I have enjoyed the lively discussion occurring about adoption disruption and the reasons behind it.


One of the recurring themes in the readers’ comments has been the role of agencies in adoption disruption. I can’t tell you how many times I have had parents tell me their agency response was, “Really? Your child has attachment issues? We’ve never had any child have those problems before!”


I still remember calling our placing agency when my family was imploding—and imploding in a huge, critical fashion—and the agency worker said, “Find someone who knows about attachment disorder!” CLICK went the phone … and I was on my own.


In the case of the child we disrupted, it was absolutely an “agency” driven debacle. I use the term “agency” loosely, because the agency consisted of one woman at that time. We were at her home for a July 4th party, six months after we moved 500 miles away from friends and family to Kansas into a home we built; one year after my husband had started a new job; one year after we had added a post-institutionalized 9-year-old; and we were currently parenting another troubled child. My husband once told me of a list he had seen of the top ten stressors in life/marriage, and they included: moving, building a home, adding a child, and taking a new job. We pretty much covered that, didn’t we? So here we are at this party, and this social worker drops the international waiting kid book in my lap. Do you think it was the word Sucker! emblazoned across my forehead? Five months later we bring home a 14-year-old girl, disrupting birth order to boot. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I was still in the “love fixes everything” stage. I’m a sucker for kids and I was suckered. Six months later the girl left, and we had more wounds to add to our already heavily damaged family. To add major insult to injury, the social worker repeatedly told me there was no way I could have three troubled kids—clearly I was the problem. I learned a few months ago that this particular social worker never did grasp the degree of damage she did to families … she never did “get it.” I wonder how many families she wrecked?


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