This is a post that I have been considering writing for some time now but have put off both because it will be long to write and because it may cause a stir which I'm not sure that I want to do but if it can help someone then it's worth it so here goes...
One of the things that is spoken of very seldom within the adoption community is the effect that it will have on your marriage relationship. If you are single and adopting, this may also be good to read in the case of future relationships. I can't seem to find any statistics on adoptive parents divorce rates but I can speak anecdotally about the situations that I have encountered over the past nine years of being first a foster parent and then an adoptive parent and running adoption mentoring groups and doing trainings for those who either have fostered, adopted or are in the process of starting and then the friendships that I have made with others who have adopted. The conclusion that I have come to is this...adoption creates risk factors for a marriage. I share these with you as I have seen many adoptive family marriages go through tremendous strain, endure affairs, separations, and some have ended in divorce and I think that this is something that needs to be looked at and talked about because if you go into this thinking that this will not negatively affect your relationship and that you don't need to put extra safeguards in place to protect your marriage that doesn't help at all. As with many other aspects of discussion in regards to adoption, I think this is one where people need to go in with their eyes wide open. Marriage is tough without adding additional strain into it but with communication and awareness perhaps this can be an additional things that adoptive parents educate themselves about while waiting for their new child(ren). Here is a list I made of possible stressors that are unique to an adoptive family that could contribute to marriage breakdown if not faced head on and talked about openly.
Public Scrutiny - When people birth their children, for the most part, strangers don't come up to them at the grocery store and question their parenting choices and decisions. Adoptive parents are scrutinized for everything from what type of adoption they choose to pursue to their choice to bottle or breastfeed, to their discipline methods, to their stand on Immunization, to their changing or keeping their child's first given name, to the way in which they choose to incorporate their child's culture, to their decision to be or not be a multi-racial family, to their methods of attachment, to the foods they feed their children, to their own weight, to their color of underwear (okay - I made that last one up!). People stare at us in public and come up and ask us questions almost every time we go out. Add to that the pressure to be the best parent possible because a birth mother is entrusting you to raise the most precious thing imaginable or an entire country has allowed you to take one of their most important natural resources and that's a pretty weighty thing! Some days, I feel like if I were to admit to certain people that I am having a crappy day and would love a break from the kids, that they would judge me harshly because they would either think "it was your choice to adopt this many...don't complain about it" or "what the heck are you thinking then adding two more if you can't handle the five you've got". And then of course there is that most intrusive scrutiny of all - the home study. This is where a complete stranger comes into your home and because they have the title of Social Worker, they are allowed to ask you all kinds of intimate details and give their opinions of your parenting (even if they are 19 years old and have no children or nieces or nephews but I digress!) and they ask about your sex life and about your childhood and about the whys of all the decisions you've made. When we first applied to become foster parents, we had to take a psych. evaluation. How many parents who birth their children can say they had to go through that to be allowed to bring their baby home from the hospital?! How many of them had to tell some professional the reason why their aunt and uncle got divorced ten years before they were even born and how that makes them feel? How many of them had their pantries looked in and their plug in sockets checked for safety covers? How many of them had their smoke alarms tested while their daughter was trying to nap (grrr)? How many of them were taken into separate rooms and questioned about their spouses consumption of alcoholic beverages, cigarettes, drugs, and always the questions of "does your partner abuse you" and "are you being coerced into this adoption in any way?" Mark and I joked about how it would be kind of funny for one of us to say yes to those questions or for me to say that I have never done drugs and then when he is asked about my use of drugs, for him to say "well other than the occasional crack and meth, just pot" but we never did that because not all Social Workers have good senses of humor!!! How many of them had their relationship scrutinized, analyzed, put under a microscope? Now certainly the argument could be made that all parents should have to undergo some background checks and training before being allowed to bring home a child but in this world, only adoptive and foster parents are put through this. So yep, all this public scrutiny and pressure can put a strain on a relationship over time.
Sleep Deprivation - This is not unique to adoptive families but can be exaggerated by things such as time change in the case of International adoption, drug or alcohol exposure of a baby pre-natally, and of course the most obvious - that adoptive families tend to have larger families, making their years of sleep deprivation longer. Lack of sleep can change your perspective on many things and if you're too tired at the end of the day, you don't take the time to talk or perhaps to do other things that may be critical for a healthy marriage.
