I cannot stress strongly enough the importance of grieving your losses in adoption. There is a lot to grieve as a hopeful adoptive parent. If you come to the adoption process through infertility, you need to grieve the loss of the child who would have had your nose and your husband’s eyes. You also need to grieve experiencing pregnancy – an experience that most women have. Adoption cures childlessness, NOT infertility. All of these losses need to be grieved.

There are other areas of adoption to grieve that are more subtle. For example, you need to grieve the loss of control over your family planning. In this day and age of birth control, we as a society have grown cocky about our ability to control this aspect of our lives. I know many people who succeed in doing just that. They decide that they don’t want to start a family for five years. With the help of the birth control pill, they succeed in delaying the start of their family. They go off the pill, “officially” start trying to conceive, and less than a year later hold a baby in their arms.

When you grow your family through adoption, the experience is quite different. You have no control over when your child arrives. You can forget controlling whether the child has a Spring birthday; you don’t even know in what year your child will be born. You also have no control over the spacing of your children. If you sign up to adopt #2 as soon as you adopt #1, you could wind up with two children who are very close together in age, or you could have children who are several years apart.

Grief is a natural response to loss and sadness. The grieving process exists so that you can heal your emotional wounds and move on with your life. Give yourself the gift of grieving. Even though it is painful today, you are investing in a much brighter tomorrow.

Related Links:

• Mother’s Day: Set Aside Time to Grieve




• Adoption Grief



• Surviving the Wait: Grieving Your Losses



• Surviving the Wait



• Faith and Adoption: Grief, Hope and Faith?



• Grief, Pain, and Healing



• Emotions of Adoption Series