Navigating post-adoption depression can be a challenging and isolating experience for many mothers. Dawn Friedman, a clinical counselor and mother, shares her personal journey of grappling with this condition after adopting her second child. She discusses the emotional complexities of open adoption, the grief involved for both the birth mother and herself, and the importance of building a support network during difficult times. Dawn emphasizes the recurring themes in parenting and the necessity of finding one's unique path as a parent, regardless of whether the child is adopted or biological. This heartfelt conversation offers valuable insights for all parents, underscoring the need for community and understanding in the ongoing journey of parenthood.

Dawn Friedman, a clinical counselor and mother, opens up about her deeply personal journey through post-adoption depression following the adoption of her second child. She reflects on the emotional complexities of adopting her daughter, Maddie, while also being a mother to her son, who is seven years older. Dawn shares her struggles with bonding and the challenges of navigating an open adoption, where she maintained a relationship with Maddie's birth mother, Jessica. The episode delves into the emotional turmoil that can accompany the adoption process, particularly the grief experienced by both the adoptive parents and the birth mother. Dawn emphasizes the importance of support systems for parents, highlighting how a solid community can help mitigate feelings of isolation and shame that often accompany mental health struggles during parenting. She candidly discusses the messy realities of motherhood, including feelings of guilt and the struggle to connect with a child while grappling with the loss felt by the birth mother. This heartfelt conversation provides valuable insights for all parents, particularly those embarking on their own adoption journeys, emphasizing that parenting is a continuous learning process, marked by love, loss, and the need for understanding.

Takeaways:

• Dawn Friedman shares her personal experience with post-adoption depression after adopting her daughter.
• The adoption process can be emotionally complex, requiring support for both parents and children.
• Open adoption presents its own challenges, including navigating the feelings of loss and grief.
• Motherhood is a continuous journey of learning and adapting to each child's unique needs.
• Building a community of support is vital for parents coping with mental health issues.
• Recognizing touchpoints in parenting helps identify recurring challenges that arise at different developmental stages.

Will you please introduce yourself and give a bit of your back story?

You don't.

Sure.

My name is Dawn Friedman and I'm a clinical counselor.

But I'm here to talk about my own experience as a mom who had post adoption depression with my second child.

My first child is a bio kid.

Yes.

Wow.

Okay.

And they're how far apart?

They're seven years apart.

Okay.

So why made you want to adopt the second time around?

Are you.

Oh, no.

Crush you go ahead.

So we had our son and then when about four.

When he was about four, we started trying for a second.

I had a lot of reoccurrent miscarriage.

And finally we decided to turn to adoption.

And his sister came home to our family when he was seven years old and she was three days old.

Wow.

So you were in close contact with the birth mother then?

Yeah.

So her birth mom's name is Jessica and I, this was a private infant adoption.

So we met.

I think Jessica was around seven months pregnant when we met and connected through an agency.

And then she signed away her rights when Maddie, our daughter, was 72 hours old.

That's the law in Ohio.

And we took her home from the hospital.

Will you explain what was signing away her.

Right.

What exactly does that mean?

So she made an adoption plan and reached out to an agency, and the agency then presented her with profiles of hopeful adoptive parents and she chose us.

And then we connected at that time to talk about that and get to know each other with plans for it to be a fully open adoption.

Now, every state has their own laws about when a woman is able to sign away her parental rights, and when that happens, she is no longer legally the parent of that child.

In most states, the child is then actually under guardianship of the agency, who then places it with the adoptive parents.

And then depending on the state, in our state, which was Ohio at the time, it would be six months before the adoption was finalized.

And then they created a new birth certificate with my name as her.

I know people don't know about this, with my name as her birth mother and her, and my husband's as her birth father.

And her original birth certificate was sealed.

Now, we actually have a copy of that original birth certificate, but usually someone can't access that until they're 18 years old if the state allows them to do that.

Not every state does.

Wow.

Yeah.

