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make room for a child via adoption with anne heffron

How to Make Room for a Child By Dealing with Infertility Grief

Does Your Adoptee Have a Job?

No baby should be born with a job, as Dr Phil has said (yup, he’s more entertainer than therapist, just like Dr Laura, but in this case it is good advice). It’s just too much to expect a baby to fix anything — a relationship, a heart, a life.

But many people come to infant adoption after experiencing infertility and enduring some sort of loss. They might think that finally getting a baby and filling their empty arms will heal all the hurt.

Adoption: The Long View
Adoption: The Long View
206: From Infertility Grief To Adoption: How to Heal From Your Infertility Grief and Make Way for a Child
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And it does heal some of the hurt. Adopting a baby does resolve parenting, but it does nothing to address the wounds of infertility, which can be deep and enduring.

Grief doesn’t go away on its own; it needs to be addressed and processed. But how?

Metabolizing the Grief of Infertility

This month’s guest for Episode 206 of Adoption: The Long View is an expert on one way to process and possibly even release big emotions like grief. Anne Heffron is the daughter of parents who hadn’t worked through their feelings of inadequacy and insecurity, who hadn’t resolved their own losses prior to adopting their three children. Parents who couldn’t talk about adoption when Anne tried to bring it up with them.

Anne wrote through her own big emotions one summer a few years ago, resulting in her memoir You Don’t Look Adopted. Since then, her Write or Die! method has had a profound impact helping people heal their wounded places and make way for their next chapter.

Anne Heffron on Writing to Process Infertility Grief & Loss

Listen in as Anne reveals:

  • What it was like to be the daughter of parents whose unacknowledged grief made them brittle and fragile;
  • Considerations for when your writing might hurt another person, and understanding the two kinds of hurt;
  • Why it’s important for adoptees to be free to focus their lives on themselves and not always on their adoptive parents;
  • How adopting a child is an invitation to work on yourself;
  • What happens to struggle if you don’t talk about it;
  • The one conversation Anne wishes more than anything that she could have had with her mom;
  • Anne’s best advice for adopting well and for adoptive-parenting well.

Show Notes from Episode 206

Besides being the author of the memoir You Don’t Look Adopted, Anne Heffron is also the co-writer with Antonia Bogdanovich of the movie Phantom Halo. Anne Heffron was born in Manhattan in 1964 to a college student. 51 years later Anne returned to Manhattan to find the roots of her story, the one that began with her birth instead of with the phrase “The day we got you.”

How to Tune In Regularly

adoption the long view

You can find us on Adopting.com, and on these and other platforms.

A new episode comes out the first Friday of the month. Thank you for sharing, subscribing, and rating this episode!

Lori Holden, mom of a young adult daughter and a young adult son, writes from Denver. She was honored as an Angel in Adoption® by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute.

Find Lori’s books on her Amazon Author page, and catch episodes of Adoption: The Long View wherever you get your podcasts.

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