Special Needs - Adoption increases the chances that you will have a child with special needs and this alone ups your chances of divorce by tremendous odds. Of our three adopted children, two have special needs. We don't yet know if our two new children will have what is officially classified as "special needs" but we do know that English will be new to them, they will have already been through tremendous loss and change, be moving to an entirely new country, and are being adopted as older children so that will come with challenges. Among the most obvious special needs of adopted children are those related to pre-natal exposures such as FASD (fetal alcohol spectrum disorder) and Fetal Drug Effect. In the case of FASD, this is irreparable brain damage and it would be naive for a family to think that it would not involve a higher level of stress. Even in the case of what is often seen as a low risk adoption option which is the domestic open adoption, if the birth mother does not drink or use drugs or even smoke during pregnancy, young mothers have a very high rate of pre-term labor and premature babies have high risk of learning disorders and attention disorders, plus the risk of blindness, deafness, lung disease, and heart problems, just to name a few. The strain that a child's Special Needs put on a marriage could be an entire post by itself but I am guessing that most of you can at least imagine that it creates less time together as you run around to specialists and appointments and that there are decisions to be made that most parents don't even have to think about and you and your spouse may not agree on the answers. Then there is dealing with the everyday, be it medical crisises or behavior or safety issues. It can be exhausting.
Religion - (warning controversial comment ahead) Not all people who choose to adopt have any Religious background but it's safe to say that a majority do and many of those are Christians. So what the heck does having a personal relationship with Jesus have to do with a rant on the risk factors to marriages of adoptive parents? Statistically, Christians have a higher divorce rate than non-Christians. My personal belief for why this is (very controversial - cover your eyes if you don't want to be shocked) ... there is a God and there is a devil and if a Christian marriage breaks down, the devil may get the kids, as they will certainly be disheartened and have a different view of God than they would have had their parents' marriage stated intact and perhaps he gets some extended family members or friends too when they see the destruction of lives that were supposedly following God so Christian marriages are under attack. I've seen it in many Christian marriages and I've seen other marriages just have no storms, not even any strong winds. I know that this was not a good ad for becoming a Christian (hey come on over here where you too can be under personal and relational attack!) but it seems to be a reality going on around me and I'm just giving my personal opinion. Many will disagree.
Infertility - Many come to adoption after years of infertility. The stress of that and the strain that puts on a relationship, on a sex life, on finances, is unbelievable. Also, some infertility treatments cause major mood swings for the wife which can be pretty unpleasant in a marriage too. So now these couples who have already suffered so much hurt and loss and grief embark on another road of ups and downs where the outcome is not always clear and the scars of the years of infertility are still there. The hurts are often still raw and for some, that pain never goes away. For others, they come to the realization that adoption wasn't meant for them to be Plan B but was God's plan A for their family all along.
Financial Strain - Okay so the number one cause of divorce in Canada is conflict over finances. Adoption affects this in the following ways...infertility treatments are very expensive and some couples have already wiped out all their savings on that before they even get to adoption...domestic open adoption, private adoption, and International adoption are all very expensive...adoptive families tend to be larger which is expensive in itself. So yep, adoption costs more (unless you adopt kids in the care of the Canadian government in which case that is free but their risk of Special Needs is much higher and caring for Special Needs kids is more expensive so the rule still applies) than birthing your children which could lead to additional financial stress.
Isolation - How many families have adopted? How many families have adopted children of another race? How many families have adopted children of another race and Special Needs children? How many families have adopted, have children of another race, have Special Needs children, and have a large family? So how often do you think that we get invited over to other people's homes?!?! Not very often I'll tell you!!! Okay so obviously we don't expect that all of our friends will have our exact situation or even close but I'll tell you that for too many years, we felt very isolated as no one could relate to our situation and it's only been in the past two years when we have begun to actively seek out other large families to get to know or other adoptive families or other multi-racial families that we have begun to feel like we can relax a bit more with those people and have families that can relate to us. Just in the last year or two, I have been blessed to meet Justine who is like me in that she shares my faith, homeschools, has a large family, and has adopted from Ethiopia (unfortunately, she lives in B.C.). I have been blessed to meet Tracy, who shares my faith, also has five children, homeschools, and moved here a year ago from South Africa so loves Africa and will love our new children I am sure. I have been blessed to meet Denise who shares my faith, homeschools, has adopted, and has a multi-racial family and Bonnie who adopted two older children from Ghana and has been homeschooling the oldest. We also have been so privileged to meet several adoptive families from within the fostering community who understand so much of our experience as they too have children with Special Needs and they have large families...Ray and Jennifer, Glenda, Stu and Laure, and Kathy and Dave. I have also met some people on-line that strangely I have formed friendships with as well and feel a kinship with, specifically Ruth, Ramona, Shelley, Karen, Andrea, Tammy, and Sheri. I also have had the great chance to begin meeting people in the Alberta who have adopted from Ethiopia.