And all of this contributed to my post adoption depression because it's really an ugly process.

It's really a terrible process.

It feels a bit draconian.

Yes.

Yes.

So you start to feel IP or.

Sad or all of it.

Before we hit record, you and I were talking about how important mothers are, and certainly as someone who had given birth, and I remember when they placed my son in my arms of going, oh, it's you.

Like, oh, you're so familiar to me.

This baby I hadn't met yet, like, I just fell in love with him.

And I knew that was something that had happened for Maddie's mom, Jessica.

And knowing then what they lost in each other was really something difficult.

It's still difficult to navigate, but at the time, I just felt devastated, participating in this incredible grief because we were at the hospital and we took a baby from her mother.

And even though there was this whole structure around it and this whole kind of belief system of adoption, when we took Maddie home, that all fell apart.

And all I saw was the grief and the loss and then trying to figure out how to mother Maddie through that, it was just a mess.

And because you have worked so hard to bring this baby home and you're still being observed by the agency, because they're going to.

They would visit once a month for the six months until the judge officially made us her parents, it was something I felt like I had to hide and not tell people.

Yeah, it was very messy.

I've found that's common with every woman I've spoken to among all of the talkers, that we all form it behind everything.

Which is why it's so important you're doing this podcast.

Yes.

Yes.

Because the only way we can make each other feel like we're not something to tell our community.

So do you think because you were a mother already, you had already had that experience?

Do you think that's why we refuse to what you imagine happening at the beginning, radiating her first parent or degree or.

Sure, I think possibly.

But also, I know because since then, I went back to school to become a therapist, and I went through the postpartum support, international training.

And when they talk about the things that are more likely, the things that make us vulnerable to struggling after we become a parent, it's a lot of those, the difficulties and the challenges of becoming a parent.

So if you've gone through infertility or had have loss, you're more likely to get depressed afterwards.

If you have a difficult relationship with your own mother, you're more likely to get depressed afterwards.

There's all these things that now I look back and say, actually, I should have been on somebody's radar from the beginning.

And having twins, having kids in the NICU, these are all things that make you more likely to have depression afterwards, having a difficult birthday.

So many of us were already vulnerable because it's a traumatic experience, often coming to motherhood and then having a baby does not cure that.

It makes babies do not make your life easier.

So then you're exhausted and you're trying to learn how in the world to parent this small person.

And it's a wonder that any of us make it through.

It's so hard.

And there's not the social supports and there's not the actual supports.

I think my husband stayed home for two weeks, and many women now are listening, going, no kidding.

My door screams, yeah.

Oh, man.

So there was a lot of time you were alone?

Yes.

And Maddie had colic for the first three months.

And so I assumed, oh, it's because she wants her real mother.

And so I couldn't make her happy.

We just walked her and bounced her for three months.

What are some of the other symptoms that you experience?

What I remember mostly is just having this overwhelming guilt that not only had I taken this baby from her mother, but that I wasn't enjoying it.

And I remember, actually, and I've told Maddy is 20 now, and we've talked about this, so it's not like she would hear this and go, oh, my.

What?

But.

So I had a friend who I was lucky that I already did have my mother friends because I was already parenting.

And so I did have women who showed up for me and were there for me.

And one of them said to me, you can say anything you want to her if you say it in a sweet voice.

So I would bounce her and say really sweetly, oh, honey, I think I just ruined my life.

I think everything is so hard now.

And it just made me feel better to be able to express that.

Of course.

Yeah.

Oh, my witness.

Filth.

Funny.

Wow.

That's very funny.

And it was.

And again, like, I had mother friends who remembered feeling that way.

That's great.

Yeah.

So they just could forgive me before I was even ready to admit how I was feeling.

Yeah.

And that's just so important.

It's so important.

Oh, wow.

You mentioned that you talked to Maddie that she knew.

So when did that happen?

I find it very interesting.

Oh, gosh.

I'm not sure.

