The Words I've Been Looking For

Right now I'm working through a very interesting book by Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner, The Spirit of Adoption: At Home in God's Family.  It's a unique book in that it stole my idea 10 years before I had it interweaves theological aspects of adoption with stories of the ups and downs of the adoption of orphans.  Of all the books I've read so far, this one most resonates with my own experience in our attempted Russian adoption.

Stevenson-Moessner brings to the forefront the various emotions of adoption: joy, expectation, anxiety, fear, fulfillment and grief.  Yes, grief.  Of course we experienced deep grief when the adoption ban passed, but it was very hard to explain to other people--we had no categories for this kind of loss ourselves, nor could we expect other people to have categories for it either.  How to name or process our grief?  After all, the boy we wanted to adopt was never "really ours," we had only spent a few days with him.  And he hadn't really died, he just wasn't coming to live with us.

Because he was "never ours" it was strange to try to own the loss that we felt.  How can you lose what you've never had?

Because he was still alive, it was strange to try to own the grief we felt.  It felt like he had died, but he was still alive (though was not facing a hopeful future).

The word in the adoption world is "failed adoption."  But we didn't feel like we failed.  We felt like we had done everything we were supposed to do.  It felt like our adoption had been taken from us.  It felt like a death.  It felt inappropriate and presumptuous to compare it to a miscarriage, because we hadn't experienced that kind of awful sadness, but that was the closest we could come to in terms of categorizing the deep dark sadness that enveloped us for much of 2013.

Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner speaks well to the precarious instabilities of adoption, and she employs a term that is helpful in thinking back over our experience.  She speaks of "miscarried adoptions":

"Much has been written about the grieving of birth mothers and adoptees.  One of my goals in this book is to document aspects of the grieving of adoptive parents...A miscarried adoption is the most difficult of all adoption experiences." (pg 53.)

Miscarried adoption.  That phrase helps categorize the sadness we felt, and what so many other prospective parents we came to know felt as well.  It helps name and make real the pain that we experienced.  And also good to be reminded of what we discovered in that experience: "For years I repeated the Apostles' Creed and never thought much about the phrase 'And he descended into hell.'  If you experience a failed adoption, you descend into hell...but remember that Christ descended into hell and is victor even over that." (pg 53-4)