The Role of Pain in Parenting
– © 2001 by Gary Legwold

Pain brings change.

There are other agents of change, of course, and I certainly don’t seek out painful situations in order to make a change. But there have been times when pain has been the only thing that has led me, crawling, to change. For that I am grateful.

Parents, of course, know about pain. To stand by and watch a toddler repeatedly boom the butt on the floor while learning to walk may be as painful for parents as it is for little ones. My parental pain has been less obvious and more easily denied if anyone were to have confronted me about it. My pain is this: There has been a distance between Kate -- my adopted daughter -- and me.

The distance has to do with me avoiding the pain of adoption. Adoption, even with all its glories and hopes for a better live, is nevertheless a painful deal. Happy parents in blissful conditions simply don’t just give away their healthy, grinning child. And many adopting parents are struggling to move past the agony of infertility. No, events that lead to adoption are usually full of pain and sometimes ugliness. Shortly after signing the last of Kate’s adoption papers over a decade ago, I wanted to forget about adoption pain and get on with a happy life of being a good dad. And I have been a good dad -- except for this distance I felt.

Last December, my wife Jane and I decided it was time to return with Kate and our son, Ben, to Colombia, where Kate was born. The trip had risks but we were well prepared and well connected in Colombia. We flew to Bogota the week after Christmas.

During the long flight, I began to journal -- and then to cry. I wrote about the unimaginable: what it must be like to give up a child for adoption. I tried to picture the peace of knowing that adoption would lead my child to a better place (presumably) and a chance at life. But my overwhelming feeling was shame: that, for whatever reasons, I couldn’t do it as a parent. Knowing the joy my kids bring me daily, I also tried to fancy what would get me up in the mornings had I been forced to give them up. I doubted that the raw ache would ever go away, and that ultimately, as the ache ate at me over the decades, it would do me in.

The more I wrote that evening, the more pain I felt for my family and Kate’s biological mom. My protective shell was cracked open by the questions, imaginings, and the worry about what was ahead. As night fell, our plane began its descent and we saw the lights of Bogota. Kate mumbled to the window, “My mom is down there somewhere. I wonder if her hair is like mine?”

Each day during the trip (which turned out to be wonderful), Kate would ride shotgun in the van as we toured Bogota and visited the orphanage where she spent time as an infant. She would also sit on park benches or at bus stop benches as we shopped. She studied faces, looking for her own face that had aged to become her biological mother’s.

She never found that face. And at the end of the week, as our plane lifted off from Bogota, she sobbed and pleaded to stay. The trip was all about going back into the pain of adoption, the pain I had all but sealed off. Kate had felt this pain every day of her life, trying to talk about it with me at times. I listened but had not been entirely there for her. Now, thanks to pain, I hear her loud and clear. Parenting is being there, and I am there.

Gary Legwold is a Minneapolis writer.