I’ve had a few questions put to me as to how parenting an adopted child is the same or different than parenting bio kids. Quite honestly, the parenting part is pretty much the same; I do the same with her as I did with the boys. I only find that with Evie, I tend to think about antecedents to her behaviours more than I did with Skyler (I probably didn’t even know what the word meant then) or Sean (where I learned the word).
The antecedent to a behaviour, of course, are the events that lead up to it, valuable clues in figuring out why the behaviour occurred. Charting this became really important during Sean’s early years, as we could usually then anticipate his bad behaviours and melt-downs if we saw the antecedents being repeated, and try to prevent them. With Evie, it isn’t so much bad behaviours that get me wondering about antecedents, but simple personality traits, or actions. For instance, she has always had an independant streak. I can’t help but wonder, is it from institutional living, or is it genetic, or is it just her personality? She has started waking up crying in the night, and can’t be soothed so easily. Is it nightmares based on her early (unknown to me) life, or something else? It seems with the boys, I could either pin some unusual behaviour down to Autism (in the case of Sean) or personality (Skyler). There wasn’t usually a question left hanging there, as I find there is with Evie.
I am constantly amazed that I can love her just as much as my other two. This may sound shocking, but never having adopted before, and knowing how strong mothering hormones are when you birth, I wasn’t sure how this was all going to work. Sure, I knew I’d love her; I loved her even before I had a picture in front of me, but I didn’t know if I’d get that "motherly rush of love" that I had with the boys when they were newborns. Granted, it wasn’t immediate with Evie, but it didn’t take long to materialize. One difference I guess, was that I really didn’t know if she was going to reciprocate the affection, and had to steel myself for a possible rejection by her. In the end, she warmed up to us pretty fast, and then over the year has really settled into loving us the way I had hoped and imagined.
The only other differences I can note come from gender, and not origin. I had fun with my boys, but it sure is nice having a girl too. At 18 months she showed preference for certain clothes; she has always loved holding her "babies" (dolls) and mothering them. She loves jewellery, playing with hairbrushes (well so does Skyler now, I guess), and hair hardware (although she won’t leave them IN her hair). Her manual dexterity is better than the boys was at that age. She likes to scribble and draw with markers and play with crafty items. She certainly picks up boyish habits from her brothers, and knows how to play with cars and trains, but there isn’t the same intensity in those activities as there is in the girly ones. It is quite amazing to watch; without my intervening, nature just takes over.
Last summer, the boys brought her a frog to see, and she screamed when it jumped. "She’s such a girl", Skyler said, grinning happily. I think he gets a kick out of that. Me, I too was raised with brothers, and know that Evie, like me, will probably develop some toughness in her, bred from the necessity of fending off big brothers, and their wicked ideas. ("Let’s get Anne to taste Tobasco sauce; Let’s see if she’ll put her finger into the mousetrap. Let’s tell her the moon is made of green cheese. Let’s make Anne climb up into the treehouse, even though she’s deathly afraid of heights, and we’ll get her down by this swing with the rotted rope") OK, it was INGRID’s idea to have me try the Tobasco sauce ("It’s medicine") Can you tell that she became a nurse?, so it wasn’t all the boys, but it did make me a little more street smart by the time I got to school. (I’d also had my legs shaved, and was convinced to take a puff on a cigarette, by the time I hit first grade.) Where MY mother was during all of this, I don’t know! Probably downstairs, making up those incredible meals of hers, or tending to animals or flowers. Evie, hopefully, won’t have all of the same trials (after all I had three big brothers and a big sister, she only has two brothers) but will get the same benefits from it.
Two out of the three brothers, circa 1969. Don't let their clean-cut looks fool you. Me, I'm pretending to be Herman Munster. I thought I'd perfected the smile....
Nature vs. nurture (or non-nurture, as in the cases above). It will be interesting to see how she develops as time goes by. And if by some stroke of luck, we do get to meet her birth family someday, we may just find she has similarities to them and we’ll get answers to some of the unexplained personality traits. This sort of thing I will ponder more with my girl than with the boys, for sure.
What a little girl learns from her big brothers.
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