Mother as Container | 3

I’ve been writing about the mother as an emotional container for her infant, and about the consequences of inadequate “containers.” The idea is a simple one: basically, whatever the baby needs, he gets from his responsive, nurturing, warm mother. When babies don’t have consistently responsive, nurturing, warm mothers, they suffer. Depending on the kind and degree of unresponsiveness, the baby is wounded; that’s what we theorize.

The Primal Wound

There’s controversy in the adoption world about what happens when the baby is separated from his own mother. Some argue that separation from the mother in whose womb a baby grew produces an irreparable harm to the baby (Nancy Verrier is one of these theorists). Verrier is the champion of wounded adoptees and birth mothers. Her 1993 book, The Primal Wound, tells just how handicapped the adopted person is. Many others in the field of adoption disagree with Verrier, saying that the adopted person cannot be permanently disfigured by the fact of having been adopted unless he or she chooses to remain so. They agree that separation from one’s biological mother and subsequent adoption can be a problem, all right, but that the fact of having been adopted cannot, by itself, predict permanent, future mental or emotional dis-ease.

There’s a journal for pre- and peri-natal psychology and an association, APPPAH, that deals with issues of birth trauma. I am not personally or professionally convinced of the theoretical foundations of the field, namely because as a Christian I believe that all human beings are spiritual orphans; even much-wanted and adored babies grow up to experience alienation. The fact of being human and, thus, individuals with our own DNA is an act of separation, so to speak. Our means of wholeness must therefore of necessity be spiritual until we lose our mortal forms.

Having said this, I’ll say too that I do see a difference between well-loved and nurtured children who have stayed with their own mothers, and those who were separated from their mothers, or from those who grew up with distant, unresponsive, self-absorbed mothers. It would be foolhardy to say that there’s no difference between the wanted child and the unwanted child, between the baby who grew up with her own mother and the one who landed several different places before being adopted, even if by a responsive and nurturing mother. The insult to the baby’s perception of the universe as a predictable, safe, abundant place arises from predictable, safe, abundant routines that keep the baby comfortable, full, and peaceful. Any departure from that causes pain and discomfort to a tiny person who does not have the mental, emotional, or physical tools to care for herself.

What Babies Need

Losing one’s mother on the first day of life, or any day thereafter, and having that mother replaced by another mother, is a loss. It’s a sad and awful loss for the infant, who spent as many as nine months inside a womb that was home. She knew her mother’s voice; she knew the rhythm of her mother. Newborns can differentiate the very smell of their own mother’s breast milk; how can anyone suggest that losing one’s own mother is not an awful loss? It is an awful loss.

Adoption does not cause the loss; the fact is that the loss occurred when the two people who had sexual intercourse and made a baby did not step up to the plate to raise that baby. Their parents did not help them, for some insane reason, and there were people available to point to the solution of adoption.

Or, if a child was older when adopted, the parents who created the baby never got themselves together enough to raise the child, and the child was removed. Not every parent is a good parent, and not every parent ought to be allowed to continue parenting. There are many lousy parents in the world, including lousy adoptive and foster parents, too. Surely we know this.

So, a baby is born and for the first four or five months of her life, her basic needs are for food, and safety. If she is not fed, she’ll die. If she’s not kept safe, she will die. Her life is a life tied to the biological rhythms of her body and the responsiveness of her mother. She sleeps; she awakes and is hungry; she’s fed; she eliminates, she’s uncomfortable and cries; she is changed and made warm and dry again; she is lonely or scared, startled or terrified, and Mother scoops her up into her arms and contains her whole body again, just as she did when they were one.

If Mother is drunk, or immature and narcissistic, or on the phone, or busy, or simply disinterested in the baby, apathetic about being a mother, she may respond sometimes and other times may not. Or, Mother may lack focus or what we call “entitlement” to the baby (the baby is not hers; she’s an adoptive or foster mother; she’s a nurse; she’s an orphanage worker), and may be excitable, lack focus, and lack the warmth and confidence that mothers need to communicate to their babies.

If that’s the case, then the baby is going to grow up hyper-vigilant, too: too alert, too excited, too upset, to focus. By the time this baby is six months old, she has already developed in ways that react or respond to stress rather than having been a baby who was responded to. Parents get it wrong so much of the time by trying to get the baby to respond to them. A parent’s job is to respond to the baby, not vice-versa. We wait for their cues, and later, when they are able, they become responsive people, too. We fill them up; they give.

Babies who are not filled up have nothing to give once they can walk. But one can see the effects of lack of loving responsiveness even in young babies. One of my children was considered a “failure to thrive” baby because she weighed only 12 pounds when she was nine months old. She couldn’t sit up or turn over; they said she might be mentally handicapped.

This was a baby who, I am convinced, was born introverted and retiring, and was deeply aggrieved when she lost her birth mother on the first day of her life. Whatever happened while she was in the womb, we will probably never know, as her birth mother as refused all contact for over 20 years. But we suspect things were not happy even in the womb, for our daughter was born weak and ill, and was hospitalized for three months after birth. Upon being placed with a foster mother, she again became ill and was returned to the hospital. She spent approximately seven of her first nine months of life in hospitals, without a mother. By the time I went to Korea to get her, she was a wizened little soul, serious and sad, who looked at everything and responded to very little. In the first photo of us together, foster mother and new adoptive mother are smiling broadly, holding this baby, Fern, between us, while Fern stares at me soberly. She just stares.

Loved Babies

I’ve always been able to tell which babies were wanted and loved by their birth mothers, and which were not, from the moment I met the children. I think this is because I have given birth to babies, myself, and have seen that a baby loved from the womb has something that a baby who was not wanted, and who was gestated in a hostile or rejecting womb, does not have.

This may just be me and my quirky belief system, but I do think there’s something about being wanted that helps a baby. Even if the baby is later adopted, there’s a deep core of wantedness in that baby, I think. I see it in some of my adopted children, that deep well of love from their first mothers. I do not see it in others, because some were truly not wanted or cherished in the womb.

So, what I would say to a mother like Anthromama, whose baby had a rough start, but who was very much wanted and loved, is: don’t worry. A rough start doesn’t have the power to permanently compromise a child’s spirit. Being “normal” isn’t the goal so much as being oneself. The reason that adoptive parents are told to take the baby or child home and love him, and all will be well, is that in the nurturing family, this is true: being loved makes all the difference in the world. Whatever quirks we’re born with or acquire as a result of our experiences are just that–quirks. They’re more like spice than substance.

Primal Wound Redux

And to those who think that adoption alone is responsible for your wounds, I would ask: are you sure? Or is it possible that the right adoptive mother might have helped heal you, but instead the adoptive mother you were given was the wrong sort of mother? Perhaps you were loved from the womb by your first mother, but then given up; and then you received an adoptive mother who never was the responsive, warm, nurturing sort of mother babies need. The fact of losing your first mother, combined with a self-absorbed or distant or cold second mother, built a web of confusion around your heart that you are still trying to untangle. And untangle it, you can.

But every wound is not “primal.” I do not think that being adopted is the primal wound. I think that being unloved and unrecognized is the primal wound. And if an adoptive mother suggests to me that her adopted child turned out wonky because of a primal wound, and points to just how great her own biological child is, I’d say to that adoptive mother: your job was to heal your adopted child and you let her down.

I believe that with all my heart. And this is why I think that adoptive parenting is not for the faint of heart or for people who aren’t whole; and this is also why adoption, for the most part, can turn out so badly for so many adopted people. We keep giving babies and children who were set adrift by their first parents to people who want babies and children to satisfy themselves, instead of to people who are called as healers.