I'm not really sure.

We have always been.

Again, we had a fully open adoption, so she knows her whole story.

She knows that I did struggle, and she knows why I struggled.

And I think probably we shared that.

I probably shared that in the context of understanding that adoption for her is a mixed bag.

Cause she loves us.

She loves me very much.

But she has grief about what could have been.

And she does have grief about the relationship that she might have had with Jessica that they don't have of not being Jessica's parented daughter.

And so probably it was in that kind of context of that we're allowed to have ambivalence, like, to feel joy and grief and that it's all part of being a person.

That's such a.

That's such an important lesson to teach and to learn, that you can feel two different or seemingly conflicting ways at the same time.

I tell a lot of moms there's a whole genre of books of women who run away from home and from their family, and that's because we've all wanted to do that.

That's the fantasy, is sometimes you wish you could.

Just like I always tell people, sure, you probably love to run away and be a showgirl in Vegas and have a glamorous life.

And who wouldn't want that?

Sometimes that's okay.

What?

Certainly it seems like men are more able to admit that.

Oh, yeah, I think you're right.

Yeah, I totally think you're right.

Cause we're supposed to be such natural nurturers.

But, like, you and I were talking before, mothering is what's wonderful, what a gift, blah, blah, blah.

It's also super boring.

It's really.

I can remember, and I was a preschool teacher.

I was an early childhood educator.

I love being with little kids.

Like, I loved it.

And I wanted to gouge my eyes out from the boredom of being home with my own kids.

Like, both.

Yeah.

It was so.

Just like taking a walk on the sidewalk and they have to stop and look at every rock, and you're just, like, grinding your teeth with how bored you are.

I just remember, physically that heaviness of it.

Oh, wow.

Like, sense you can send thoroughly sensory weeding.

You remember?

Totally.

Yes.

I remember that about my son, too.

Of, like, I couldn't stop looking at him, but I was so tired of looking at him.

Like, I was so in love with him, and I was nauseous from loving him so much.

Oh, my gosh, that is so poetic.

That's, well, beautifully poetic, but in bizarre way much that it makes me nauseous.

And nobody likes to be nauseous.

Nor, I think it makes complete sense because you're an adult human.

You are an adult human person.

And if you go, no matter.

Not speaking to adult human thing like your reality, same like war.

Adult Willie, a college education or whatever.

But now I dreamt I'm crawling about or beginning making weird Evan wealth.

You have to sing with your job and maybe do it with yellow like you.

Yeah.

And we are not meant to raise children in isolation and we are not meant to have these compartmentalized job.

Like, here I'm a working person and here I'm a mother.

It's supposed to be all squished up.

We're supposed to be in community.

And I think that's part of what's crazy making, too.

Oh, my gosh, that is crazy making.

That's a good new phrase, I think.

And I can only speak from a woman's point of view.

I'm a woman.

I just, I feel like particularly, I think it's your months before you're more anthem.

When do you work?

Everyone has the know your contemporary.

Why?

Why did you teach?

I was excited.

I thought Covid would change things because all of a sudden everybody's on Zoom and there were all those videos, remember, of kids interrupting birth work.

And I loved it because I thought finally we're acknowledging that people have children and that children matter and that children are not always convenient and that they get a and that you have to feed them.

And I was so hoping it would mean a shift culturally and it hasn't.

It's just so disappointing that we are all going back to pretending like parents aren't parents or parents don't have jobs.

And it was such an opportunity for us to grow as a society and we didn't take the opportunity.

Yeah, it's like I had that same because I was actually taking care of my father at the time.

And I've had to have a real lack of flexibility, sort of passion.

And then not really all of a sudden, Covid, everyone had to be accommodating what it is part of any sort of ended.

And actually the school district that my practice was in, they made the teachers go and teach at school online.

So all the, like every place else, the schools went online, the teachers were teaching via Zoom.

And in my district, they decided that it was too distracting that they were parenting their own children while teaching.

