Dear friends and family,
Warning: This is a long but important post. Grab a beverage
and settle in.
It is almost time to return to Ethiopia
to bring Kena home. We hope he will be home before the end of August. As we prepare to bring Kena home, we would like to share
some of our thoughts on some parenting decisions we are making. We want to help
you understand how you can help us begin our new life with Kena as a family of
six.
In Kena's short life, he will have gone through many significant
changes and life altering experiences. While he may not consciously remember
the events, he will still experience immense loss when we bring him home,
including feelings of grief and trauma. He will soon experience the loss of
familiar and comforting nannies, as well as the sights, smells, and language of
his orphanage in Ethiopia.
He will likely struggle with feeling safe and secure, and he may lack the
ability to trust that we will meet his needs. Kena has not experienced God's
design for family while living in the orphanage, and his world is about to turn
upside down.
Throughout our adoption process, we have read books,
attended conferences, and listened to stories from other adoptive families. One
thing we hear repeatedly is that parenting a child from a hard place is very
different than parenting a child from birth. Children who come home through
adoption have experienced interruptions in the typical attachment process. The
loss of a biological mother and birth family at an early age is a major trauma
on their little hearts. He has spent more of his life in institutional care
than anywhere else. He is a 20 month old baby boy with wounds that God has
entrusted to us to help heal. The good news is that we can now, as Kena’s
parents and by God’s grace, rebuild attachment and help him heal from these emotional
wounds.
Everything around Kena will be new and he will need to learn
not just about his new environment but also about love and family. The best way
for us to form a parent/child bond with him is to be the ones to hold, snuggle, instruct, soothe and feed
him. For the first few months home, Donny and I will need to be the only ones
who hold, feed, bathe, comfort, and change Kena. We need to teach him that we
are his people, his parents, and that we will always be there to care for his needs. As our love and
care of him repeats over time, he will be able to learn that his parents are
safe to trust and to love deeply. We are, essentially, recreating the newborn/parent
connection. Once Kena starts to establish this important bond, he will then be
able to branch out to other healthy relationships.
It will
help us immensely if adults limit with Kena what is typically considered normal,
physical contact with a baby/toddler. This will (for a while) include things like
holding, hugging, and kissing and just seeking any kind of real attachment
relationship with him. Children from orphanage settings are prone to attach too
easily to anyone and everyone - which hinders the important, primary
relationship with parents. Waving, blowing kisses or giving high fives are
absolutely appropriate and welcomed! We want Kena to know that the people with
whom he interacts are our trusted friends and family, but we also need to
differentiate that we will be the ones who are always there for him as his
parents. Please don’t try to meet his needs. Please redirect him to us.
"A well-tended newborn is fed, cradled, and soothed
when he cries from hunger or crankiness. This scene plays out hundreds of times
in the first month of life alone. Through this exchange, the baby learns to
trust that his needs will be met and that he can rely on people." (from The
Connected Child).
We have been professionally advised that it is best that Donny and I solely
meet every need--quickly and consistently. Until he has learned that WE are his
parents, we will need to be his primary caretakers at all times. Although it may appear that we are spoiling or babying him, we are not. You may wonder
how long this will take, but the timeline is different for every child. We will
follow his lead and trust our instincts as his mom and dad. After meeting him a
few weeks ago, we learned that he is apprehensive and hesitant and even fearful
in new situations. This confirms even more that we need to really work on
developing trust and consistency with him and trust the Lord to bind our hearts.
For the first few weeks or even months, it will seem as if we are kind of
cocooning our family in our home. It will be our time, as a family of 6, to
huddle in together and start fresh. We need to teach Kena that he has a stable,
calm and predictable environment to live in. Donny will be working from home
more often the first few weeks Kena is home, so he can establish himself as “Dad”
for Kena. As I stated above, we are starting from the beginning and
establishing a connection similar to a newborn/parent.
"Children who come from hard places don't overcome their history in six
weeks; it can take years before new, improved life skills and attachment take
permanent root for these children." –from The Connected Child
A brief note about his story – Kena’s life has been hard,
but there are obvious strands of God’s love, protection and redemption in his
past. We will protect his story, and we are choosing not to share the details
of his life before he was matched with us. It is his story, and we are blessed
to be a part of it. We will wait to share more with him when he is older, and
we pray that the gift of his story in the future will be used to
help him see God’s kind and protective hand in the midst of the brokenness that
came so early in his life.
We cherish each of you and the role you have played in our
adoption story. You have helped us grow our family, and there is just no way to
thank you enough for that. We need you. Adoption is restoration,
redemption, healing. It is work. It is a different kind of parenting as it's
parenting on the front lines of children who come from very hard places. While
we wanted to offer some boundaries on how we will approach our early months
with Kena, please don’t fear making a mistake that might threaten our
attachment with Kena. We will give lots of grace just as we hope you will give
us grace as we enter into this new phase of our lives.
I will follow up soon with more about how you can
practically help us through this transition. Please keep praying for us. We
know the Lord has brought us to this point, and we need to continue to rely on
his grace and power to parent Kena in a loving and secure way. Please pray he
will bond to us. Thanks again for your love and care. We can’t wait to bring
Kena home, and we thank the Lord for this gift of our new son.
With love and thanks,
Donny and Kim (and all of us)
