Whether you’re adopted, you’re an adoptive parent or you just want to have a better understanding of adoption and all the ways it plays out in families’ lives (some of which you’ve never dreamed of), you’ll want to check out a wonderful Psychology Today blog, Adoption Stories.
Blogger Meredith Resnick, M.A., M.S.W., L.C.S.W., is a health writer and a licensed social worker. She’s also the mother of two adopted daughters. I have to share one post in particular, “National Adoption Month: Bittersweet.”
A brief excerpt: “Before our adoption, pregnant friends rubbed their bellies and said: ‘The older they are the more problems you’ll have.’ ‘You must feel desperate,’ one said. ‘Do you think they’re even capable of loving you?’”
Honestly, I found myself wanting to smack some of the people who made such insensitive comments to a woman who was about to adopt two girls, nearly 11 and 14, from an orphanage in St. Petersberg, Russia.
Resnick’s honest writing about what it has been like to raise these two young women — and then to watch them go out into the world as young adults all too soon — resonated with me, a mom whose son will turn 14 next week.
But Resnick and her husband took the brave leap of inviting Anya and Olya into their lives when the girls already had developed personalities, likes, dislikes, fears and desires of their own. When they knew that the time they had with the girls under their roof would be short.
Resnick is a talented writer (she has written for Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Chicago Tribune and many other pubs), taking us with her from the orphanage director’s office during a freezing St. Petersberg winter to today, as she looks back on a period of years that she wishes she could somehow stretch to equal all the love in her heart.