Counting the Cost, Reaping the Harvest

Last week, I shared with you the story of Solomon. It is the story of a perfect adoption, the perfect binding together of the heart of a child to the hearts of his adoptive family.

This week I am sharing with you the story of our failed adoption. A few weeks ago, we signed away our rights as Jumoke’s parents as he entered into a new adoption. With the signing away of those rights, I have also signed away the right to use our son’s given name.  I chose the name “Jumoke” for him when I was writing a journal-blog about him last spring. Jumoke is an African name that means “the child everyone loves”. That is my hope for him.

Jumoke lived with us for four years.  Last spring, my husband made the final decision to dissolve the adoption. A dissolution of an adoption is much like the dissolution of a marriage, both legally and emotionally.  The last months have been much more painful than the four years that led up to the dissolution. I wonder sometimes if choosing to dissolve an adoption is like being a parent who has to choose whether to keep a child on life support…or let him go. The choice is not an easy one, and is filled with guilt and grief and loss and there is no one to blame, unless a parent blames herself. Which she does often.

We spent the summer walking on eggshells, trying to keep our feet on the fine line of handling the dissolution correctly. We knew no one who had walked this road before us, so we had no one’s experience to learn from.  On the one hand, we had to let go of Jumoke emotionally, which felt like letting a child go to death. On the other hand, we were still spiritually, morally, legally, and financially responsible for Jumoke. It was a difficult thing trying to find the place where we could let go and grieve, but know when to move on something for Jumoke’s good. I’m not sure we did a good job, but I do know we gave it our best efforts.

We signed the final papers relinquishing our complete parental rights to Jumoke some weeks ago. A family had been found for Jumoke, and he was moving from foster care to permanent placement. I believe that day was one of the hardest in my life. He was lost to us permanently and forever. Whatever gains we had made in his life were lost. We could only hope that his new parents would find the threads and pick them up and continue with helping to heal him up.

We found out a few weeks later that Jumoke’s new adoption failed as well. Because the family had not completed the adoption legally, this failure is called a “disruption”. Jumoke was moved into another foster home, and the search is on again for a permanent home for him.

Because we signed relinquishment over to the adoption agency, we do not have the authority or privilege of knowing what is happening to Jumoke.  Because this particular adoption agency feels as strongly for relinquishing families as they do about adopting families, we can ask for and receive carefully worded reports. But essentially, we do not know how Jumoke is dealing with this second failed adoption.

You can read Jumoke’s story in the journal I wrote last spring at Jumoke’s Journal.  There is also a link to the journal on the sidebar of my blog, Eleven Oreos. Most of the journal is made up of entries of the ups and downs of our family as we faced the possibility of and then the reality of a dissolution.  But I also wrote Jumoke’s full adoption story in an eight part entry.

It is not happy reading, but it is reality. Our family has experienced the extremes of adoption…the completely successful and the complete and ultimate failure of an adoption. The two sides of the same, very valuable, coin.

But remember…this is not the end of these stories.  If I’m around, I will update you in about fifty years and tell you how it all worked out.

Shurleen is a homeschooling mom of 8 and Nonnie of 3 in the Pacific Northwest. Shurleen and her husband, Tim, adopted two boys from Liberia to add to their good sized birth family.  The family has been priviliged to have experienced both the best and the worst in their adoptions.

Related Tags: adoption, dissolution, disruption