Attachment Matters

Baby found the bat cave.

 

Attachment.  Prospective adoptive parents learn this word quickly.  What is attachment?  Put simply, it’s the relationship formed between a child and his or her parent(s) that allows him/her to have a secure base from which to explore from and appropriately develop and/or flourish emotionally, socially, and physiologically.   A newborn infant begins to form those attachment bonds from birth but infants, toddlers, and children who are adopted have had their relationship with their central caregiver disrupted at least once (when the child goes from biological parent to adoptive parent) and often times more than just once (from biological caregive to caretaker in a carehouse to adoptive parents or a couple stops at carehouse or foster homes along the way).  So, the first thing you learn as an adoptive parent is that the cornerstone to building a thriving relationship with your child, and hence a thriving child, is to nurture and create attachment. 

You might remember that our adoption medicine specialist laid out very specific instructions for building attachment after adoption.  They were instructions that were based on the best possible practices in building attachment, and they were instructions that placed me and BF as the center of baby’s world.  That happens a lot when families come home from the hospital with their newborn–  mom and dad and baby nest and get to know each other.  But because our baby was older and because he had nested and attached to others before, we were going to need to be really deliberate about building his confidence in us and his sense of our permanence in his life.  This meant that we were to be baby’s only caretakers for likely up to six months and possibly even more depending on his needs.  

As all parents do, BF and I rearranged our lives to meet baby’s needs.  We even adjusted our work schedules and work loads so that we could each care for baby 1/2 of each workday.  For the first month at home, we barely worked– concentrating on helping our baby boy be as sure about us as he could.  When people learn you are adopting an infant, you often hear in response, “Oh, good, so you’ll be the only parents he ever knows.”  But that’s not a true statement.  When our baby is seven years old, we will be the only parents he remembers, sure.  But I can tell you from the moment that baby’s nanny placed him in my arms, he knew the difference between her and me.  And I know that he knew the difference between his biological mother and his nanny when he was first placed in his nanny’s arms.  He may be little, he may be young, but he is not without memory, without muscle recall, without sensation or scent or all those other things that tell you who a person is before you when your eyes are closed or your ears plugged.  If anything, caretaker turnover had happened often enough in his short life to know that it might come again. 

We stayed home for the first week with baby– none of us going anywhere and no one coming by.  And then after the one week mark, we had our families come over in groups of two to meet him for just a little bit.  Everyone’s observation about baby was the same:  he was so friendly, so warm, so charming.  His personality was adored, but, amongst ourselves, we wondered if that charming, always on, you will love me personality was really true for baby or if it was a survival mechanism– an understanding within that his caretakers could change at any second and it would serve him best to make sure that the person right in front of him right this minute found him charming and irresistible.  While people fell in love with him, our hearts broke a little bit with what we thought might be going on.  We kept our world intentionally small during this time, not going out much, and just continuing to nest although we did make the special occassions our families were marking during this time.   

From the beginning, baby had a hard time sleeping.  For almost seven weeks, our nightly wakeups averaged 15.  Sometimes there were more– especially after a social event like a family gathering– sometimes there were one or two less, but we could count on the fact that we would be up at least once every hour between 7 pm and 7 am and sometimes more than that.  We tried the things that parents try when they face sleep challenges with their infants and very little worked or worked over time.  During the day, baby could be counted on to take two solid two hour naps so we knew he had it in him to sleep more than forty-five minutes to an hour at a time and he never woke during the day in the panic he exhibited when he woke up at night.  We kept trying every solution possible– the swaddle, elevating one end of his crib to reduce reflux, having him sleep with us in our room, having me sleep with him in his room, but still he woke.  Meanwhile, as time passed, we saw that baby always slept worse after social interactions with people other than us or social situations.  If he spent a day with just the two of us, maybe he’d wake up 5-7 times.  If we did something with someone else, his wake ups shot up to over 15.  Overstimulation, we thought.    

