Tips For Grieving For Your Child After Adoption
If you have recently made the decision to give a child up for adoption, you likely had many good reasons for doing so. You might have not felt ready to be a parent due to your financial instability, your desire to have a career and be established before you took time off of work to have a baby, or the worries that you had about possibly being a single parent. You might have felt that abortion wasn't the right thing to do or found that you were too far along to have an abortion in the state in which you live. However, this doesn't mean that you cannot grieve for the child. There is a chance that you wanted the baby and felt as though you were forced to give it up by circumstance when you would have otherwise gladly kept it. Here are some ways that you can grieve for your child after adoption.
1. See If You Can Get Updates
The first thing that you want to do is speak to the adoption agency or the parents that adopted your child to see if you can get updates on the progress of your child. This might allow you to feel as though you are following your child's progress from afar, which can make you feel more connected to your child after placing baby for adoption. On the flip side, if you feel that updates on your child are going to be too painful to handle, feel free to refuse them with the knowledge that you can always request them again later, when the loss is less raw.
2. Give Yourself Time
The next thing that you want to do is make sure that you give yourself time. You want to give yourself time to stay in bed if you want to and watch movies. You want to give yourself time to recover from the trauma of birth if you've just gone through that agonizing process. You need to give yourself time to recover. However, make sure that you set a time limit for this necessary self-indulgence to go back to work and reenter the world.
3. Develop a Support System
If you have felt comfortable telling anyone about giving the baby up for adoption, seek those people out and see if they will be willing to do things with you to distract you while the pain is the most intense. This can make the grieving process a little bit easier.
For more information, talk to a company that specializes in placing a baby up for adoption.