The Trauma of the Holidays

As we approach the Holiday season, my adopted kiddos are falling apart.

Every year, they have to revisit the trauma of being taken away from their parents in this cold, dark month of November. They have to deal with the reality of their parents blaming everyone around them for their choices of neglect and abuse. They have to remember that L’s 5th birthday was the first without their parents. That just scant weeks later, C’s very first birthday was celebrated with their grandparents instead of the people who should live with them, love them, and protect them for their entire lives. In just 6 short weeks, my children had to experience 2 birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Winter break from school, and the start of the New Year; all immediately after losing their parents.

This loss reverberates still to this day, this year. They have begun their sixth year of holidays and family events without the foundation that all children crave.

Six years, when you are 12, 10, and 6, are both a lifetime away and just a blink in time. Trauma causes the mind to remember every detail and every feeling of the day they were loaded into a cop car at school and taken to their grandparents house instead of home. They can close their eyes and live again the first time they visited their bio-parents with their desperate arms and empty promises of changes and hope. They can experience again the indoctrination to rebel against every authority outside of their parents, especially their dad’s. They can live in the desperate, erroneous feeling that if they had just been better or more obedient or lied to the cops and social workers that they would still live with the parents that both loved and scared them. They wouldn’t be alone.

They are starting to idolize and idealize their bio-parents again. My husband and I are, once again, being accused of stealing them from their parents and the chant, “You have ruined my life,” has begun. There are still pockets of damaged hearts that honestly believe that, if there had been no one to adopt them, they would have ended up back with their parents. During the year, they can apply a small measure of realism and recognize that the life they lived in was not one that was safe. This time of the year, they are governed by hurts and emotions that shove their jagged edges through the thin skin of healing that has been accomplished this year.

As they get older and process through the layers of hurt and trauma, their reactions to this season seem to grow larger and more critical. The idea of suicide or murder, even from sibling to sibling, is imagined and idealized. The desperate need for all of the attention, all of the love, all of everything and anything to fill the hole left behind by missing parents begins to dominate thoughts both morning and night.

Some days, their desperate clinging to the parents of their past is easy to meet with a compassion and understanding that must be God-given. Other days, their hurts strike against my own. After four years of living with us and two years of being adopted, this is the first year we kind-of made the list of people they are grateful for this year. Older bio-sister, bio-mom, bio-dad, and family. I am lumped into a family category that includes cousins, the siblings they live with, grandparents, aunts and uncles. “Oh, and you guys.”

I am reminded, again, that adoption is first a ministry and second a family. I am reminded, again, that my sense of family and belonging needs to come from God, the one who created me and sustains me. And I am reminded, after tears, recrimination, and desperation comes the healing hope of Jesus that will renew my strength and allow me to love my hurting family with his love, and not my own.