http://omegamom.com/2006/01/04/baby-shock/
So there you are, you’ve just got a referral or have just been matched with a baby due any minute, and you’re over the moon. You pad through the Shrine To Baby (aka the nursery) late at night, when the spouse is asleep, and you daydream about the future. You sit on the glider and snuggle with one of the stuffed animals that various friends and family have presented you, and pretend it’s your baby, and you sit and croon lullabies.
Your daydreams about motherhood (or fatherhood) are portrayed in your mind’s eye with a roseate glow, a soft-focus medallion of Madonna-esque Precious Moments type joy.
Friends are excited, relatives are excited, your spouse is excited, you are excited.
If you’re traveling to meet your baby, the excitement builds. You’re in a different place–Russia or China or Cincinnati or some other place you have never been before. You’re sightseeing, you’re dealing with officials, you’re meeting and bonding with your baby, it’s all new and different and vivid.
And then you get home.
Your baby, who slept like…well, a baby…while you were elsewhere, suddenly is adjusting to a new time zone. New smells. New sights. New sounds. He or she wakes up every three hours, and nothing you can do, short of carrying baby around for hours, will put baby back to sleep.
You are in a haze of sleep deprivation, and find yourself questioning your ability to do the most mundane of things (parallel parking? How do I do parallel parking again? I know I’ve done it before!).
The house becomes messy.
Your spouse returns to work, leaving you alone.
And this baby…this precious, darling child who you have longed for for years…is a stranger. You are suddenly a stranger to yourself. And this baby…precious, darling child…is a leech.
Yes. A leech.
Hanging on you.
Demanding all your time and attention.
Screaming if you leave the room.
Desperate for love. Hungry all the time. An endless source of wet and poopy diapers.
And you are the object of this small, self-centered person’s obsession. You realize you can’t do anything without this child hanging off you. You realize you can’t sleep, because your ear is suddenly attuned to the tiniest of grunts from the crib (or another room). Vacuuming the house is ditched entirely (even us lousy housekeepers do vacuum once in a while), because (a) you can’t do it with baby hanging off you, and (b) the noise terrifies baby.
You realize that you are Everything In the World to this small, self-centered creature. And your soft-focus daydreams of gently crooning baby to sleep in the glider have gone into the trashcan, because baby hates your singing, or baby is (like mine) a wiggler who couldn’t settle down to a nice crooning session to save her life.
You feel like your life is spiraling out of control.
You don’t like yourself anymore.
You resent your spouse (the light of your life) because s/he just Doesn’t Get It, and, besides, the bastard gets toleave the house and interact with other adults.
Your house is a shambles.
You feel like your life is a shambles.
You wonder if you’ve made the worst mistake in your life. You know there is No End In Sight, because you’ve signed an oath to take care of this small creature forever.
Does this describe your response in the first six months to a year after you adopted?
Don’t beat yourself up.
You’re not sick. You’re not insane. You’re not an Evil Person. They’re not going to come take your baby away (even at your most down moment, you are terrified that They are going to take her away).
Most of all, you are not alone.
There’s a thing called “Post-Adoption Depression”. It’s similar to Post-Partum Depression. PPD has the advantage of being explained away by waving hands at hormones, but y’know, OmegaMom has very big suspicions that the majority of it is what Jean MacLeod calls Baby Shock.
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