A new Open Adoption Roundtable asks this question:
How do you feel after a visit?
After a visit is always a hard time. It takes a few days, sometimes a few weeks, to step back and evaluate the larger picture of a visit. The immediacy of “after a visit” is always fraught with deep emotions and anxiety and tears and the general “missing” of my daughter. I am often quiet and introspective, because I fear opening my mouth and saying or typing the things in my head. To be honest, I’m often afraid of feeling the things I feel.
The truth is that I miss my daughter all the time. I miss when she’s not here, doing the everyday things that we do every single day. But after a visit, it’s very much so in my face. I am face-to-face with the lack of her presence in our home. I am forced to acknowledge some of those feelings that I otherwise am afforded the right to ignore. It’s not that I ignore my daughter, but most days I am able to avoid dealing with the sadness, the grief, the loss, the guilt simply because I have too much else to do. The end of a visit brings all of those things to the forefront and I am forced to sit in them, to dwell amongst them. I am forced to take account of them, to feel them. I am forced to reevaluate where I was after the last visit and how I have grown or stagnated or even regressed since the last visit in terms of healing and emotions and appropriate responses to negative feelings toward myself. I am forced to answer the question, “Am I still doing this for the right reasons, even when it is hard. Am I continuing to place my daughter first in these decisions? Am I soaring or falling? Am I winning or failing? Am I enough?”
In short: the “after a visit” time is absolutely exhausting for me.
It’s more exhausting than keeping up with four children, multiple adults and, if we’re over there, multiple pets. It’s more exhausting than answering questions all the way to the Munchkin’s house. It’s more exhausting than being put on the spot with questions or statements that you couldn’t even imagine to expect. It’s more exhausting than worrying about a visit in the days before it arrives. It’s more exhausting than traveling, alone, with two very active little boys and a “60-year-old back.” The self-evaluation that happens in the immediate aftermath of a visit is just draining.
But, of course, firmly worth it as well.
Because eventually, the dwelling is dealt with and I come to a personal conclusion about the emotional work I need to do before the next visit, and I am able to step back and look at that larger picture. It is almost always a picture that I want to remember. And as I said in that post, after that emotional work is done — whether it takes a day or twelve, I come back to what keeps me going, to how I deal with this thing called open adoption:
I know I’ll remember that heavy weight of sadness that washes over me as we walk out the door to go home, but as I always do, I’ll remember the good stuff first. It’s how I function, how my brain works. I can’t focus on the negative. I can realistically accept the bittersweet aspects of visiting and how it’s never easy to leave. But we made some good memories on this visit.
And I will carry them with me until next time — until forever.
We’re gearing up for a visit at the end of May, so I’m doing some emotional work to prepare myself for the post-visit blues knowing, full well, that they’ll still sideswipe me, that I won’t really be prepared. And that, in the end, it will all be okay.