The Chapter I Never Wanted to Write
This is for all of us living stories we desperately wish had been written differently
Tomorrow evening, our town is holding its high school graduation ceremony.
Two or three years ago, I envisioned this night to be a lot different than it has actually turned out to be. I pictured cheering our daughter on from our chairs as she crossed the stage to get her diploma. I’d planned to get one of those personalized “Congratulations, Graduate!” signs for our front lawn with her picture on it, the same kind of sign at least half a dozen houses on my block have out front. I thought we’d show up, all four of us as a family, wearing school colors of red, black, and white to show our spirit and support.
Tomorrow evening, our town is holding its high school graduation ceremony. But neither I nor my husband, nor our son, will be there. We actually weren’t even invited to come at all.
*************************************************************************************************************When we began our adoption journey eight years ago, one of the things my husband and I were extremely careful to do was share our story without divulging all our future daughter’s trauma. We firmly believed – and still do believe – her story is her own, that she ought to have ownership and autonomy over when to share, with who, and how much.
We knew the complexities of adopting internationally, transracially, and of a child who was on the cusp of adolescence and who had spent the majority of her life in institutionalized care. Woven throughout her life are themes of abandonment, poverty, suffering, and pain. What makes it so tricky, of course, is how her story is so intricately interwoven with ours.
Many of her threads connect with my own story of living in her home country for nearly five years and watching her grow up while I worked in her orphanage every week. Those threads entwined with ours from the moment we got the phone call saying the doctors thought it was a tumor in her eye and that she needed care to save her life. Those threads were knitted together with ours when we talked to her on the phone and asked her consent to be adopted, when the courts gave her our last name, and when a terrified, small girl curled up in her bed in her new home in New York after we prayed with her, read her a story, and tucked her in to sleep.
And so the challenge over these last few years has been how to tell this next chapter of the story in a way that respects and honors her experience while offering the same respect and honor to our own. Because for a while, things were good. We found out that it wasn’t a tumor, thank God, and though she wasn’t a candidate for surgery, the doctors were quite optimistic about her prognosis. She began school, and she received wonderful supports that took into account the language and cultural barriers, her physical disability, and the lags in her education from years before. We took family vacations and saw new places, and the kids would play together for hours on end – her so patient while the little one was so curious.
There were family photos and family dinners and traditions we started, like always getting Chinese food on Family Day (the day she came into the US) because Chinese food was one of the few meals she felt comfortable eating in those early months when she was still getting used to new flavors and foods. When the conservative, majority-white town we’d been living in began to apply pressure because of our staunch support of Black Lives Matter, we moved to a new, more diverse region so she’d feel safer and have more racial mirrors. She did summer camp and went to dances, played school soccer and basketball. I took her shopping and went with her to buy makeup, and we got Starbucks together and extra large popcorn when we went to the movies. Like I said, things were good…for a while.
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Here is something I have always believed and have always been vocal about: Adoption can be beautiful, but it is also filled with loss and trauma. We knew that our daughter was losing her birth country, her culture, her ties to her biological family, and her relationships forged with other children she’d lived with over the years. It was always a both/and kind of situation. Yes, there were new memories and new relationships, but that didn’t take away from the loss she had experienced. And it didn’t automatically erase the years of trauma she had endured before we adopted her, either: the fear of attachment and abandonment, the anger, the learned coping mechanisms and survival instincts. So there was also lots of therapy and medications, and attempts to run away, and crisis line calls, and police visits, and lots of tears and slammed doors and raised voices over the years, too. Again, both/and.
And as she got older, she began to shut us out more and more, both metaphorically and literally. She would stay in her room more, and when we would see her, she would barely acknowledge us. She stopped doing things with her brother. She didn’t want to eat dinner with us anymore, or be in public with us, or come to church. She began a long, painfully-slow separation from the family unit, and part of me chalked it up to being a normal stage of transition, of getting older and fledgling independence and her trying to figure out her place in the world. And in some ways, I guess it was.
But it was also Reactive Attachment Disorder, a condition stemming from early experiences of abuse and neglect. This led to her being unable to form secure attachments, particularly with anyone in a caretaking role, and extreme difficulties with emotional regulation and healthy relationships. She would mask with anyone in public, but as soon as she was home, hell broke loose. There was lying, and stealing, erratic moods, emotional distance, outright defiance, violent outbursts, threats, and more. The older she got, the worse it became. I still believe a big part of her was afraid of what it meant to grow up when so much of her was wildly unprepared for life on her own. All our attempts to help, guide, nurture, comfort, or simply parent her were rebuffed.
