The two hardest things I've ever done:

1. Forgive my dad for leaving me and my mom.
2. Forgive the people who gave my son up for adoption just because he was difficult.

Not in that order. https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1265988253741703175

The vast majority of adoptions involve no villains. People have kids and are in impossible situations: poverty, death, disease, addiction. Adoption is the least bad solution in these cases.

But "rehoming" special needs children is not one of these. It's a unique evil.

These folks get an article about them because they are minor celebs, but their story is not unusual. It goes like this.

1. Well-meaning but ignorant (and relatively wealthy or comfortable) American decides that they want to save the world and look great while doing so.

2. So, adoption. No! Not just adoption. International adoption.

No! International SPECIAL NEEDS adoption.

Hit the trifecta. (a) kid is from another country; (b) a different color than you (so people can tell he's adopted and that you are a great person); (c) special needs.

3. They complete the adoption. It's hard. It's expensive. It takes forever. But the community is rooting you on. You've NEVER felt so important and supported. You are Mother Theresa, a force for good, helping the poorest of the poor.

It's intoxicating. I know because I felt it.

4. And then you get home, and there's a honeymoon period. Several months. There are struggles, sure, but you've been fattened up with confidence from everyone telling you how great you are over the past two years. so you can endure it.

People even stop you on the street and congratulate you for adopting a special needs child. People anonymously pay for your meals at restaurants. Happens *all* the time.

5. But then, the reality sets in. Things start to get hard.

Reactive attachment disorder and adoption trauma are VERY real, more or less incurable, and make life extremely difficult.

6. After a few years of this, you can't do it anymore. You've lost your own life. Your life revolves around this child.

7. You start telling yourself stories. Maybe he would be better off somewhere else? Maybe another parent could connect with him better.

So you make the call to a rehoming agency. Maybe Wasatch International Adoptions or a few others. And the problem is solved.

8. At least on your end, it is.

For the kid, that's a different story. This child has had the following traumatic experiences in the first five-ish years of his life.

a. Losing his birth parents. Losing his birth siblings.

b. Being placed in an orphanage. And then another. And then another. At each place he tries to make heartfelt connections with his caregivers.

But each time, he is rejected by his caregivers. Or worse, he does make a connection with his caregivers, but is then ripped away.

c. He finally makes it to a forever home! But it's with people with strange white skin. People who don't look like him. People who don't speak his language.

They take him on a plane to a new country. None of this makes sense.

d. But he starts to learn the language and connect with his new caregivers. It is hard, but he tries to find connection with them.

But the trauma of all of his losses come back. Nightmares. Anxiety. He cannot love in the normal sense at this time.

e. And just like that, he is "rehomed." Taken from the people he called mom and dad for a few years. Put in another family, in another state, with people he does not know. He is told that *these* people are now his caregivers.

Now, hopefully, the story ends there.

But it doesn't always. Some rehomed children are *so* damaged that they are rehomed again and again, passed around the adoption community like an article at a swap-meet.

You can read more here or a dozen other articles out there.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/11/children-who-have-second-adoptions/575902/

This is personal for me. I've adopted twice. Once from Africa, and once an African child who was rehomed in America.

Both of my children experienced trauma, but one of them has absolutely insane levels of reactive attachment disorder. Guess which one.

One final note: the NYP article quoted the Youtube mom as saying that she wishes there was a manual for dealing with RAD and adoption trauma.

Umm, there is such a manual. The late Karyn Purvis's Institute for Child Development is the gold standard.

You gotta do the work. Read the books. Attend the conferences. Yeah it's hard, but this is YOUR CHILD.

I had to meet the woman who was abandoning my boy. She found the most broken person she could in the world - a disabled African orphan - and brought him to America. Then she cruelly imposed more trauma on him for her own convenience.

I had to buy her food at the Olive Garden.

But I had to forgive her. Unforgiveness is a prison that I refuse to be trapped in.

She meant well. She just fucked up. End of story. Forgive her and bless her. That's how you find freedom.