Attachment from the Adoptee Perspective

Courtney’s post last night got me thinking about attachment from my own experience. I was adopted as an infant of eight weeks old and my brother was adopted seven years later as an infant of roughly the same age. Neither of us have ever had any conscious memory of any family or life prior to the childhood we experienced with our parents, our adoptions were openly discussed even if the details regarding our birth families were totally closed to us, and being children of the 70s, our parents didn’t have a tremendous amount of advance adoption counseling regarding attachment. So how did our experience wind up seeming so uneventful, normal and positive?

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I think, from the start, our parents acknowledged and made accomodations for the routines that we had developed in the weeks after our birth. In my case, I had been placed with a Catholic Charities foster family while my birth mother was given time to decide if relinquishment would be the best option for her. This foster family, who operated entirely anonymously inside the Catholic Charities system, wrote a remarkable letter to my parents that outlined all the important details of my young life: when I awoke & slept, what I was eating & what I was refusing to eat, my likes & dislikes, the type of sounds and other stimuli I had been exposed to, even the soaps, detergents and diaper pail cleaners that they were using in their home! In the weeks after I arrived at their home, my parents had received a unique gift from this unknown foster family that I believe really gave us a leg up on bonding. They tried to modify their routines to best reflect what I had already been comfortable with and I quickly bonded with them.

The more I get to know about how much or how little adoptive parents receive regarding their children, the more amazed I am at what a gift this letter was to my parents! It was 1970 and the prevalent belief was that adopted children would naturally bond with whatever family they were presented to, given an ample amount of love and affection. While certainly love & affection played a major role in my early relationship with my parents, the fact that I wasn’t harshly jolted into a new reality clearly made the transition a smoother one.

Granted, I was quite young, eight weeks is hardly time to establish a solid world outlook, but the letter from the family is filled with insight about my personality that holds true today: “she does have a bit of temper which she displays at certain times,” “delighted by shiny objects,” and “she prefers sweet potatoes over squash.”

When I began searching at 22, my mother gave me a copy of this letter in the hopes that we might glean some piece of information from it that would lead us in the right direction. It held nothing that identified my origins, even my original birth name appears nowhere in the letter, but it painted a picture of me in the weeks prior to the childhood I know that communicated that I had been loved from the beginning.

Does this make me lucky among adoptees? Sure, very few adult adoptees are lucky enough to have access to such a letter & most adoptive parents even today don’t receive a letter as detailed as this one. What it tells me now is that the little things matter the most; Courtney is exactly right when she says that she had to get to know her daughter for the beautiful, unique individual she is. All of us, adoptees or not, start our lives as individuals and what happens even in those weeks after our birth help to shape our worldview. The longer we progress in our lives separate from our forever families, the more we are exposed to and experience that our new families have no point of reference for. What do you think?

Photo Credit: 1970 LisaB.

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