Shouldn't I Be Feeling Happier Now That I'm Finally a Mom? - Weekend Wisdom

Please pardon any errors this is an automated transcript.
Dawn Davenport  0:00  
Welcome to weekend wisdom by creating a family. As you may know, creating a family is a national support and training nonprofit for foster adoptive and kinship families. And this segment of our podcast is part of our attempt to have a short form podcast answering a specific question, or addressing a specific topic. We also have a long form podcast called Creating a family. Talk about foster adoption in kinship care. And that's long form. It's one hour of an interview with an expert. So welcome to weakened wisdom. Today, we're going to be talking about post adoption depression. It is more common, and it needs to be talked about more. Here is a question. I adopted my son four months ago, it took me almost three years and I am supposed to be living my dream. Instead, I just feel frustrated, sad, and sometimes even angry. I don't know what's wrong with me. It's not like my hormones are all messed up from giving birth. It's a good question. And it's a good misperception. In a sense, we do think of postpartum depression as being connected to the hormones that are out of whack inside of a woman's body. But anytime you go through a major, major life change, and adoption, or anytime you add a child to the family in any way, it is a major life change. And every adoptive parent expects it after working so hard to become a parent that they're going to feel nothing but joy and thankfulness at the gift of their child. And honestly, very often, this is exactly what they do feel. Of course, realistically, we know that these feelings of joy can be mixed with feelings of being overwhelmed and exhausted and feelings of oh my god, what have I gotten myself into and feelings of all I want is night I want to have two hours of sleep uninterrupted. That's all I'm asking for. And sometimes they are complicated. With the worry of, I didn't fall madly in love at first with this child. What's wrong with me? That is another common thing that adoptive parents can sometimes feel they can also feel they I feel like a babysitter. I feel like I'm a fraud. Am I the real mom? Is this child going to always long for the hands, the arms, the comfort of their biological mom. It's complicated. Adoption is a complicated thing. And you add the all those complications on to a major life change. And we shouldn't be surprised that sometimes we're feeling depressed. And sometimes these feelings of sadness and tiredness and heaviness get to the point where it just feels overwhelming. I have not seen any research on how many adoptive parents experienced depression post adoption. But I can say anecdotally, from members of our online support community, we believe that there are a couple of factors that play into people feeling post adoption, depression, and also the degree that they might feel. One, we see it more often with parents who have not resolved their grief over not having a biologically related child. I don't know if this is an issue with our questioner. But that often is an issue. And sometimes we jump off the infertility treatment escalator so quick, we jumped immediately on to the adoption escalator, I think of it in terms of two escalators going up. And there are two very different ways of creating your family. And what we need to do. And we don't do a good job of this, in my opinion, in the infertility world, there's a little encouragement. In the adoption world, there is more encouragement to take time to think through and acknowledge your grief. But not enough, oftentimes, it is important to get off, especially if you've been in treatment, or have been just trying without treatment for a long time. There are a lot of losses associated with that decision. And there's nothing wrong with saying that there are losses. And it's important for you to acknowledge those and honor those and allow yourself to grieve at creating a family.org We have a lot of resources to help you do just that. A second thing that we see that lend itself to post adoption, depression is parents having unrealistic expectations of what the transition period will be like this. This is especially true when adopting children past infancy. They may have thought this kid's going to have it a lot better with us. They're going to be grateful they're going to be appreciative. This is a good thing. Well, good news here guys or bad news. Children are not designed to feel grateful they shouldn't be grateful to their parents anyway. They aren't going to, at least not until they're in their mid 20s. So if you've adopted a older child, then you need to have realistic expectations of what they're going to They like how they're going to feel how their behavior will look like. And if their behaviors, their challenges, learning challenges, behavior, challenges, medical challenges, whatever are different from what you were prepared for. That is something you have to adjust to and that adjustment can lead to depression. Another thing that we see that can lend itself to post adoption, depression is parents not having people who they can confide in confide their fears and their concerns. The worst thing we can do when we are feeling frustrated and sad when we're supposed to be, as the questioner said, living our dream is to bottle it all up, to feel guilty about it to not include it, to not share that with other people. You need people in your life that you can say, this is a lot harder than I thought. And they will understand and not say I told you, so you need to find those people in your life, I cannot stress strongly enough that support groups can really be helpful. And I think one of the best is the creating a family one, you can find it on facebook.com/groups/creating a family. And the last thing that we have seen that lends to people struggling with post adoption of depression, if you have had depression in the past, or were currently depressed, prior to the adoption. So if you are struggling post adoption, the first thing you need to know is that you are absolutely not alone. This is not a reflection on you, or your child, or your eventual adjustment or how good a mom you're going to be or a dad, how good of a parent I should say you're going to be, you need to talk with the first person you can reach out to is your adoption social worker, she really isn't going to judge you and she can help. The other thing is get yourself into counseling. And in the meantime, as I mentioned before, join either an in person or an online support group and share there you're going to find a great deal. It really helps when you post we see it all the time in the creating a family Facebook group, somebody will post what they're feeling and they're scared to do it because they think they're going to be slammed. And what happens is they have so many people come and say I felt that exact same way. Or I felt even worse or this is what my experience was. And knowing that other people have gone through it take some of the pressure off of that there is something really wrong with me. However, if you have fears of harming yourself or your child, you need to get help immediately. Call 988 which is the suicide and crisis lifeline. You also need to tell somebody immediately in your everyday life, be it your partner, your pediatrician, your parent, your friend, tell somebody immediately and get yourself help. Before you leave, I want to tell you about a really strong resource that we're offering here at creating a family. It is an interactive training. It can be used as a small group training for adoptive foster or kinship parents or it can be used as a support group curriculum. It is interactive, it's a lot of discussion. It is educational. It's a video based program so it's super easy to use, you show it and the video pauses. It tells you what to discuss leaves you with two points you need to practice and work on and your next month. It is super easy to use. We have 25 curriculum in the library can be used for online or in person groups. Check it out at parent support groups.org. That's one way parent support groups.org Or you can go to creating a family.org and hover over the training section and click on curriculum. Thanks for listening today. Check us out next week.

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