Good morning.
My name is Jennifer Lewis, and I am really thankful for the opportunity to be here today and to share the story of my family.
I am a wife and a mother of four children, three naturally born and one adopted. My husband and I always knew that we would be adoptive parents; our idea was that at some point in our marriage we would add a little girl from China to our family. After three naturally born children and a wait time that was stretching on to four years for international adoption, we weighed the possibility and considered the age of our children, our desire being to keep them all close in age.
In the midst of this process, we heard about a little boy whose reality touched our hearts. This little boy had been born to a young, single mom, one who wasn’t quite ready to lend her identity to motherhood and whose lifestyle was more party girl than consistent caregiver. Her son was almost two and seriously neglected.
The Children's Aid Society had been called on several occasions, but they felt he was not in danger, just not in the best situation. Their caseload had no room for a child in neglect because they had to focus on children in extreme cases.
She, as his mother, knew he was in trouble and she made the decision to break a cycle in her life of neglect and abuse. She reached out and said, “Please, is there someone who will take this child before I hurt him?” She's one of my heroes.
We said yes. We were naive, though. We were unqualified, but our hearts were wide open. He was a beautiful baby, and so full of rage, so full of hurt, so totally incapable of trusting anyone. He was almost two, and he made his bed, he cut his own fingernails, and he washed his own dishes, not because he was bright—even though he was—but because he had to.
When the process was started, we jumped in. We had no idea what was waiting for us—legally, mentally, emotionally, or physically. She chose us; she knew he was in danger and she wanted him in our family. We looked at finding a lawyer—that's how little we knew. Our searching led us to a private adoption agency that said it could help us, and because of the situation that we and he were facing, they said they could help us quickly by speeding up the process and doubling up on our home study sessions.
Two weeks after that initial phone call, that cry for help, we were meeting twice a week with a social worker and watching our family, our marriage, our children, and our history get picked apart and analyzed. We spent four months under an intense microscope. They questioned our motives, our communication, our parenting, and our marriage. We usually left those meetings feeling wrung out and completely bare, all the while knowing that his situation wasn’t changing and he was facing the same neglect he had always endured. Sometimes I couldn’t sleep for worry. He was one of my babies. I knew it even without having the chance to hold him yet.
We weren’t the only ones dealing with the stress of transition. His birth mother, already having decided to give him up, just wanted it finished, and every morning it was harder and harder for her to face a day in this long goodbye. Near the end, she couldn’t wait and terminated her rights before we were approved to bring him into our home, before it was legal for us to do so.
An emergency response was necessary, and we had to establish care for him every night for two weeks leading up to our approval. We didn't know when that was going to happen. A network of friends came forward and offered spare rooms so that he could spend the day with us and sleep somewhere else so that the process would not be jeopardized. This was agony for all of us. But once those beds were found, his birth mother chose the transition day—one that I will never forget.
No one will ever be able to convince me that children have less of an awareness than adults do. Sometimes I believe they are more keenly aware of what is happening. I know this was true of our little boy. He knew she was leaving him forever and he reacted like she was. I have never heard a cry like the one that came out of his little body that day—not before and not since. He shook with loss, he sobbed with loss, he fully understood loss, and a part of his heart was broken. That is what it sounded like, and six years later it is what we still face every once in a while—a broken heart, more ready to lash out at love than to receive it, and more able to test than to trust.
Once our rights as parents were established, two weeks after “leaving day”, we thought he would be able to experience a smooth transition into our family. We spent a year thinking that, every day, and every day his actions begged that we would reject him.
He had been broken from the only reality he had ever known and he wanted us to pay. If we hugged, he bit; if we praised, he ripped. He banged his head into walls and threw himself off stairs. He rolled screaming from one end of the room to the other for hours and hours, sometimes for the entire time he was awake.
We loved and we cried and we despaired and we held on harder. We were told that he had an attachment disorder, but no one needed to tell us that because we lived it. When I considered the attachment I had to my other children, to his brother and sisters, I remembered the time spent holding them as infants, rocking them and cradling them. So we wrapped him in his snugglie and we held him. And he screamed. And we held him longer.
The stress was overwhelming. The bar for adopting had been set so high that we felt as though we were barely approved as parents. We felt like we were failing him. Our children were stressed. All of them had been eagerly anticipating this little brother and he had rejected each one of them in turn. So as a family we decided to make lists of what we were thankful for in him so that we could yell those things out in the midst of his fits. He had an amazing laugh. He giggled. He loved to help. He made us laugh. And when he disconnected from us, those things kept us holding on.
Six years later, because this is a story of hope and it is one of love, this little guy still loves to laugh, and he loves to make us laugh. He has come so far.
Our first year as adoptive parents was full of stress, love, tears, victories, tragedies, and triumphs, a year that needed our complete focus, our undivided attention, and all of our time. We needed this transitional time to bring a little boy from a painful place to a place of belonging. We needed this time to become a family. And we faced things in this transition that no one could have prepared us for, but we came out of it stronger than we could have ever imagined.
Children need all the support we can give them, and parents who bring a child into their homes by heart choice need to be able to focus on that child. We are whole as a family. We're not perfect, but we're whole, and that would not have happened without consistent time and effort. It is a worthy investment.
I believe the strength of a nation is built on the strength of its families and the hope of its future is built on the health and well-being of its children. With these two things in mind, I believe the government can ease transition for adoptive parents and their children by removing some of the stressors that diminish our focus, both financially and socially.
By recognizing the limitations and legislating on an issue that falls primarily to the provinces, I hold to the belief that Canada can be unified by a decision for our children that crosses the federal-provincial divide--transitional leave for parents and a nation-wide effort to unify adoption strategies that are expressed so differently among the provinces--because the journey from brokenness to mending is a beautiful one, and it's one that we should all support and engage in.
Thank you.
