Online Adoption Class #1

Last night Jesse and I decided to do our first online adoption class.  It covered information on how to help an adopted child cope with grief and loss and also losses and gains of each person involved in the adoption.  We learned so much from the class.  It was just short of two hours and had a small assessment at the end.  As we learned about different symptoms of grief of an adopted child, the different stages in life grief could appear, triggering events of grief or loss for an adopted child and so much more, it was somewhat overwhelming to think about the emotions that come with every adoption no matter how good the child has it or how smoothly the adoption took place.  There will almost always be some form of grief and it is not bound to appear at the same time for each adopted person.  One of the main things that we learned was that being open with our child about their past, birth mom, and any other information we know can help the child tremendously.  The questions are bound to come and if our child feels like they are not able to talk with us about them they will harbor them inside and cause bad feelings about themselves or possibly those around them.  We learned all sorts of ways to help a child cope with their past and their feelings about their adoption and their birth mother.  Some of these include, adoption books, LifeBook's about the child's adoption and life, adoption groups, timelines, telling stories, and rituals.  I am sure having these ideas will be very helpful in the future as we help our child deal with any grief that might come.  One thing we want our child to have is a positive view of his/her birth mother.  We learned that if an adopted child has a negative view of his/her birth mother, the child may take those negative feelings and apply them to himself because he came from his birth mother.  There was an idea to have the birth mother write a letter to her child at the time of adoption to explain that she really does love him and why she has decided to give him up for adoption.  We really hope this is something we can have our birth mother do so that our child will always have that letter to go back to and remember that his birth mother really cared and wanted to do what was best for him.  We really have no idea how our adoption is going to go though so that will be totally dependent on what the birth mother feels comfortable doing.  The online classes are nice because we made an account online and bought the class so we can go back to them at any time in the future.  Some of the things we learned or thought about are things that will be really helpful to reconsider and go back to once we have adopted our child.

We have two more adoption classes to complete.  Our next meeting is this Friday, the seventh.  This meeting  is actually technically two meetings were Jesse and I will meet individually with our case worker and she will learn more about us individually and go over any questions she has about our adoption application questions we completed.  I think this could be somewhat nerve racking especially for Jesse but I think he will do just fine!