In early May, I did what every doctor dreads.  I googled.  It was 4 am and we were somewhere between 15 and 20 wake ups.  Pulling up the search engine, I wondered for just one second what to type in and then I pounded out SLEEP DISORDERS IN INFANTS.  The first item was exactly what I needed–  it was a link to a study done at Boston University that looked at infants who had had caregiver turnover and the effect that had on their sleep.  As it turns out, some infants are particularly sensitive to caregiver turnover and it can present in a couple different ways.  For our baby boy, who became increasingly worried after social events that one of those people might be his new caregiver, it presented with the multitude of wake ups all night long.  As it turns out, our baby was blocking himself from being able to descend into REM sleep at night so that he could continually check-in with us all night long and make sure his caregivers hadn’t changed yet again.  How much does that break your heart?  I read this study to BF one night while we were both lying in bed, having just put baby down.  We were broken-hearted that we had accidentally riled baby’s confidence by attending birthday parties here and there.  Other people wanted to engage with and love baby, and we had allowed it, unfortunately, to his detriment.  Those moments, we now know, just put baby on alert that something else could change soon since he saw that those people were interacting with him just as we do.    

Lying in bed, we remembered a piece of advice that we had read and heard a few times pre-adoption without much explanation behind it:  don’t let anyone else hold or kiss the infant you are adopting for at least two months.   BF and I didn’t really consider that option– we employed all the other things on the list our adoption medicine specialist gave us and felt like we were being beyond pro-active.  But, all of a sudden, we both understood the 2 month rule clearly.  With infants, you don’t really have a language between you where you can explain what family is, what permanence is, what love is.  All you can do is physically show it. You show it by meeting needs like feeding and diaper changing, by hugging, by kissing, by rocking a baby before bedtime, by holding each other close.  And while BF and I were doing all of baby’s care, there were other people using part of our love language with baby, too.  And that was confusing to our baby who happened to be particularly sensitive to those things.  That night, we talked about what made sense moving forward.  Should we be the only two people to hold baby for a bit to see if it made a difference and then, if it did, let our loved ones– family and friends– know that we would be doing that moving forward for at least two months?  We, of course, dreaded the idea of disappointing our loved ones, but we dreaded the idea of letting baby down, confusing him for one more second even more.  And so for a week, quietly, we experimented.  The first day, his wake ups dropped to 6.  After that, they dropped to 4.  So we ultimately broke the news to our loved ones and have been the only ones holding baby for the past two months.  It wasn’t without its social heartache or awkwardness (especially because some people will just grab a baby without asking first if he or she can hold them and then we had to extricate baby from their arms while explaining what was going on.  Always easier when someone asks first!  That said, sometimes a person will just look back at us when we explain as if we are those crazy overprotective parents you read about in magazines.  We know that not every one understands that parenting through the lens of adoption has some unique nuances that have to be accounted for so we don’t take that judgment personally).   Now, if its a normal day, the most wake ups we’ll have is 4 and we’ve even had some 3, 2, and 1 wake up nights.  And there are other signs that this effort has built his security.  Baby, finally, does not feel the need to please every single person in front of him– the check out girl at Target, the person that stops us on the street, etc– which means that he is no longer vigilant about being ready for the next set of parents that come his way.  He also wakes up from his naps much crankier– indicating that he is getting into some deeper sleep finally.  And he is relaxing into us and cuddling in a way that he didn’t before.  Social situations are still a sensitive spot for him and on those nights, his wake ups eek back up which we’ve learned make the next day hard for him, too so we’re as careful as we can be without completely surrendering. 

Knowing that we ultimately hold the key to building baby’s confidence has been illuminating– it has made each of us even more intentional and it has made us realize that things don’t magically change at the 4 month or 6 month mark just because it has been four months or six months.  Our little guy probably isn’t the one who can spend a whole day or night without one of the two of us and not have it affect him yet.  And because he is the baby boy we were meant to guide and we are the ones he was meant to soften and wisen, this is the journey we were joyfully meant to take.