Attachment Issues and the Grieving Process

We have one really amazing kid here. We love her so much and she wants to trust us, because we are the ones here taking care of her, feeding her, changing her and even sometimes, making her laugh. When we went through our mandated 10 hours of parent classes to be able to adopt from China, we were told that children attach in different ways. Some kids are so neglected in the orphanage that they have already shut down and given up and are very slow to attach. Others, after experiencing the same neglect, realize suddenly that someone will tend to their every need and desire and quickly attach and become clingy. Some kids attach only to mom and others only to dad. This made sense to us. We were also told that kids go through a grieving process when they are adopted. The grieve for the foster home they lost, the birth mom they will never know, the familiarity of their orphanage or for a worker they may have attached to. Larry and I sort of ignored that part of the course, thinking that since Abigail would only be 13 months, she would not be old enough to grieve.

We did not give her enough credit. The depth of her emotion is beyond what we can understand and what she is going through right now is breaking our hearts.

She seems to have attached to both of us pretty well. When one of us is gone from the room, she will often become very stressed out. Larry went through this yesterday when I had to go for an hour to a paperwork meeting. Twenty-four hours of love, attention, and bonding later, Abigail is a very conflicted little girl. Today Larry had to leave for 2.5 hours to run errands. One hour into the separation Abigail became inconsolable. She was in my arms and we were sitting in a chair. She crawled onto her knees on my lap, facing me and began to go through a type of comfort ritual that we have noticed she does when she becomes stressed. She stuffed a corner of her blanket into her mouth and sucked on it, silent tears ran down her face, she started hyperventilating, and buried her face in my chest for about 5 minutes, sobbing silently and sucking on her blanket and gripping my shirt th

e whole time. Then her breath would slow down, she would sit up, look into my eyes, find a dry spot on her blanket, and repeat the process.

This little human being has been through 2 abandonments (as she sees it) so far in her life and seems terrified that it will happen again. We talked to the social worker with us here, worried that something is really wrong with her because all of the other kids are playing on the floor with their new families and our kid can't be out of our arms for 2 seconds. Apparently, this is just another version of "normal", although it seems like the most cruel and heart wrenching thing in the world to us right now. We have no way to tell her "We are never going to abandon you: this is it, Kid, you are stuck with us!" except to just keep holding her, letting the tears fall, and letting her work through it.