A year ago, she went to school with allegations of abuse and neglect that, of course, were unfounded and proven false after the investigation. But the damage was done. She signed paperwork that said she wanted to enact her right to privacy at school and that her teachers, counselors, and therapists were not to communicate anything to us. We sent letters, and emails, had meetings, raised our concerns over and over again, but the school completely shut us out, stating it was our daughter’s wishes. She wasn’t going to class, wasn’t turning in assignments, would come home at all hours of the night and still, the school assured us they didn’t see a problem. We tried family therapy, which she rejected. We tried mediated conversations, which she walked out of. We tried to sign her up for classes and programs that would help her transition after high school, but she refused to sign consent forms, stating instead that she “had people at school who were helping her.”
And four days ago, at 10:30 in the morning, three policemen knocked on our door and told us the school had sent them to pick up our daughter. We asked questions, but were told they couldn’t really reveal much more information than that. We showed them where her room was on the third floor, and they spoke to her privately while my husband and I waited, confused, downstairs. It wasn’t until the policemen started coming down with garbage bags stuffed with clothes and boxes overflowing with shoes and personal care items that we understood what was happening. “She’s moving out,” one of the policemen finally told us. “I guess the school found a place for her, kind of like a group home. She’ll be with other young adults and will go to classes for independent living and stuff.”
Stunned, all I could manage was, “Is she going to be safe?” The officer assured me she was. “What about her furniture and stuff? Her bed?” I asked him. “Apparently they’ve got it all set up,” he told me. “She doesn’t need anything else.”
So my husband and I could do nothing but watch as these three uniformed officers trekked up and down the flights of stairs. In the end, they carried out seven garbage bags, three boxes, and two backpacks of her belongings, putting everything in the back of one of their SUVs. When our daughter came down, she didn’t say a word to us. My husband told her we’d always love her and be there to support her, and handed her a piece of paper with his phone number on it in case she ever needed to call. She almost didn’t take it, but did so begrudgingly in the end. And then she walked out the door, and the officer that was left looked at us with an apologetic look in his eyes.
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Tomorrow evening, our town is holding its high school graduation ceremony. But neither I nor my husband were invited to be there.
In fact, we have no idea where our daughter is even living. She left behind no contact information or forwarding address. The two large rooms on the third floor that had been hers are littered with actual trash, hair she’d cut out from previous styles, crumbs, and memories. Clothes and shoes, books, framed photos from the trips we took together as a family are all over the floor. So are cards and gifts she’d been given over the years for holidays, birthdays, and special events. She left behind souvenirs from Liberia, which we’d brought with us as a way of keeping a tie to the country of her birth, and artwork and electronics and bedding. It’s like the last six years of her living as our daughter and as part of our family are just…gone.
And I honestly don’t know what comes next. There is so much grief and sadness wrapped up with so much fury and fear. There is so much shame and disappointment, exhaustion and disbelief, worry about the child that has been left behind, who has already been through so much uncertainty in the past six years that he, frankly, never asked for.
And worry about the young woman who has left, too. I know she is hurting as much as we are, even if it may be in different ways. I can only hope and pray she settles in to wherever her place in the world ends up being, that she is able to heal, that she finds what will make her happy and bring her peace.
When we set out on our adoption journey eight years ago, we did so because we wanted to give her a chance, one we were told she would not have had she stayed where she was with what we all thought was a cancerous tumor.
Though it all turned out so very differently than we thought it would, I can only hope we have still managed to give her that. If that’s all, then that is enough.
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So, I suppose this is a story for all of us who have chapters of our parenthood journey that we desperately wish were different. For those of us who have children who aren’t celebrating the traditional milestones the traditional way, whose social media feeds don’t contain pictures of smiling, happy families celebrating such accomplishments. For those of us who feel alone as parents, feel like we’ve failed, like we’re not good enough. For those of us who may understand a thing with our heads but whose hearts ache nonetheless. For those of us who have been afraid to speak the hard truths, because saying them aloud makes it feel more real somehow. For the past several years, I kept so many things hidden for this exact reason. Only once I started speaking them into the light was when I began to heal.
If that’s you, please know I am with you. I get it. And together, we can make it through.
xo,