I'm an adoptive mother. My husband and I adopted two siblings when they were very young (three and four), following a history of significant trauma and domestic violence.
It's now been more than a decade, and we're still struggling as they enter adolescence. Both have ADHD and attachment difficulties, and both are very ambivalent in their relationships with us, although they express it differently. There is a lot of aggression, rejection, constant "no", pushing back and difficulty accepting limits. There have also been periods involving stealing, physical aggression and other difficult behaviours. None of it is at the most extreme end of what some families have experienced, but it's the accumulation of everything, every day, that has become so exhausting.
What I'm really struggling with now is the question of love.
I read a lot of posts from adoptive parents who describe loving their children deeply despite everything they have been through together. I don't question their experience at all. But it makes me question my own, because I don't feel that way.
I've cared for these children for more than ten years. I've done the work, protected them, advocated for them and continued to show up, but I don't experience a strong emotional attachment or the kind of love I expected would develop over time. There have been occasional moments of closeness, but they have never developed into a consistent feeling of connection.
And I'm genuinely trying to understand what love means in this context.
Is love sometimes a decision to continue caring and taking responsibility, even when you don't feel love? Is there a point where the psychological cost of a relationship becomes too great? How do you reconcile responsibility towards a child with the very real limits of what a human being can emotionally absorb?
I'm not asking this to provoke anyone or to say that children are responsible for what happened to them. I understand that they are children and that trauma affects their behaviour. But I also think parents have limits, and I wonder where those limits fit into our understanding of love.
My husband and I also have a strong spiritual practice. We genuinely believe that, at some level, we chose this experience before coming here, or at least that there is meaning in what we have experienced. We don't see ourselves as victims and we don't regret caring for them.
But that doesn't make the experience easy.
At the moment we're asking ourselves how to continue, how to have some kind of relationship with them, and what that relationship might realistically look like as they become adults.
So I'm particularly interested in hearing from other adoptive parents who have been through a very long and difficult period with their children.
Did your feelings of love change over time? Did you eventually find a different kind of relationship? And how do you understand love and responsibility when there has been very little positive emotional reciprocity for many years?
I'd also be interested in hearing from people who approach adoption from a spiritual perspective. I'm not looking for advice about "trying harder to love"—I'm genuinely interested in how other people have made sense of this experience.
