we couldn’t get parked and at one point I did think we should just drive away and not go in.

Sometimes it’s best not to think about things too much and just let them happen. I really wish I was better at doing that. Meeting baby sister was such a different experience to meeting little Miss. I was very surprised that I loved her the second I set eyes on her. She is the double of Little Miss. She has a lot of her mannerisms, her head is the same shape and she has the same amazing big blue eyes. I think that helped the love for baby sister to come straight away.

There’s no doubt that doing introductions when you already have a child is more of a juggle. But actually, I think it made things easier too. We had 2 days of meeting baby sister by ourselves and then little Miss met her on the third day. Seeing her face when she saw baby sister for the first time was priceless. She coped so well with it all and was really chatty with the foster carers which was lovely. She’s normally very shy with new people (she was only 9 months old when she left so has no memory of them) but she really took to them which made things a lot easier. It was amazing for them too as although they’ve fostered over 20 children, they’ve never had this situation before.

Baby sister has settled in really well and so far has been able to transfer her attachment from the foster carers to us without too much distress. It blows my mind that we’ve taken her away from everything she’s ever known and she’s just taken it all in her stride. She’s teething which is causing her a lot of grief, but the move hasn’t phased her at all. Only time will tell how her attachment to us will develop but so far, the signs are promising.

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