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Toni George's avatar

Hello: Thank you for sharing. A few words from an adoptive parent who had children already. The new child: children will not know all the “unspoken” family rules and family culture so to speak. They will by their experience be treated “differently”. Stick to your guns and remind your bio children that you treat them as individuals as well. Make sure you are not asking your bio children to alway accept or always forgive or always tolerate but to find ways to have compassion. There will be a shuffling of position and responsibilities and so on. I don’t know how long you will have the children for but your priority remains your wife and your bio children. Expressing love for them is not always interpreted as you likely intend it. Those who were responsible and failed likely expressed their love also so it just may not mean the same thing. We lost friendships over our adoption as our new child who was nine years old hurt a pet of another child. We did not tell everyone what was happening but there were consequences of which outsiders were aware and they interpreted this as unfair on our part. Others who came to babysit so we could go Christmas shopping for a few hours, who we warned that this new child in our family (about two weeks by the ) had a propensity to cheat at games and get very angry if losing. This was not a dig at the child- he had been told his value came from winning so he took it very personally - it was simply a fact to be aware of and to assist in navigating the time watching him. They later told us that they had to pull over on the drive home so the wife could throw up because she was so sickened by this idea that we already were mistreating him in their opinion. He’s now 33 years old and married and all in good stead with siblings. It was a long hard road and without his background of lead poisoning and orphanage neglect who knows what he would have done. The point being is to have realistic expectations, keep your cool and see things from your bio kids perspectives. They can say “this sounds great” or this is what we should do” but they possibly don’t really know to what they’re agreeing.

The other point is in another life situation we had a daughter who placed a baby for adoption and had to go to family court facility. You could not have described it better. The judge in our case lectured our daughter about all the state programs she could do just in case she wanted to change her mind after having agonized over this decision and all she suffered through to that point. The adoption agency was there for themselves and the guardian ad litem was there for the baby and no one was there for her. I was angry at the adoption agency, who had been this wonderful “friend” to our daughter in her mind, as they basically abandoned her at this critical juncture. I had asked if she should have a lawyer previous to this and they said it wasn’t necessary. I so wish she would have had her own counsel and her own advisor at her table as I could only watch from rear of courtroom as she sat alone and her shoulders heaved from onslaught after onslaught of this judge. This would likely not have happened if she had an attorney there telling the judge that he had made his client aware of all of this already. It was an awful day and an awful place and many of those who must interact there and conduct business there everyday do not earn enough. In this case the fish rots from the head down and things much change at that level before this portion will ever change.

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John A. Lucas's avatar

You are a good man to do this, Martin. A good man.

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