I keep thinking about how insanely hard it must be to parent a child who has already been through some shit before they even got to you. And I don’t mean “hard” in the basic parenting-is-hard way. I mean having a child in front of you who is angry, shutting down, lying, screaming, throwing things, refusing affection, saying horrible things, or acting in a way that seems completely irrational, and you somehow have to remember that you are still the adult in the room. You do not really get to lose it just because they are losing it.
Which sounds obvious, I know, but adults have feelings too. If somebody screams at you, your first reaction is probably not going to be, wow, I wonder what childhood wound this is connected to. You are probably going to be pissed. If someone says something intentionally cruel, you want to defend yourself. If somebody pushes you away over and over again, eventually there is probably a little part of you that wants to be like, okay then, fuck it, I’ll stop trying. That is just being human. So I cannot imagine how much patience it takes to have those feelings and still remember, okay, this is a child. This is not some random grown adult trying to ruin my day.
I am not adopted, so obviously I cannot sit here and pretend I understand what that experience feels like. I have never had adults deciding where I am going to live, whether I get to see my family, whether I stay with my siblings, what house I am going to next, who gets to call themselves my parent, any of that. Even thinking about it makes me uncomfortable because when you are a kid, adults literally control your whole life. They decide where you sleep, what you eat, where you go to school, who you live with, everything. You cannot be seven years old and be like, this home environment is toxic as hell, let me pack a bag and get an apartment. You are seven. You are just stuck dealing with whatever the adults around you create.
So if the adults you were supposed to trust already failed you, why the hell would you automatically trust the next ones just because they are nicer?
That is probably the part I keep coming back to the most. You can tell a child “you’re safe now” all you want, but that does not mean their brain is going to be like, great, thanks for the update. You can give them a bedroom, clean clothes, a full fridge, a family that genuinely loves them, and all of that can be completely real, but they still have everything that happened before. None of that just disappears because they have new sheets and a cute bedroom now.
And I think that is where people can really misunderstand certain behaviors. A kid can have unlimited food in the house and still hide snacks in their room. They can have parents who come home every night and still panic when someone is late. They can be told over and over that nobody is sending them away and still act like they need to be prepared to leave. From the outside, I feel like it would be so easy to get annoyed and think, why are you doing this? Nobody is taking your food. Nobody is leaving you. Nobody is hurting you. But their brain learned that stuff before you showed up. You cannot just argue it out of them.
I once heard about an adopted girl who would say really awful things to her mom whenever they fought. She would say stuff like, “You’re not my real mom,” “I hate you,” or “I don’t want to live here.” Later she admitted that sometimes she did not even know if she actually meant it. She wanted a reaction. She wanted to see what her mom would do after she said the worst thing she could think of.
Because yeah, on the surface you could call that manipulative. I mean, technically, she was trying to get a reaction. But then I think about what the actual question underneath it might have been. Maybe it was not, how can I hurt you? Maybe it was, how bad can I be before you decide you do not want me anymore? What happens if I become difficult? Are you actually staying? Is there a point where you are going to be done with me too?
That is so sad to me because I can completely imagine a kid pushing someone away before they get the chance to leave first. Like, if people leaving has already happened enough times, maybe being the one who ruins it first somehow feels safer. At least then you saw it coming. At least then you had some control over it.
And then I think about the parent on the other side of that. Imagine spending years loving a child, making them dinner, worrying about them, showing up to everything, trying to make them feel safe, and then in the middle of an argument they hit you with “you’re not my real mom.” Obviously that is going to hurt. I am not going to pretend some magical parental instinct turns off your feelings. I think the selfless part is not that it does not hurt you. It is that you do not make the child responsible for making you feel better about it right then.
That has to take so much self-control.
Because there would probably be moments where you desperately want to say, “I am not the one who did this to you.” And you would be right. You were not the one who abandoned them. You were not the one who neglected them. You were not the one who scared them or made them feel unsafe. But unfortunately, trauma is not that organized. A child’s brain is not going to neatly sort adults into folders like, bad adult, bad adult, okay this new one seems chill.
If their life taught them that adults leave, then you saying “I’m not leaving” probably is not going to mean much at first. You have to prove it.
And probably prove it again. And again. And again.
I feel like safety for a kid like that probably looks extremely boring. You say you are picking them up at three, so you are actually there at three. You say you are coming back, and then you come back. You do not threaten to send them away every time they piss you off. You do not use their adoption against them during an argument. You do not remind them how “lucky” they are every five seconds. You do not make affection disappear when they behave badly. You just keep being consistent until maybe one day their brain finally goes, oh. This person actually does come back.
And I hate the whole savior thing around adoption too. Like someone adopts a child and suddenly everybody wants to act like they are Mother Teresa. That framing feels so weird to me because the child does not owe you a lifetime of gratitude because you gave them a home. Feeding them, clothing them, keeping them safe, loving them, giving them a bed, those are all things children are supposed to have. A kid should not have to spend their whole life feeling like they need to be extra good because someone “saved” them.
The selfless part, to me, is being willing to love a child without constantly needing proof that your love is working. You might do everything right and they still might not trust you yet. You might love them completely and they might still miss their biological mom. They might want to know where they came from. They might love people who were not good for them. They might be angry about being adopted and still love their adoptive family at the same time. All of that can exist together, even if it is messy as hell.
And I think the parent has to be secure enough not to make the child choose. If the kid misses their biological mom, they should be able to say that without feeling like they are betraying the woman raising them now. If they want to know where they came from, that should not automatically be treated like rejection. If they are angry about what happened to them, let them be angry. Their feelings do not need to be convenient.
That is probably another huge part of being the safest person in the room. The child should not have to manage your emotions while they are trying to figure out their own. They should not have to think, I better not talk about my birth mom because Mom is going to get sad, or I better not say I am angry about being adopted because Dad is going to think I do not love him. That is too much pressure to put on a kid.
And honestly, I also think people throw around “love is enough” way too casually. Love matters, obviously, but love by itself does not magically fix everything. Love without patience can turn into pressure really fast. Love without understanding can become control. Love without selflessness can become, “Look at everything I have done for you, why are you still acting like this?”
And I hate that.
A child who has already had adults fail them should not have to heal fast enough to make the next adult feel successful.
Maybe being the safest person in the room really just means being the person who does not turn every bad moment into a threat. The kid can be angry and you are still there. They can mess up and you are still there. They can say something that hurts you and, yeah, there might be consequences and boundaries and conversations later, but your love is still there. They do not have to sit in their room wondering if this was finally the thing that made you give up on them.
I think that is what safety is, at least in my head. It is not just living in a house where nobody hits you or neglects you or screams at you. It is knowing you are not disposable. It is knowing one bad day does not erase your place in the family. It is knowing that anger does not automatically mean abandonment and that being difficult does not make you unlovable.
And I guess that is the part I keep thinking about. You cannot just tell a child once that they are safe and expect them to believe you. You probably have to show them so many damn times that eventually they stop waiting for the catch.
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