Adoption Loss: A Unique Loss

There is very little written about the loss of an adopted child. This loss is quite unique; the child was not lost due to miscarriage, still birth, or other circumstances. The child lives on either with their birthmother or birthparents or with another adoptive family. As Wendy Williams and Pat Johnston described in their article Losing an Adoption: Practical Advice for Moving on after a Uniquely Painful Experience, this is “…an ongoing loss.”

My husband and I have lost three sons during the adoption process all at various stages. Our first son, Alexander, was a “referral” whom although we never met physically, we considered him to be our future son for nearly nine months. We had dozens of pictures of Alexander both from the adoption agency and other AP’s who were adopting from the same orphanage. Many people do not see this as a “significant loss” since you have never held this child in your arms or parented this child directly. I can only liken it to the platitudes given to a mother who has miscarried: “It must not have been meant to be” or “At least you never got attached to him/her.” A mother begins bonding with her child from the moment she discovers she is pregnant. Likewise, an adoptive mother begins bonding with her child as though “in-utero” when she is presented with a “referral”. The hopes and dreams of a mother are not determined by the method through which she becomes a mother. Whether she dreams of the day she physically gives birth to her child or the day her child is placed in her arms for the first time the anticipation is equivalent.

In my opinion, there is one difference in the loss of an “unparented” child. The loss of a child you have not seen or parented is the loss of what “could have been” and of the hopes and dreams for the future you have envisioned for that child and for your family as a whole. The loss of a child you have parented, regardless of how long you parented that child, is the loss of what is in the here and now as well as what was to come. It is a compounded loss in that it takes away not only what you were blessed with having, but the future blessings as well.

I hope that I do not offend anyone who has experienced a miscarriage or the death of a child by sharing my own personal grief. I can not claim to understand the grief of losing a child to death, although I did lose my brother as a teenager and saw the devastation inflicted upon my parents and our family as a whole. For me, the difference between losing a loved one through death and the loss of an adopted child is that there is little opportunity for closure for the latter.