Why Have Adoptive Parents’ Support Group?

By Donna White

Our St. Mary’s Adoptive Parents’ Support Group is celebrating its first anniversary in March. Hooray for us! I feel grateful to St. Mary’s for hosting us and very proud of our work together as parents.

Our members include adoptive and pre-adoptive parents and foster care providers. We are twenty-five families strong and still growing. We meet on the last Thursday of every month. We are non-denominational; our adoptions are both domestic and international. Members come from towns beyond Shrewsbury such as Princeton, Sudbury, Upton, Worcester, and Northboro.

I am an adoptive mother, and I know that my new vocation demands enormous strength, perseverance, love, resourcefulness, and patience. This is the most demanding job I have ever had.

The truth is that when my husband and I brought home our two toddlers from Russia, I felt quite alone and exhausted! I did not know of any resources to help us. I had to start at zero! I needed a plan for our children: their schooling, their social worker, their therapist, their pediatrician, their exercise regiment, their language acquisition, their diet, vitamins, a baby-sitter …

In my own case, the single most helpful resource to my family and me was St. Mary’s parish. Eileen Birch, our parish nurse, comforted me immensely and provided immediate help. We found a mother’s helper from the confirmation class and some baby-sitting help from a health ministry assistant too. It was so wonderful!

My wish in setting up our peer support group was to make the journey for others a little easier. As Dr. Gregory Keck says in his book Parenting the Hurt Child: Helping Adoptive Families Heal and Grow “The challenge for adoptive parents is to learn as much as possible from each other, and in turn, to share their experiences and knowledge with others.”

Our context is “You are not alone.”

Here is our vision statement.

Through this support group, adoptive families are stronger, healthier, and happier. All who are touched by this work feel compassion, understanding, the power of faith, and the power of resources.

Some are inspired so much that they seek to adopt again. Some feel the depth of the support so much that they inspire other families to adopt. Through this work, somewhere in the world, the life of one child is forever changed.

Taking a child, he placed it in their midst, and putting his arms around it, he said to them, “Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me and whoever receives me, receives not me but the One who sent me.” Mark 9:30-37