Jennifer: wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend, neighbour, volunteer, home learning facilitator, breastfeeding mentor, lactation educator, birth partner, labour support, birth advocate, breastfeeding advocate, early childhood educator, cloth diaperer, baby wearer, hockey mom, rugby coach, attentive parent, avid reader, writer, homebirther, prospective adoptive parent.........the list can go on. I started out trying to place things in order of priority but realized that each item takes priority at different times or even on different days of my life so it is neither prioritized nor exhaustive.
This list does not share who I am, it does show some ways in which I define myself or ways others may define me. The last on the list, and not the least of my priorities, is prospective adoptive parent. We have been thinking about adoption for over 11 years and just in the past months have decided to take more concrete steps to deciding if we will choose this path for our family. The Child and Family Services Act 1990 regulates adoption legislation in Ontario and indicates that in order to be consider as a potential adoptive parent one has to meet certain requirements. One of the first being to complete a PRIDE (Parent Resource for Information Development and Education) course. This is a 27 hour curriculum covering a variety of topics on adoption, parenting, attachment, loss, child development, supporting cultural identity and maintaining meaningful and healthy relationships with previous connections.
The most recent topic covered in the course we have been a part of was loss. The obvious loss that most think about is through the death of a person. Beyond death we can experience many types of loss such as loss of proximity to family, loss of health, loss of trust to name a few. In adoption itself there are losses for the birth family, child, foster parent, adoptive parent and adoptive family. It was a particularly powerful component of the PRIDE course.
One particular loss that struck me was a loss of identity. Loss within adoption is far reaching. Learning about how we have faced loss in our own lives and how we have managed that loss is key to being able to support a child in our care who has experienced loss. This is an issue in adoption however in particular the loss of identity that came immediately to my mind was my own loss of identity when we moved. It actually took me by surprise when I took note of the intensity of my feelings that night. I realized at that moment that a number of items on my list roles of how I might be defined disappeared when we moved. I am a wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend, volunteer, neighbour....and so much more however a large part of how I related to others and how I defined me was my connection to the birth and breastfeeding community. Moving to rural Ontario I left that all behind. My babies were no longer babies when we moved making it difficult to make those connections in a new community. I am sure there are breastfeeding mothers, homebirthing families, and attached parents in this area but finding them was a lot more difficult without a baby in a sling or toddler to break the ice.
I made new connections here, although not as deep, with sports parents but it was still a big transition to go from well known and hopefully respected in one community to virtually unknown in another. My ego took quite a dive, although I didn't recognize this until just this past Thursday at our PRIDE course when I framed it as a significant loss of identity for myself. Throughout everyone's lives circumstances occur where a sense there may be a loss of identity. Often times a loss of identity is accompanied by other losses like proximity to friends and family in my case, or the loss of the home we built and within which Eoin was birthed. Recognizing this loss gives me a deeper understanding as to my reactions and emotions, it allows me to give myself the space to redefine myself in my new space and it has given me a better grasp as to how loss can affect those around me.
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