I was in Grazia magazine talking about being adopted and having post-natal depression

Last month I was in the UK edition of Grazia magazine talking about post-adoption grief aka post-natal depression.

Here is the full Grazia piece

Here are a few things that have happened since then:

1. My parents read it and didn’t disown me ;) I was shaking like a leaf until my mum had been to be newsagent and texted me! (Of course we should feel free to express our truth, but it’s still scary. And I’ve come a long way since I was too frightened to start an anonymous blog.

2. My birth mother read it and said she has been thinking about writing her story down for a while and might give it a go. I said I can’t recommend it enough. She is also an adoptee.

3. I got trolled by someone saying I am in the fog. Obviously they didn’t read the piece properly as in it I state that I was in the fog before I had my children, but now I’m very much “out”. This was a rare opportunity to get a piece about adoption BY AN ADOPTEE in a mainstream publication and so I trod more lightly than I would in this blog, for example.

   And as Brené Brown says:

   “It’s not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the person who is in the arena.”

4. So many adoptees have got in touch to thank me, a section of their comments are pasted below. Thank you to everyone who took the time to write to me, I appreciate it and it helps me to feel less alone too, so it’s a virtuous circle! I managed to signpost a few people to services such as PAC-UK.

5. Thanks to my adoptee friends for all their encouragement with this including Joe, Matt, Haley from Adoptees On and Anne Heffron - who said to me we are only really alive if we are living our truth (she also said “fuck anonymity” which is a more pithy way of putting it!)

6. I’m no longer anonymous. As I told Al Coates when he interviewed me after The Open Nest conference 2019, there are so many others sharing - and if it helps people, I can be brave too. So, hi. I’m Claire and I blog about being adopted! :) If anyone from 7AF at my school is reading this, yes I’m still “on my soapbox”!!

7. A few old contacts came out of the woodwork including an old boss who is now an adoptive parent and suggested we meet for coffee. I’ve been asked to speak to adoptive parents before and declined but many adoptive parents with youngsters seem keen to get input from (older) adopted people, so let’s see. Either way it’s a positive step that older adoptees narratives are seen as valuable as I have heard adoptive parents say adoption has changed so much that adoptees from the closed era are like a different species.

Excerpt from Grazia magazine October 2019

Lovely and heart-breaking messages from adoptees

“I just wanted to send a message to say thank you for writing this blog. I'm a 33 year old adoptee (adopted as a baby), mum of one and pregnant with my second, and I identify with so much of what you say and your experiences. I'm not as far on as you are with dealing with all my feelings around being adopted, but having someone discuss it so openly and clearly has made me think about it more deeply than I have in a long time. So thank you, and I hope you are able to continue writing for a long time to come.”

“Hello, and thankyou very much for your article on post adoption grief. It explains everything I have felt on becoming a mother. I could go into great depth over what it felt like for me, from the point of wanting to conceive, telling my adoptive parents I was pregnant, feeling the physical connection with my daughter growing inside my body. The loss you speak of is something I have always felt and tried to explain to people. It's a sense of loss that travels with you through your whole life in everything you do. That loss of the natural connnection with a birth mother. My little girl who is now 2, absolutely loves me telling her how she used to be in my tummy, and when ever I tell her of my life before she was born, she says when I was in your tummy! It makes me think of how there is no thought of life without mummy. That even before birth she was with me. I think of the loss of this connection adopted people have with their birth mother. Thank you for your website.”

“I have yet to have a baby of my own but am already emotional at the thought of those first few hours/days/weeks when I didn’t have a mum... I can’t help but feel so sad for myself and thank god I wasn’t able to remember it. I remember when my biological mother told me she hadn’t held me and I had to fight the lump in my throat and the tears from falling. Even though she said it was because she never would have let go I still felt she should have.”

Please leave your comments below on the piece, I would love to hear from you if you are adopted and have experienced any challenges around becoming a parent.

Post-natal depression or delayed adoption grief?

How five little ducks and a little white whale called Baby Beluga helped me out of the adoption fog.