So they made them go to the school, go to the classroom and teach them the classroom without their children.

Never mind that there was no childcare.

So what it.

I have no idea what people did, but I just think, I don't know how they did it, but it just devastated me that they would do that.

And apparently it was because some parents in the district complained that their kids are being distracted.

And I know we were all under tremendous stress.

But it seems, gee, as a parent, you would get why that.

I don't know.

And I don't think our kids are harmed by knowing that children exist in the world.

Many of them are going to be parents someday, too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was really.

That was discouraging.

Yeah.

Earlier, we were talking about, before we start to record in, we were talking about the moonwalk brand and there is a pride status and that hand.

And we needed all over the moment when you.

You said it.

No, I'm.

It's somebody.

It's T.

Barry Braselton's touch points theory.

There you go.

So he said it better.

Okay.

So you just paraphrase him badly.

You said that.

A limited crisis.

Yeah.

So his theory is that there are these predictable moments that he calls touch points, when parents are in some way making a decision as a parent that they step into their parenthood.

So I think it happens.

I think it happens at the beginning when we're preparing for parenthood and we're decorating the nursery and thinking about the baby that will come home.

But there's these specific times when we're making decisions about sleep or feeding or the toddlerhood, when they start separating and we have to decide how to handle it, that those are all times that we are creating our parenthood like we have.

We make a decision.

We do a thing.

We differentiate ourselves from other parents because we are parenting this child, us, them.

We shape each other.

And that when we rely too much on experts to tell us what to do, we get in the way of that organic growth as parents.

And it's one reason why I struggle when people are saying, this is how you parenthood.

Because there are a million and one ways to be a great parent.

And I think parents are best served when somebody helps them discover their way for that child.

And you've got twins, which means you've got to discover two ways every time.

They're different.

They're tiny people.

There's different people.

Right?

So different.

They are so different.

So different.

Yeah.

So whenever I see parenting a device, it's like, talk like this and you'll get these results.

I'm like, you might get those results, but I know from my two kids, I thought I had parenting mailed.

And then Maddie came along and needed completely different parenting than her brother did.

I had to relearn everything.

So was there.

Were there touch points that happened early on while you were still in post adoption depression?

Yeah, there were a couple.

And the one thing I really remember.

So she had colic.

And we had to bounce her and walk her.

We had to walk her constantly.

And I don't actually even know if it was colic.

All I know is she stopped crying once she got mobile.

And she was.

She took her first steps at eight months, and this kid was on fire.

So I think when she was three months old, she could push up on her knees and her hands, like, almost like she could commando crawl already.

She's crazy.

And so there was a time we were walking, or I'm just pacing the yard, our backyard, just walking around with her in the sling.

She liked to be outside.

She liked to look at trees, and she was looking up at the trees, and she stopped crying for a minute.

And she made, like, a gurble noise, and I made a gurble noise back at her.

And it was the first time she looked at me with this surprise, oh, you're here.

Like, she saw me.

I'm not sure how old she was.

It's in my journal.

And I realized, oh, we're gonna.

We're gonna be able to.

We're gonna be able to do this.

Like, we connected.

And I can remember that time with her.

So that was one time where we were just.

We connected.

And then the other thing was her mom, Jessica, wanted me to pierce her ears.

And I said, I'm not going to pierce her ears for her.

I'm going to let her choose for herself.

And it was the first time that I chose something for Maddie.

It was the first time I asserted my motherhood.

And for me, it was one of those touch point times.

And Jessica was incredibly gracious.

We have a fine relationship because that must not have been easy for her either.

But it was the first time we negotiated that what it was gonna look like for me to parent.

And the thing I always say is that Jessica is her noun, mother.

Like, she's just her mother.

It's a fact.

She gave birth to her.

She's her mother, and I'm her verb mother.

So I had to become her mother by mothering her.

And that was really the first time I remember, like, stepping into that role in a really firm way.

