In so many ways, Julia is a young soon-to-be twelve year old. Though she’s in middle school, she’s unconcerned with fashion, boys, or other pre-pubescent experimenting.
My daughter Julia, adopted from a Siberian orphanage at 8-months old, is on track intellectually but is still catching up emotionally. She is a wonderful violinist and a gobsmacking artist and an honor student, but she hasn’t yet learned how to make a BFF, nor, and I suppose I should be thankful, she had not attached herself to a clique. My husband and I are her whole world.
The other day, Julia and I were in the car waiting for my husband to pick up cat food and chicken feed. Her mood had grown stormy, and I was restlessly impatient. I honestly can’t remember what we were bickering about but I had said “no” to something, and she replied by telling me she didn’t have to listen to me. “You are not my real mom,” she said, defiantly.
I knew this day would come. I can’t say I was prepared for it. I wish I had handled it with aplomb. I didn’t. I snapped back by saying, “Oh yeah, then who is?” I regretted these words as they catapulted from my mouth. Judging from Julia’s reaction, I could see she too felt very sad about the exchange. “That’s so mean,” she said. I knew it was. We sat silently. I was choking back tears. She managed to be the bigger one and said she was sorry. I was sorry too. I asked her to never say that again. Finally allowing tears too flow, I told her being her mother was the most important thing in the world to me. She reached toward me from the back seat and threw her hands around my neck and shoulders. I clutched her wrists.
Mothers and daughters clash, especially with harsh words and unexpected revelations when young girls are entering puberty. Tweens are hormone-addled and gaining confidence about their place in the world. Julia is experimenting with lots of new repertoires lately, maybe taking a swear word or two for a test drive. Asking more incisive questions about why people do the things they do. Taking greater notice too of my life.
But those four words “you’re not my mother” are an adoptive mother’s nightmare, especially because it took more than a few years for my child to attach. My husband and I were surprised but in the early months after we adopted Julia, she would not let me hold her without recoiling and she wouldn’t make eye contact. Her “terrible twos” were terrible, and confusing because she was constantly oppositional and distant.
During this time, I assumed I was deeply flawed and not fit to be a mother. I certainly didn’t feel like Julia’s mother. Clues along the way led us to a syndrome called Reactive Attachment Disorder, which is a serious condition suffered by children who’ve experienced early neglect or abuse. With concerted effort, a host of counter-intuitive parenting techniques, and all the love we could muster, Julia released her armor and began to bond and trust us. It was slow and steady progress, and when I look back, I think of us as survivors.
Like a former alcoholic counts his sober years, I ponder seven years bonded, and I’m so grateful that we’ve never looked back. Julia is my daughter, in all the ways that mothers and daughters love and hate, push and pull, know they belong to one another. Yes, the words “you are not my mother” are just words, but they are true, and they are words a birth mother is not likely to hear. They are hurtful words because an adoptive mother knows she has walked to the end of the earth for that child, literally in our case, and wants nothing more than to love that child.
Maybe we overcompensate because we viscerally aware of the privilege we have been given to raise a child another woman has borne. When a child says “you’re not my real mom,” it reminds us that we are never going to gaze into a face that looks like our own or be able to tell our daughter or son about the night we gave birth. That hurts. Deep down we wish we could have given that child life.
As parents, birth or adopted, we steel ourselves for moments when our child turns mean or hateful. I should have been better prepared to hear those words. Unfortunately, they caught me unaware and seared my heart. As I thought about them, I wondered whether Julia was just experimenting with a spectacular way to push my buttons, or whether she was trying to tell me something deeper and more complicated. I must keep my antenna up.
Over the years, she’s asked briefly about her birth and her origins, and we’ve told her everything we know, which is practically nothing. If this should truly preoccupy her down the road, I will do anything necessary to quell her needs. Of course I would. I’m her mother.
Excerpted from Rescuing Julia Twice: A Mother’s Tale of Russian Adoption and Overcoming Reactive Attachment Disorder by Tina Traster, with permission from Chicago Review Press. Copyright © 2014. All Rights Reserved.