Adoption workshop 2 - Attachment & Seperation

I realise I didn't really debrief from our adoption workshop last Saturday. It was a lot to take in again, heaps of theory and information about seperation and attachment, but it also had a lot of practical suggestions for how to establish an attachment with an adopted child. There are so many challenges with creating this attachment, it is really quite overwhelming.

We have been given plenty of reading material which has been great, but also very challenging personally. I know that I can be a good adoptive parent, but my concern with adoption is about the child, and how they will respond when they are old enough to understand the concepts. If we go down this path, we would absolutely tell the child from the moment they are born that they are adopted, in an age appropriate way, so I don't intend on hiding anything from them. But everyone responds differently. What happens when they become teenagers and like all kids that age, tries to establish their identity. They will have gaps and not know everything they want to know about where they came from, who they get their characteristics from etc. We don't know how deeply this will affect the child. I can only hope and pray that they get out of it relatively unscathed.

We have decided at this point to only pursue local adoption, which is adoption just in Western Australia. There is very little local adoption (anywhere between 3 and 10 children adopted locally each year) and much more intercountry adoption in WA. ICA (intercountry adoption) is significantly more expensive and with having spent as much as we have on ivf, we dont have any more spare money to pursue it. Even if we did, everything we have learnt about attachment is that children who have spent time in orphanages (which is where most of these children come from), suffer great emotional stress which they can sometimes never recover from. In Australia, the children are always in foster care, not an orphanage which gives much better care and allows the child to form bonds with their caregiver.

I submitted our forms yesterday to the Department of Child Protection who faciliate adoption in WA. The forms were pretty basic - ticking that we had attended all of the compulsory workshops, what age child we wanted, date of birth etc info and a photo of the two of us. I forgot to bring a photo to work so had to take a holiday snap out of my frame at work to include - I hope that doesn't matter too much! So now we wait and see. The next stage is another seminar - this time on the assessment process and all the things we need to do there. I don't think there are any spots left in that until January so we will have some time with no ivf and no adoption over Christmas which will be good.