Wow, that's beautiful.

That's.

That just.

That makes so much sense.

Well, I think we all have to do that even when we give birth and we still have to verb mother.

Yeah, it was just.

I was just thinking.

Yeah, I absolutely can think of the first time for.

I had that feeling for mother.

And I know.

Totally.

I mean, totally rude me, but I.

Know it's powerful, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Especially because there was such a hand off, emotional if I go too far here since the vague time and then there was handwritten like such an enormous ceremony in hand on which you probably.

And it stops me, the narrator, we're gender adopting them maybe in her controllable.

Sure, yeah.

This heart because it's yellow bad.

Like I should.

I don't know.

I know that would work.

And a gold mix.

Yeah.

I don't know how I.

Yeah, I.

Don'T think that's unusual.

I think we're just not allowed to talk about it.

Yeah, we're not.

Cause we're supposed to just, I don't know, like it's just all supposed to be easy.

And then when it's not easy for whatever reason that somehow our fault when again I think that we become parents.

Over and over again we become parents.

Yeah.

And I think in my short time I have felt that it's almost like it's a day.

It's a day.

It's a.

I wake up every day and say to myself, okay, like here I'm the mother.

Yes, here I lodge.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like it's not just, I don't just roll out of bed and just like naturally flow through it.

And I think that is also another important thing.

And again, I think Braselton does this when he talks about these touch points is we have to relearn it all the time because at every developmental stage you have to learn new things.

And I think when we look back we start seeing our kids have a theme.

Like I look back, they're both adults now and I can look back and say, oh, there was always a theme to every struggle we had.

Like it was always the same theme with them.

Wow.

But I couldn't see that at the time.

So I would just hit a crisis where I'd go, I don't know what I'm doing.

I'm a terrible parent.

I don't know how to parent this kid.

And it was only after, I think they were like nine or ten where I would go, oh, wait, no, this is the same crisis.

It's just in a new developmental space.

Like we were talking about your son and that he's bright and so there's going to be a particular kind of, he's probably going to be a loophole kid.

You're probably going to be like, oh, here he is finding a new way to do a thing that I couldn't predict that might be his theme with you.

I don't know.

You'll know when you can.

You'll go oh, that was him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

Wow.

When I'm working with parents and they're talking about, oh, this is the problem I'm having.

I always ask them, what were they like when they were like, two ish, one and a half to two and a half?

Because that's a time where there's usually some separation, and then four is another time.

And I'll say, so what was your struggle with them at either of those times?

Because probably there's going to be echoes of that here in this struggle.

Like, it's predictable that it might be hard at those ages, and once you know that, then you don't beat yourself up because it just makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So tell us about your.

So tell us what you do now.

So, besides my clinical practice, I have a program called child anxiety support, where I coach parents of anxious kids.

And a lot of it is this stuff.

So people come to me because they either have anxious kids or they're anxious about their kids and think it's their child's anxiety, but sometimes it's their anxiety.

And the research says it doesn't really matter whose anxiety it is, just needs to be taken care of.

And it is a lot of this because there's some predictable times where you'll see anxiety come up for kids and parents.

Like, there are these predictable times when I expect to get calls from parents and.

Yeah.

And I see them as touch points.

I see them as those kinds of.

How can we help you guys come back together again?

How can we help you grow through this particular challenge?

Wow.

My love to use your favorite up in the many years.

Wrong.

Nah, you're going to do great.

You're going to do great.

Thank you.

But everywhere in the eighties, sure.

But let's start with the assumption that you're.

Because this is the truth.

A lot of the parents I work with are doing great.

They just need help to do more.

Great.

Yeah.

And that's okay.

Yep.

It's not a bad place to be.

Okay.

It's been so much fun talking with you.

I've had a great time.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Thank you.

We can do this again.

Yeah, any old time.

Great.

All right, Darren, speak again.

Okay.

Bye bye.

Okay.