A friend of mine recently adopted twins, and I found myself feeling a brief pang of jealousy that she gets to experience the joy of newborn babes-in-arms, without the hormonal roller coaster and painful recovery.  It quickly passed, but it’s interesting to hear how the two experiences differed so much for you.

What a beautiful blog! I have been feeling the struggle of living this “hidden” life of motherhood… but then a friend pointed out to me.. look at what Mary did for 30 years! She had this hidden life no one knew about… but it was so worth it.  My friend was saying… imagine Mary saying…. “Should go out and be busy and do all these great things in the world or stay home with Jesus? What is more important?” Her comments put everything in right order. It is hard and lonely to stay home but your kids need and love it. May God bless you as you make your home a little “Nazareth”.

Dear ladies, thanks for all your great comments.  I am blessed to hear about all your experiences.

Please know that I did not mean to imply that adoptive mothering is any less real than biological mothering.  We are all mothers by virtue of our womanhood and exercise that gift in many different ways, most especially the rearing of children, whether those from our own wombs or from the womb of another.

For me, the emotional and spiritual transition into full-time motherhood has been a gradual one.  I’m not proud of that.  Because I am so stubborn, I held on to my big dreams for longer than I needed, which caused me to miss some of the joy of mothering when I received my twins; I was not fully able to enter this new life at first and had to settle in slowly. 

If you are adoptive mother and you were blessed with an instant bond and fierce love for your child, that is a grace.  I did not have that.  I felt at first that I was playing at being a mother with my twins and daughter, whereas with my biological son, mothering felt as natural as living in my own skin. 

There are many reasons for this I’m sure—I had Edmund from his first day on earth, while I received the twins when they were already eight months old and daughter when she was 2 1/2 years.  In addition, my daughter came to us with many behavioral/emotional wounds and behaves in a way that makes her very hard to like sometimes, while little Edmund, because he is a newborn, elicits from me a very natural and strong affection.  And, finally, Edmund and I share a chemical/hormonal bond forged in utero that I cannot share with my Leo, Tobias, and Adele; Our Lord is forging bonds of love between us, but we don’t have that natural bond.  That is a grief for me.  I wish I could have known all my children from their first moments.

Are any of you mothers of mixed families like mine?  How did you handle the bonding process with your adoptive and bio children?  I’d love to hear from you and learn from your experience.

I just wanted to make a comment related to this article.  I am from a family that was half biological and half adopted, different race.  So I am not ignorant of the dynamics of such a family.  My parents always told each of us that they loved us all equally from the moment they set eyes on each of us.  My mother and father never voiced the fact that they struggled with natural feelings of affection for any particular one of us.  (Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t.)  But it is to their credit that they never voiced ANYTHING about such existent or non-existent feelings to anyone, unless to each other or in the deepest confidence.  So my suggestion is this:  Don’t voice your struggle to ANYONE except your spouse or MAYBE to someone in the deepest confidence (for example, to someone else who may be seeking support/reassurance in their adoptive parenting role and who is a close friend).  All of you who are so willing to discuss such things frankly on the Internet may later see with hindsight that it wasn’t such a good idea.  Children grow up to read what their parents have written or overhear others talking about what their parents have said/written.  And by that time, you will hopefully feel a natural and equal, effortless affection for each child, regardless of whether they are biological or adopted.  Better to leave current struggles unwritten and unpublished.  Just a suggestion from someone who can guess how these words might someday affect an adopted child.

I’m all for adoption and kids.  I think the challenge here is that you are raising one (biological) child who you have a natural attachment to and also raising 3 other beautiful children who require you to work to feel that attachment.  I know the kids are little, but kids are extremely smart and I worry that they might pick up on the fact that it is easier to naturally love Edmund and that you require work to love them and interact with them.  Even if you don’t come out and explicitly tell the adopted kids that you feel differently towards them (as the previous commenter Sarah mentioned), they’re likely to pick up on non-verbal signals and small behaviors.  Not that you don’t already have numerous tasks already laid out for you, but I would think that now that you have felt that biological bond that you have more information available and more emotional awareness to know how to provide special motherly focus on the older children.  And finally, just like Sarah said, saying anything less positive about the adopted kids vs. the biological kids online does run the risk of the kids feeling hurt.  If the blog is out there when Adele learns to read, I’m sure her feelings might be hurt to see that she causes so much trouble for you as a mother right now.  And the twins might feel bad to see that you wish God’s blessings on Edmund, but not on Tobias and Leo (http://www.devinrose.heroicvirtuecreations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/DSC_1368-800x529.jpg)  It’s likely that it’s not an intentional behavior to exclude them, but you have a harder task than most mothers to double ensure that you are treating them equally.

Thank you for this great post!

I have planned on adopting since I was still a child myself and have to admit that I am sometimes afraid that “there is something about adoption, especially adoption of children who really need homes, which can allow one to think of oneself as a bit more of an activist than a mother.” Do you have any tips for preventing that?

As a mother to children both biological and adopted, I wanted to comment.  While I know that the bonding process for mothers of adopted children can be slow and painful, it can be equally slow and painful for the mothers of biological children.  I have 2 friends in particular who took weeks if not months for that intense motherly love to kick in.  And they experienced the feeling of guilt, uncertainty and sadness that go along with it.  I on the other hand became a mother for the first time when my son was 14 months old.  He was terrified and wanted nothing to do with either my husband or I…and I was totally in love.  It was as if my chemistry changed. I was his mom.  A month later I was pregnant and tried to politely dodge the well meaning comments about how I would now see what it was like to be a “real” mom.  I couldn’t imagine that it was possible to love a child more, but what did I know, right?  Then my younger son was here and for the second time I experienced what it was like to be instantly, completely in love.  And I could say without an ounce of hesitation that my kids were my kids, equally loved and equally mine, despite the fact that one is the spitting image of my husband and the other the spitting image of his birthmom in Taiwan.  I am so thankful for God’s blessing of the instant bond that I felt with both of my children.  It was truly a gift.  But I know that this is not always the case and that for some moms, biological or adoptive, the road to feeling like a “real” mom is bumpier, longer and more painful.

As a single woman with no children, I guess I’m in the peanut gallery on this one. However, I’d just like to point out that if we were to limit motherhood to women who would be happy doing it full time, there’d probably be even fewer women having kids. If I had a dollar for every time I heard my older female relatives grousing about how lucky women are now because they aren’t ‘stuck at home with a bunch of d-d kids’, I’d be a lot more well off ! For some, having, or evening being in, a big family just spreads around the misery.