Gentle & Realistic New Year's Resolutions from a Veteran Adoptive Mom
Ideas for growth as a foster/adopt family + plenty of grace if your only resolution is "survive"
Do I get to call myself a veteran adoptive mom? We’ve been adoptive parents for almost 6 years. It’s been 9 years since we started the process of adopting. You might notice there’s a 3 year difference between those numbers. Yeah, that sucked. Maybe someday I’ll write about what it takes to get approved to adopt (let alone to get actually matched with a waiting child.) Sneak preview: if you enjoy filling out forms and collecting documents to allow someone to find out every detail of your personal family history, health history, financial situation, work performance, and the state of your marriage, you would love the pre-adoption process.
Anyway, we’ve been in this game for a while now. I like to think we’ve learned some things. Six years in, I think I have a better read on the most beneficial areas for us to invest our time and energy than I did in the early years of adoptive parenting. It helps, certainly, that we’re more stable as a family now than we’ve ever been before so I have *just a little* more mental space to consider this sort of thing. ’d like to share my foster/adoption related new year’s resolutions with you.
My approach to making resolutions has changed as I’ve gotten older.1 When I sit down to write resolutions now, some considerations I keep in mind are:
how fallible I am2 (especially given the mental and emotional strain of the last 6-9 years. I shouldn’t set myself the kind of resolutions I used to — like the year when I was in grad school that I set myself the resolution of running a marathon and then miraculously actually did it.)
maintaining expectations that accept and account for those flaws
setting goals that are gentle with myself around those shortcomings while still making room for the possibility of growth
(related) that the goals I set for myself should be designed to capitalize on my strengths and shore up my weaknesses (rather than the sorts of goals I used to make that were intended to turn me into an entirely different person, see the marathon related goal above.)
If you’re a foster/adoptive parent, I hope you’re keeping your expectations realistic and being gentle to yourself.3 It is simply harder to parent foster/adopted kids than the average bio kid. No shade to regular parents either because parenting is ridiculously hard just at baseline. (Shannon Clark, the “NeuroMama”, describes the feeling of the elevated demands of therapeutic parenting so well in her post called “Your Life Is Harder Than Most”).
Please think of all of the resolutions I’m about to share as simply possibilities. IF daily life allows, and IF you’re feeling up to it, and IF you’ve got the basics covered in your life with a little bit of margin left and IF you can do it without burning yourself out and IF you’re doing it out of genuine desire and not a sense of guilt, then I think each of these resolutions could be beneficial for foster/adopt families. Even though I wrote this list, I’m not even necessarily owning all of these resolutions for myself. These are directions I could go with my time and energy IF all of the above conditions are met in our home.
With all of these caveats4 out of the way, here are my New Year’s Resolutions for 2025.
Finally make some adoptive parent friends.
This has been so hard for us. Possibly because we’ve put almost zero effort into it. But if some adoptive parent friends fell into our laps this year, I think it would be good for us.
Read more writing and memoirs by adoptees.
Recommendations welcome! As one of my kids reminds me occasionally, I’m not adopted so I can’t understand what it feels like to be an adopted kid. It’s important to me to keep learning from adoptees to be the best support possible to my kids.
Make a scrapbook/photobook for my kids recording everything we know about their birth and foster families and their lives before we adopted them.
This is the resolution that I think I have the best chance of completing in 2025. I need to get this done while memories of their adoptions are still reasonably fresh and we still have connection to the foster families and caseworkers who were there with them.
Research (and try out?) healing methodologies like EMDR and the Safe & Sound Protocol.
I’ve heard such good things. I would love to find ways to address the really deep feelings that are hard for the kids to access with language.
Lean into relationships with the kids’ extended birth families.
I’ll be honest: this feels like more of a “should” than a “want to” but I think it’s important for my kids’ futures to know that we tried to maintain that connection for them, whether they eventually decide to engage with those relationships or not.
Find ways to support other foster/adopt families through financial donations, volunteering, etc.
We were the beneficiaries of so much generosity and support in the early years of our adoptions. It’s really important to me to pay that forward. We may not be in a place of enough margin for this yet though.
Be more intentional about supporting my nervous system through nutrition, exercise, supplements and meditative practices like contemplative prayer and yoga.
I’m reading Stephanie Foo’s CPTSD memoir What My Bones Know right now. She talks about how helpful these sorts of lifestyle choices were for her in her process of emotional growth for her. I’m not saying adoptive parenting gave me CPTSD. I’m also not not saying that.
Find respite providers for our son with special needs.
He has respite hours paid for by the state that we could be making use of IF we could find the right person. This is a challenge for many families that receive support hours from the state.
Keep writing & sharing about adoption in a way that supports foster/adoptive families but also reaches non-adoptive families.
Have I mentioned you can always share this newsletter with anyone you think might be interested?
Find more books and movies for the kids that portray adoption positively and sensitively.
Again, recommendations welcome! We did watch Elf this Christmas; that movie has a not-terrible adoption-based plot. But I feel like we could still do better with media actually made with adopted kids in mind.
Are you making any resolutions this year? Do you have any to add to my list? Or are you in the place we have been for many years where resolutions just seem like a guilt-inducing waste of time? Maybe you have some anti-resolutions: “lean into couch-rotting and hate-watching”? We listen and we don’t judge. Whatever you’ve got, share it in the comments.
I’m all of 37. (38 in April!) Please enjoy the benefit of my wisdom. Does Substack have the little “forehead slapping” emoji? If so, I’d put one right here.
There’s a significant part of my being that would love to write an entire newsletter with exactly all of my flaws, shortcomings, mistakes, and failures but I don’t think my therapist would approve so I’m restraining myself.
My 90s kid heart really wants you to click on this link
I've done EMDR for childhood abuse. I was shocked at how effective it was. Almost magical, for me at least! This is a great list. Be gentle with yourself!