Rosanne and Martin have three adopted children: 'In an ideal world they would not have been adopted'
Rosanne (41, midwife) and Martin (38, owns their own marketing and strategy business), have three adopted children: Shawn (12), Josiah (9) and Hannah (3). All three children are from South Africa. First came Josiah (when he was 11 months), then Shawn (who was then 5.5). Hannah came in April 2020, when she was almost 1.5. The family lives in Veenendaal.
No need to be pregnant
Rosanne: 'I don't recognize the need to carry a child. Not even to give birth. As a midwife I am often asked that, logically. I think it's fantastic to experience, but for myself I don't feel that need very strongly.
Now that I am a mother, I can miss that feeling that you know from scratch where your child is and what it is going through. I sometimes feel sad about that. That I couldn't be there for them from day one. I was able to save them from that difficult and sometimes damaging start they had.
Fix the damage
I have a strong feeling that I want to repair that damage. So I'm very careful that they don't have that feeling of abandonment in my care. When Shawn had surgery a few years ago, he had to go to the pediatric ICU right after the surgery.
“You can't sleep here,” the doctors told me. To which I replied, "The first to be with him when he wakes up is me." sure. Leg stiff. If I tell him I'm there, then I'm there. The same goes for the children's IC. When he awoke, I was lying next to him on a stretcher.
Medical trajectory
Our children have a backpack. During the adoption process we had checked that we were open to a child with special needs . Everyone is welcome with us, that idea.
Getting pregnant didn't come naturally. We followed a medical trajectory, but let it go. It was too emotional. What are we doing to ourselves? We had a great time together. I couldn't imagine becoming a mother.
When a friend said, "John, you have the house, the heart and the space, isn't adoption for you?" that was an eye opener. There are many children in this world growing up without parents. We had the space to be those parents for them.
Visually impaired
You start fantasizing about the baby in your belly. You also do that as adoptive parents, but there is no physical or hormonal experience involved. It therefore takes a while before you feel familiar.
Hannah has a cuddliness factor of one hundred. She is small for her age, has a very cute head, a doll. We melted when we saw her. She was in a good orphanage and we were given a diaper bag full of things they thought were important to her.
Shawn was a big toddler when he came to us, already a real human being. We had no experience, we really did it by feel. Talking a lot together and seeking help if we couldn't figure it out. He was visually impaired, but we had no idea how visually impaired he was. We knew something about his background, but not much.
Fighting to survive
I sometimes think: I love you a hundred thousand, but you should have been with your biological mother. In an ideal world they wouldn't have been adopted, and their parents wouldn't have gone through all that misery either. We see in Shawn that he must grieve for what he has lost, and what he did not know.
Both boys had to fight to survive, sometimes they still suffer from that. We try to help them as best we can.
Checked on vacation
The children are in a fairly white environment, but in our church they are not the only ones with a different skin color, nor are they at primary school. They are really accepted in our close network. But when we're on vacation, we get horribly checked.
Josiah is missing part of his nose and sometimes people say something about that. When he was a toddler, I was walking down the street with him, when someone said, "Oh, war victim?" People touch their hair or ask things like, "What happened to him?" And if I know. Sure, that's just his story. He decides who he will or will not tell later.
Sometimes I joke, sometimes I get mad and sometimes I say, "That's private." So that Josiah experiences: everything is okay, you can choose your reaction.'
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