Parents-in-Waiting" (PIW) is a support group for men and women dealing with the pain of infertility as they enter the adoption process. Its purpose is to facilitate grieving the loss of biological parenthood -- with all of its intrapsychic, physiological, marital, familial and social implications -- and thereby to free the infertile to experience the joy of adoptive parenthood.
PIW met bi-monthly for one-and-a-half hours at Vista Del Mar Child and Family Services. It was an open, voluntary group, led by an adoptive mother. Members typically spend two months to a year in PIW, as they plan and complete the adoption of their child. The group usually includes six to twelve members, usually married couples, although occasionally a single woman or a lesbian couple will join. (That, in combination with the facts that the women contribute more to this group's process than the men, that at every meeting there is at least one wife who comes without her husband, and that the group leader is female, skews the focus of many issues toward the female gender).
As a "theme" support group, PIW meets Glassman and Kates. According to the dual definition of social work groups: It develops a "democratic mutual aid system" ("graduates" often form independent adoptive parents' groups that meet informally for a few years after placement) and it "actualizes the members' purpose" -- to complete infertility grief work and achieve "healthy" adoptions. The methods used most effectively to "actualize the purpose" of PIW can also be found in the Glassman and Kates model: expressing and identifying feelings, sharing perceptions and feelings, identifying themes, identifying projections and self-fulfilling prophesies, creating activities "in the milieu" and reflecting on and reinforcing individual change.
Like many groups, PIW is designed to meet more than one purpose. In addition to support, it provides education and a forum for problem-solving. The members of PIW are part of the current trend toward "open" adoption, in which prospective adoptive parents and birthparents (often just birthmothers) meet prior to the birth of the child. As such, they take a very active role in the adoption process.
The accompanying article follows the progress of one adoptive mother-to-be, Elizabeth, as she travels through the emotion-laden terrain of open adoption. It is a six-month, personal diary that explores Elizabeth's feelings, issues, life experiences and group experiences from her entry into Parents-in-Waiting to her "graduation" and the birth of the baby she will ultimately adopt. "Diary of a Mother-in-Waiting" is formatted chronologically, with first-person journal entries describing each month of Elizabeth's feelings, issues and life experiences appearing first and her corresponding support group experiences, and their impact, following. Infertility support group members can have slower or less consistent progress than Elizabeth's with their grief work, but an infertility support group usually has a positive impact on its members..
As the journey begins, Elizabeth and her husband, Jerry, have ended four years of expensive, painful infertility treatment with a decision to adopt. They plan to use a "collaborative" adoption, i.e., one in which an agency and a private attorney collaborate to locate a birthmother and to coordinate the birth and the relinquishment of the baby. It is January, the start of a new year, and, for Elizabeth, the beginning of what she hopes to be her final approach to motherhood.
Elizabeth is typical at this stage: Beneath her excitement, she is filled with fear and denial. She vacillates between fearful fantasies of adoption traumas and denial of adoption reality. She is terrified "her" birthmother will change her mind and reclaim the baby, scared she will not know how to tell the child of his/her adoption, afraid the child will desert her for the birthmother should there be a "reunion" when the child grows up. At the same time, she is in denial that the adoptive experience will be any different from raising a biological child and, concurrently, that the child should have any need to connect to his/her biological heritage. (Denial of difference is one of two problematic attitudes toward adoption; insistence on difference being the second. Acceptance of difference is the goal.) Moreover, it is a fear of confronting, and, therefore, a denying of, a great loss that underscores Elizabeth's days and nights as she and Jerry join Parents-in-Waiting.
In order to resolve her loss, Elisabeth will need to pass through Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's four stages of mourning, as detailed in her landmark work, On Death and Dying: denial, anger, grief and acceptance. Because she received counseling when her parents died, Elizabeth is aware of the Kubler-Ross model -- and she feels that she has already completed the journey. She is no longer in denial that the infertility exists, she feels that she has expressed her anger over her inability to bear a child and she thinks she has grieved as much as she needs to. What she doesn't realize is that denial has reared its ugly head again, that there's a lot more anger buried way down deep and there are buckets of tears still to cry.
