baby dolls

i was talking to my dad last night on the phone when he asked:

"why didn't you play with baby dolls?"

"what?" i said, a bit confused because this question seemed to come out of nowhere.

"when you were little -- why didn't you play with baby dolls? you liked to play with barbies, but not baby dolls. where did you get all these motherly instincts?"

then it made sense. we had been in the middle of another conversation about our kids. and as i spoke with tenacity about attachment and brain development and how i refuse to leave my kids between our court date and embassy date, my dad was thinking back to all those times i sat on the couch while my sister got down in the floor and played with the newest baby cousin.

now, let me clear one thing up: never in my growing up years did i express any hatred or apathy towards children. my parents won't like reading this, but when my younger sister expressed a more natural affinity to kids than i did, my family suddenly decided that she liked kids more than me. so when the new baby cousins came along, everyone would say, "so-and-so just loves megan, doesn't he?" or "come on, megan, get down and play with so-and-so." it would kind of be like i wasn't even there.

so i understand why my dad is a little surprised to hear me be so motherly even though my personal opinion is that all women have these instincts even though some express them more comfortably than others (and for some, the object of those instincts isn't always a child).

but i want to share my answer to his question because i think it will help people who aren't really familiar with the unique issues facing children from "hard places" and their families. you see, my maternal instincts, i think, have become heightened throughout this adoption process because i am continually broken by the plight of the orphan. i feel fiercely protective of my children (and really all 147 million orphans in the world) because i've come to understand where they will come from and how that will affect them.

people often ask me how an infant really understands abandonment and trauma. i think the assumption is that an infant is too young to make sense of anything going on in his world. however, the truth is that while infants cannot verbally express their understanding of trauma, they experience it deeply. this is because the infant brain is the primative brain, meaning that what an infant experiences is immediately coded into the lowest part of the brain stem and becomes like the "script" that little human being comes to live by.

what is quite amazing about God's design of attachment between mother and child is that it's built into our bodies and our senses. when a baby is inside its mother's womb, it comes to know its mother's scent and the sound of its mother's heartbeat. when the baby is born, things like breastfeeding (breastmilk carries the mother's scent) and holding the baby close re-inforce the attachment that has already occurred in utero. it's even amazing to note that baby's have limited eyesight for the first few weeks of life and can only see enough to identify the face of the person holding them -- most often their mother.

so imagine what the script would say if a baby was born to a mother too poor or too sick to care for him. imagine what would code into the brain of that child when his mother had to leave him on the side of a road (with a prayer that someone would find him and take him to an orphanage).

abandonment. unmet needs. hunger. thirst. fear.

and then imagine what would continue to be written in the script if that child was taken to an orphanage where there were likely several different caregivers, too many children for each child to have significant one-on-one contact with a caregiver, and not enough resources for each child to have physical needs met.

abandonment. unmet needs. hunger. thirst. fear.

now, a lot of people assume that adoption fixes everything, that adoptive families "save" children from all that terrible stuff, and, in essence, reverse the abandonment, unmet needs, hunger, thirst, and fear. and the reality is, while adoptive families certainly make a new way for their children and want to help them heal, things don't change overnight simply because a child is getting hugs and hamburgers. the point i'm getting at is that these things (abandonment, etc) are so deeply written into the soul of some children that it may take awhile for their brains to catch up with what's actually happening in reality.

a child could be in the most stable and loving of homes and yet still not believe his parents aren't going to abandon him tomorrow. a child could actually do bad things to make sure that no matter how terrible he is, his parents won't decide they don't want him. a child could present as being ADHD when he is really just overcome with anxiety about a new situation and expressing it as nervous energy. a child might offer to give you his food at the dinner table when he perceives you don't have enough to eat because he knows what it's like to starve.

i think this is why God commands us over 200 times in the bible to care for the poor. i don't think God wants us to believe that possessions and money fix everything. rather, i think God knows that when a man is worried about how he will eat or where he will live or if his bills will get paid, it is truly his soul that suffers.

and so when i told my dad where all my maternal instincts were coming from, i told him that it pains me to think that millions of children have endured more in their first few years of life than some people do in an entire lifetime. it's not fair that some children have to worry about if their parents are going to abandon them or if they'll have enough to eat or if they're even going to survive until tomorrow.

and when it comes to my children specifically, they deserve to have their mother with them ASAP even if some people consider it unsafe or inconvenient or "against the rules" for me to stay in ethiopia. i have never understood why it's OK for my kids to be in a place some people consider unsafe, but not for me to be there. when it comes to my children, they deserve to have their mother make a personal choice to take medicine in order to produce and pump breastmilk (yes, this is possible and i'm considering it) so they have a chance at a better immune system even if some people consider it a danger to my body. (i mention these things because people have tried to talk me out of them without considering what the needs of my children might be. i don't mean to say that all adoptive mothers must stay in ethiopia or pump breastmilk).

maternal instincts are fierce. and, for me, they grow fiercer everyday as i confront the greatest orphan crisis in human history and the needs of so many children around the globe. every child deserves the love, protection, and provision of a family. i pray God will allow us to give that to many children who scripts did not begin that way.