We were sitting in a required parent training for adoption a couple years ago now, when the facilitator started explaining that there is a “primal wound” that develops when a birth mother and a child are separated shortly after childbirth. She was teaching from a well known resource published in 1993 by Nancy Verrier called “The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child.” The primary focus of both the book and the class was the effects of adoption on the adopted. The big idea was that all adoptees, even those adopted at birth, experience a break in bond that is a deep emotional wound. And that a loving set of adoptive parents can help to heal the wounds.
I remember there was a woman in our class who listened to all the unique challenges of bonding and attaching inherent in adoption and then she finally blurted out, “This is so depressing! I’m not even sure I want to adopt anymore!”
Tim and I listened, learned, were sobered by the realizations but didn’t feel any less drawn to adopt. For us it felt empowering to know the information. It felt honest to acknowledge and embrace the research. Just like there is a nostalgia to romance, there can be a nostalgia to adoption. Nostalgia plays a role in initially drawing us, inspiring us towards a beautiful vision of what could be. But nostalgia is a limited view. It’s only a small part of the true story. Real love – the tough, weathered, true kind – doesn’t remain in nostalgia-land forever. Authentic love is sometimes boring, sometimes brutal, sometimes messy and scary and roll-up-your-sleeves, push-on, one-foot forward, hard+hard+hard work. Nostalgia comes and goes. Sustaining love on the other hand, embraces the truth, lives informed and rides the seasons of winter, spring, summer and fall.
I want to be the kind of person who moves beyond nostalgia to give and receive sustaining love. I want to offer this kind of love to my people; to my kids, to Tim and to our home team. I want more than pseudo-community that is all about conflict-avoidance. I want the real deal. I want to foster true, authentic community that is only born when we risk vulnerability and are willing to enter the tunnel of chaos to find one another as we truly are on the other side.
Embracing “the primal wound” of adoption is just a picture to me of embracing people for who they really are (and not who I want to make them be) and not minimizing the pain of our unique human experiences – whatever they may be. This takes humility and vulnerability and patience and time – and it is relevant in all my relationships. Because we all have different pains & wounds, and we all have the chance to offer one another healing too.
Susie Grade 