After my first baby was born I cried every day for 30 days. When I saw my doctor, he diagnosed me with post-natal depression (PND) and gave me a prescription for anti-depressants. He didn’t refer me for any counselling because, as he said, “the waiting lists are too long”.

I’m pretty sure he was right that I was depressed – I’d had a difficult birth and a lot of problems with breastfeeding. But was it classic PND, or was it delayed adoption grief? I think it took giving birth to my son to finally acknowledge the pre-verbal trauma I experienced at being separated from my mother.

Throughout my pregnancy the signs were there. I had started to feel new emotions about being given away at birth. Previously I had been very matter-of-fact about it all: my birth mother couldn’t care for me adequately, so she found a family who could. Simple. Looking back, it’s safe to say I was very much in the fog.

But now every time my pregnancy app beeped to say my baby was the size of a peach or a mango, I couldn’t help wondering how my birth mother might have been feeling at this stage. Not proud, excited and blooming, but (most likely) hiding her bump in shame and growing anxious about the impending birth. With this in mind, being constantly told that my baby could pick up on my emotions was very hard to hear.

So, yes I did cry every day after I had my son, but much of it was localised to certain triggers, for example, when singing about a little white whale called Baby Beluga in Mother and Baby Singing Class:

“Is the water warm? Is your mummy there with you? So happy.”

Is your mummy there? Why wouldn’t she be there? Where is she? Surely this is a rhetorical question? Oh there I go, crying at Baby Singing again. I’ll just hide behind my hair.

And don’t get me started on Five Little Ducks Went Swimming One Day. I’ve got abandonment issues, I’ve had very little sleep for weeks and you’re making me sing:

“Mummy Duck said ‘quack, quack, quack, quack’ but none of those little ducks came back.”

Please someone put Mummy Duck out of her misery and tell her all her ducks come back at the end of the song!

This period of crying may well have been a very natural, albeit very belated, response to being adopted. Why shouldn’t I feel grief at being separated from my biological mother and forced to bond with a new mother in order to survive? As I cuddled and cooed at my son, why shouldn’t I cry for the baby who listened in vain for her mother’s voice?

It took the birth of my son to realise that actually, whatever I’ve said in the past, I was affected by being relinquished. A ready-made family waiting to take me home from hospital did not negate the trauma. Five years later I am still processing all these feelings and accepting my new status as an out-of-the-fog adoptee.

What could help other adoptees when they become parents?

·      Ask for additional support around pregnancy

If I had known I might experience PND, would I have asked for additional support when I became pregnant? Is this even something the NHS would be able to offer? How would doctors and midwives know the right questions to ask to put adoptees into a medium-risk category for PND? My advice would be, even if you don’t think your adoption has affected you, or you think it has but you’ve dealt with it, it’s always worth mentioning to your health professional.

·      Share how you’re feeling

Looking back, one thing I wish I had done differently was to share how I was feeling instead of hiding the fact that I was crying every day. Although I didn’t have any fellow adoptees in my “mummy circle”, I did have friends who had experienced loss, so perhaps we could have shared how hard we were finding certain situations.

·      Get help post-natally

Consider asking for additional help after your baby is born. This could be anything from hiring a doula if funds allow, to asking a friend to take any older children to the park for an hour, to setting clear boundaries with family members. (Remember many adoptees tend to be people pleasers, so perhaps ask your partner for help setting boundaries!) 

·      Find an adoption-competent therapist

In an ideal world, I would have dealt with all my adoption stuff before I became a parent, so I could have “enjoyed every minute” as the unhelpful cliché goes. But I didn’t, so I am working hard now to get to a place where I can a healthy role model for my children. And I think it’s good for them to know we are all a work-in-progress.

I have now found an excellent adoption-competent therapist – she is actually an adoptee herself – but she was not easy to find, and the sessions have been at my own expense. For advice, try the Post-Adoption Centre.

Over to you

I would love to hear from other adoptees – both women and men – who are now parents to see how this life stage has affected them, as well as their relationships with partner and baby. My hope is to put together some guidance for the health sector to recognise that adoptees may need additional support during pregnancy and beyond.

With thanks to Dr Emma Svanberg from The Mumologist who is @Mumologist on Instagram.