“I want to leave this stupid family. Send me back to my birthmom.”
My ten-year-old threw that statement out last week when I told her that I wouldn’t make pancakes for breakfast. I knew she would be getting a doughnut later in the morning, so I made eggs and fruit to prevent a sugar overload. My girl tends to be a big grouch when her blood sugar is low, and her response to my suggestion that she start off the day with something healthy was met with extreme hostility.
Much of the time she is a delight—full of affection, enthusiastic, and talkative—but now that my adopted daughter is in her tweens, we see more frequent glimpses of her sullen, uncooperative side. One of her favorite go-to statements when she doesn’t get her way is, “You don’t love me. I hate this family. I want to go live with M.” (M is her birthmom).
I always respond with some version of, “We love you tremendously. I’m sorry you are upset, but loving you doesn’t mean always giving you your way. Even when you are mad and acting rudely, I still love you, but this behavior is not acceptable.”
She usually meets my words with rolling eyes and huffiness. After a bit, she comes around, and we carry on. Sometimes there is a massive meltdown that takes an hour or two to manage, but then all is well.
As she is hurling invective at me, I have to remind myself this: it is when our kids are acting the most unlovable that they need our love the most.
A few months ago, we had an incident where my daughter made some poor choices, and we laid down the consequences, and she insisted for several days in a row that she wanted to leave us. I wrote on my blog’s Facebook page about how my daughter always tells me she wants to go live with her birthmom when she is mad, wondering if other parents hear these statements and how they handle them.
Divorced parents wrote sympathetic comments about how their children basically say the same thing, professing a desire to go live with the other (noncustodial) parent whenever they were angry. “I want to go live with mom” or “I want to go live with dad” were statements tossed out in anger and frustration by their kids too.
The best comment came from the following mom (who happens to be a birthmother, not an adoptive mother): “My children say stuff like that all the time, and they are born and raised by me. So completely typical. If she didn’t have a birthmom to throw out there, she would use grandma, or auntie or any other adult other than YOU! Heck, I wished I had the birthmom option when I was a kid. I would have packed my bags and hit the road. My advice is take it with a grain of salt, just like every mother has to do. (PS – I am a birthmother and I fully expect to get that call some day from my daughter. And I expect that my response will be the same as what I tell my boys when they call me from their dad’s house telling me how horrible it is and I need to come get them. I tell them I love them and I am sure they are mad, but sometimes parents make us mad. Then I tell them to put dad on the phone. That usually ends it right there.)”
The general consensus was that kids will yell whatever they think is most wounding when they are pissed off.
Later in that day, I had a fascinating text conversation with my daughter’s birthmom. She is a member of my blog’s Facebook community, so she saw the whole story.
M wanted to make sure my feelings weren’t hurt (they weren’t) and then she expressed disappointment that K was acting out when she didn’t get her own way.
I found myself in the amusing position of then reassuring K’s birthmom that all kids act out and that K was no different. Truthfully, K had tested the boundaries, and we responded, but this was normal behavior for a kid.
M, being highly perceptive, was able to identify why she felt so upset to learn that K had misbehaved. She texted to me that “I just have this mental image that she’s perfect, u know? Kind of like her image of me.”
And that sums it up. K and M have each other on a pedestal. When K is angry at me, she hollers that she wants to go live with M, because in her mind, M is the ideal. Meanwhile, M remembers an image of K as the perfect little girl, and she was startled to find that K can be difficult, just like every other kid.
To my joy, I feel that K’s birthmother is my ally and my partner. She supports the parenting decisions that my husband and I make. As she says, “this is why I picked you guys to raise her.” But I am of the firm belief that there can never be too many people loving my child. As K grows into a teenager, I’ll be the first to hand her the phone if she yells that she wants M instead of me.
“Call her,” I will say, and then I will leave the room and let them talk. This too is how I will show my daughter how much I love her.
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