From the category archives:

Grief/Grieving

Triggers: Mother’s Day

May 6, 2011

Mother’s Day is this Sunday. And, similar to the majority of women, Mother’s Day holds great meaning for me. It is a day I celebrate being a mother. And it is also a day of quiet reflection, for I share Mother’s Day with unknown remarkable women whose invisible features reside in my children’s faces.
Mother’s Day [...]

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Pebbles…

March 20, 2011

Do you appreciate one-liners? I certainly do. I believe they are important. They can make us laugh (those endorphins are good for us), think and act. There are the comedic one-liners, jokes—the silly, the funny, the dirty, the stupid. They come out of nowhere, surprising you, making you chuckle, for example: “Do not argue with [...]

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How to Help Your Child Process the Past

October 21, 2010

Adoptive parents are very good about painting the rosy picture—how they came to be families, how they love their children. Parents do this to claim their children. The also do this because as an adoptive family they are in the position of having to validate their family to extended family, friends and strangers. But often, [...]

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Loss: The Well of Grief

September 21, 2010

The basic trauma of every single adoption is loss. No matter how young a child is when they join their adoptive family, they have suffered loss—of their birth mother, birth history, and possibly birth father, birth siblings and culture. Loss brings about grief and for many, depending on the situation and child, other issues.
One of [...]

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Parenting Your Adopted Child: Tweens, Teens & Beyond Begins Tomorrow!

April 6, 2010

Spring has arrived and that means that my April class for adoptive parents of tweens and teens begins! I’m looking forward to tomorrow, when we get the ball “rolling.”
So, what is the class about? In a nutshell, Parenting Your Adopted Child is a six-week e-mail course that focuses on helping adoptive parents support adopted tweens [...]

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Triggers

March 25, 2010

An event or situation that causes grieving in the adopted child is known as a trigger. For years, my daughter’s birthday was a trigger for her grief. The weeks leading up to her birthday were filled with immense pain and she spent counteless hours in my arms crying.
Other triggers can be:

Mother’s Day
First day of each [...]

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