When you Raise your Hand for Support

By One Thankful Mama   

“Put your health card on the table,” was ordered after the blue rubber gloves went on the set of hands.  

Her nervous system was already in a stress response and had been idling there for two weeks by pain, after an IUD insertion.   

I had done all I could, I couldn’t fix this. I couldn’t take away the pain. As her Mama, I was tapped out.   

I often feel tapped out. Constantly. Normally.   

Her nervous system went deeper into a stress response, she froze (her usual response with any medical procedure) and brought her terrified eyes to mine, begging for my help without saying a word.   

“Because she is of age, you can’t stay with her in the waiting room. You can go with her when she is seen by someone, but not wait with her.” 

She absolutely would have bolted right then and there if that was the case. IUD in place. Debilitating pain.  

She wouldn’t have been able to access health care. She couldn’t access mental health services. She can’t access the necessities—like groceries — without support.   

My biggest fear to date is what will they do when we are gone? 

Our daughters—these incredible human beings—joined our family through foster care by adoption.  

As did, in the very least, a severed primary attachment, exposures in utero, and neurodivergence.  

These layered and compounded complexities exist. They did not go away when the adoption order was sealed.  

I think most of us can agree that parenting is hard. Not hard because we do not love our children, not hard because we do not highly value our role as parents and not hard because we don’t give our best to parenting. Perhaps hard precisely because of these certainties.  

This relationship we are honoured to have with our children so matters.   

And it is in these truths—that parenting is hard and it so matters—that our commonalities remain; a reality that brings us together.   

From here as parents, we begin to diverge.   

The average parenting ‘know how-tos’, skills, and podcasts lack the ability to support parenting outside of a healthy uterine experience of secure attachment without trauma and exposures—without loss upon loss remaining on it all.  

As we begin to address our present, consuming fear regarding our girls’ future, we are slowly building circles of support, both personally and professionally, around our daughters. This dependable network of interdependence is being constructed by providing advocacy, organization, and structure for them.  

Our biggest help has been our association with Adopt4Life. They “get” us. Being heard and seen, along with the coming alongside, has helped us begin to pick up where placement left off.

Sincerely, One Thankful Mama 

The opinions expressed in blogs posted reflect their author and do not represent any official stance of Adopt4Life. We respect the diversity of opinions within the adoption, kinship and customary care community and hope that these posts will stimulate meaningful conversations.