The Unbelievably Good Adoptive Mother

I’ve discovered what I think ought to be a bona-fide Jungian archetype: the Unbelievably Good Adoptive Mother. She is so way much better than the merely Good Mother or the Good Adoptive Mother. Good Mothers and Good Adoptive Mothers, you see, are still human. But the Unbelievably Good Adoptive Mother archetype, or UGAM, as we’ll call her, is the mother archetype to beat all mother archetypes. While I haven’t figured out what function she serves in the collective and personal unconscious, I have at least identified her unique characteristics.

You can recognize her by her halo and her martyr’s crown, to begin with. Sure, they have to fight for position on her demure head, but so what? She’s as radiant as a pageant queen, as proud as a ship setting sail: she’s an Unbelievably Good Adoptive Mother.

Although the UGAM criteria may read more like a DSM-IV diagnosis than the description of an archetype, her particular problem is not diagnosable and is, in fact, supported by social workers, psychologists, attorneys, judges, teachers, the community, and almost everyone else who knows her. They are the ones who continue to place numerous children with her, even when the numbers of children in her home reach the double digits, and even when they number in the scores. Even when the children are severely emotionally disturbed, endanger themselves and others, and even when reasonable people become critical or the husband packs his bags and leaves: all continue to believe in the UGAM.

The UGAM, you see, is super-human. She doesn’t feel or think the way a normal mother feels, because if she did, she wouldn’t be normal any more. If she felt her feelings, or thought like a typical mother, she might wake up one day and ask herself, “What in God’s name have I done?!”

The UGAM begins as a normal mother, but progresses through a magical quest that transforms her into the UGAM. Between the finalization of her first adoption and the slam of the judge’s gavel on the last, she experiences a major transformation. In the beginning, she has faith–a lot of faith. Faith that love and time will heal all wounds. She underestimates and over-estimates the powers of mothers. She thinks that the original mother and caretakers, and their treatment of the child she adopts, cannot have had lasting effects, thereby diminishing their actual power. And she also thinks that her love, consistency, and superior parenting skills will heal the wounded child, bringing him in a headlong rush straight into her arms.

Sadly, this isn’t what happens. Prepared for a life sentence of parenting the traumatized child by attending 40 hours or less of parenting classes and a handful of social worker visits, the Good Adoptive Mother is armed with everything it will take, they tell her, to soothe the savage beast of the traumatized, wounded, attachment-disordered child. Unfortunately, they lied. This is not all it takes. In fact, given the wrong set of circumstances and the wrong family fit, disaster will occur and the adoptive family who began with such hopefulness and joy will crash and burn. Their marriage may not survive, and if they had any normal, healthy children in the beginning, they will not be so normal or so healthy after they’ve lived in the war zone created by a disturbed sibling.

The adoptive family becomes anesthetized to the trauma and horror brought into the family by an out-of-control child. They numb their own feelings and, I think, develop a systemic sort of post-traumatic stress that isn’t diagnosable yet because few people want to talk or tell the truth about what is happening in these large, crazy adoptive families.

As an example of what happens, I actually read this account of an adoptive mother-child interaction today on an adoptive parent web site:

I absolutely remained calm, I don’t care if she hates me, she isn’t emotionally together enough to feel any kind of love anyway so scream at me all you want, child, it doesn’t hurt my feelings. Her baby brother was sobbing, scared by her anger while her other brother, now 14, stood by me looking at her screaming and kicking on the floor, lashing out at us occasionally, but looking for all the world like a demon possessed whirling dervish who had no clue as to why she was really angry in the first place.

I’m not going to link to the site, because my intention isn’t to start a blog war or to be overtly critical of a person I don’t know. My point is to illustrate how clinically removed from herself this mother has to be to handle the terrific stress of an out-of-control, raging child on the kitchen floor, while the baby cries and the older brother, now allied with the mother, looks at a younger sibling as demon possessed. Which is to say: does not qualify as fully human. And, not only is the child not fully human, but whatever humanity she has is insensible, since she has no idea why she is even angry.

This is, if you’ll pardon me, no more than B.S. The child knows why she’s angry. But she’s living in an artificial environment ruled by a UGAM who is separated from her own feelings and needs plenty of angry, rage-filled children to act out the suppressed feelings and be the scapegoat. Certainly, the child is angry and has an orphan’s heart, and is going to act like a wounded child. But other perspectives of how children heal teach and act on love and do not use demeaning methods with children, and these other perspectives, based on love, work. I am suggesting that the UGAM is responding to a pathological situation with pathological behavior–the blind leading the blind–and that both are going to fall into a pit.

Another way of looking at this type of environment is to ask how people can live this way? Why isn’t anyone helping them to stop living this way? Imagine being the normal child (or the Within-Normal-Limits child) in this family. Every day, judging by the blogs and web sites of these UGAMs, life is a living hell in which terrorism occurs. Knives are brandished, poop is smeared, curses are flung, attacks are made, alarms are set, cops come to the door, and nobody but the UGAM knows the truth about everything. She’s a hypnotist who convinces people that the rage and despair in the child have nothing to do with living in a chaotic household where there is one mom and over 20 or 30 other children and that such a family life will have no effect on the healthy children (if any) living in the home. And she doesn’t want anyone to talk about the effect it will have on her or her marriage.

Finally, I doubt that UGAMs would write about their children publicly as they do if they knew that everyone who had participated and continued to participate in their placements read everything they wrote. Though they profess to love their children, they write about them as if they are only half human. They write about themselves as if their willingness to take abuse day after day, month after month, and year after year are saintly, when if they did it in any other circumstance they would be called “codependent” in the worst way. They escape judgment only because there are children involved, and because nobody else wants to raise these children. The system is desperate for more UGAMs because abusive parents keep churning out more and more traumatized children for the system to place–and there is often a UGAM standing ready to take in one more child.

I’m so very sorry for the traumatized children and the adoptive parents who try to help them. I know that nobody really understood, at the beginning, how bad it was going to be, how much it would hurt, how lasting the effects. But we certainly know enough now that there are no excuses for the system to continue to place severely emotionally disturbed children into families with other vulnerable children. 

No excuses.
 

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