Meeting these people who have adopted also and beginning to forge friendships with them has been a tremendous help to us in feeling like we are not alone and in creating almost a support network. I am so glad that we continue to have friendships in our lives with people we don't have quite as much in common with but I feel like this new community will really help our chances of keeping our marriage intact. So the first bit of solid advice I can give here is don't be like us and let years of feeling isolated and like the odd ones out go by...seek out and find those who are also adoptive families and form a connection.
Disparity - I am adding this in because though I thought of it earlier, I forgot it and Kelly pointed it out to me so thanks Kelly. In almost all cases of adoption, one spouse wants it more than the other. Sometimes, they both really want it but one is more the driving force behind it but in other cases, it is really one being coerced into it or going along with it to make the other spouse happy and that can obviously cause tremendous strain later on if there are problems adjusting and one spouse blames the other or if an adoption falls through and the gung-ho one blames the reluctance one and this type of disparity gives room for a lot of resentment to build.
Conflict - In any marriage, there are so many potential areas for conflict but the ones added by adoption may include things like disagreeing on birth family contact, discipline with really challenging behaviors, how to work on attachment, how to deal with questions in public, what to tell your children regarding their history, and adopting future children from the same birth mother. The biggest conflict that I have ever seen and I have seen it in four or five homes so far is that one parent actually asks the other parent to choose them over the children. Take this scenario for example...a couple that I know that already had two children got a baby girl in their foster care right from the hospital when she was born and they fell in love with her and they had her for over two years when she became available for adoption. The mom assumed that of course they would adopt her as in her heart, she already felt like this was her daughter. The dad refused to adopt her out of fear that perhaps she may develop Special Needs later on and also he did not want to take on the financial responsibility. Terrible situation...so sad...yet I have personally seen pretty much this exact thing another three times since then. In this first case, the wife considered leaving her husband but in the end did stay with him and the little girl was adopted by another family. This couple is still together. In another case, the wife chose the baby over the marriage. In the third case, she chose to try to save her marriage so lost the baby but about a year later, left the marriage anyway as she could not get over the resentment, anger, and loss. The fourth has yet to come to a decision. A few other cases I know involve older children and when given the choice, the mom always chose the kids and the marriages ended. These types of horrendous decisions do not tend to happen in non-foster or adoptive homes.
Conclusion - Granted it can also be said that going through things together as a couple can make you stronger and that in enduring hardships, it can toughen a relationship. I believe that this is often true. More than one time in my thirteen year marriage I have thought to myself "if we can get through this, we should be able to get through anything". I do think though that there is a lot of talk in the adoption world about preparing yourself for attachment issues and toddler tantrums and parasites and this is rarely if ever mentioned. So perhaps those that are still waiting could add some other books to their reading list other than the typical parenting and adoption books. I hear that "Love and Respect" is a good marriage book but I haven't had time to read it! Isn't that the pot calling the kettle black but hey - at least I'm being honest!!! For less financial stress, I would HIGHLY recommend you getting "The Total Money Makeover" by Dave Ramsey. Not only will it help alleviate some of the financial stress but it will get you communicating as a couple about it. If you can't find it in your local bookstore, click on the My Amazon Store link on the right. And the absolute biggest advice I can give you is that the first year home with your child may be hell. As a mom, you may experience post partum depression (yes, equally as common in women who adopt as in those who give birth). As a couple, you will have far less time for each other and your relationship will undergo some major changes. As a family, there is a lot of adjustments to be made so if at all possible, just get through that first year any way you can and don't make any life changing decisions until after that first year. I know that in a marriage, it takes two people to make it work so if the other person decides to leave that first year, you may not have any say in the matter but if you can both hang on, the odds of you being okay after that first year is over go up pretty dramatically so I would urge you to try to hang in there. Okay so in short, sorry this is so heavy and depressing but I am really interested in people getting the discussion started and being real about how adoption and/or infertility have affected their relationship. When it seems like everyone around you is saying "things are so great", it makes it hard to come out and say "this is tough" so I am saying "sometimes this has been really tough" and I really hope that those who travel this road behind me will learn from what I wish I had done differently such a creating a better support network, having more open discussions between Mark and I about all the above topics BEFORE they became issues, and putting as much effort into preparing our relationship as I did preparing for all our new children.
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