Adopting the Older Child -- Part 2

Hubs and me in the van at Bole International Airport, waiting to be taken to our guest house.
We've got our game faces on and don't look too bad after 24 hours of travel, in my opinion.

The referral we received for T was unremarkable. His age was listed as three, but the doctor thought it was more likely he was four, a tiny four, but four. He was generally healthy with a few scars. And the clincher: "gets along well with staff and other children." He looked pitiful in his photos: terrified, sad, and shy. There was nothing to indicate we should not accept this referral.

We asked traveling families to be on the lookout for him, and report to us on how he was doing. We wanted to know if he was happier than he looked in his photos and if he was making friends at the orphanage. But he didn't arrive at our agency's facility until shortly before a measles outbreak. The families who were there when he was there ended up being immersed in caring for their own children who were struggling to survive this epidemic. So we heard nothing and saw no new photos -- all we had to rely on were the referral report and the two pitiful intake photos at the first orphanage.

We did our due diligence during our adoption process. We chose Ethiopia because, among other reasons, the children are not institutionalized for long and therefore supposedly have very few, if any, adjustment issues. We spoke with three families who'd adopted older children from Ethiopia about adopting children in our age range, and heard that the first month would be a bit rough, but then things would smooth out. The families all talked about a few explosive temper tantrums they'd had to deal with initially, but we never got the sense there was anything significant other than that. We were satisfied that we could handle a rough first month.

We completed online educational courses about adopting the older child and did the readings required by our agency. During this process, I commented to my husband that all the educational materials we had reviewed stated that typical parenting techniques wouldn't work with attachment-challenged children, but never provided any tips on what would work. We just forged ahead and hoped we wouldn't need to know. We were, after all, adopting from Ethiopia, where the children are not attachment-challenged.

It wasn't until we were standing in Addis Ababa's Bole Airport waiting for all the people on our flight to gather for the ride back to the guest house that we got our first hint of what we might really expect. Chatting with a woman who was waiting with us, she found out we were adopting a four year old. "Oh, good luck," she said. "I adopted my daughter at four a year ago and the first three months were a nightmare. She spit food out at me; she threw feces at me. It was horrible." Then a pause. "It's a lot better now though."

I got the sense we were getting our first truly candid report of parenting an adopted older child. Food spitting and feces throwing. A sinking feeling settled over me.