After Only Two Weeks, An Adoptive Mother Gives A Child Back [Broken Bonds]

[Ella S]

Yvette Maguire desperately wanted children. After 18 months of failing to conceive, she and her husband Mark turned to IUI treatments, which failed the couple three times. After IVF treatments also failed, the Maguires decided to turn to adoption. The process was emotionally draining, but the Maguires pressed on. As Yvette recalls, "The entire process is designed to put you off, to frighten you to see if you're 100 per cent committed. But it didn't deter either of us. I was so blinkered that all I could think was: 'I want a baby, I want a baby.'" The couple eventually got their wish: a 2-year-old boy named Ben, who "had been terribly neglected as a baby" was placed in their custody. Yvette finally had the child she always wanted. But then something went wrong: just two weeks after welcoming little Ben into their home, Yvette felt a disconnect from the child, and eventually returned him to the adoption agency as a result.
Kathryn Knight of the Daily Mail takes a look at the Maguire's strange situation, focusing on Yvette's inability to bond with her adopted child, who only stayed with the couple for two short weeks. "I have a very strong memory of looking at him in the first couple of days that he was with us, and thinking: 'He didn't come from me,'" Yvette recalls, "I felt no bond with him whatsoever."
Yvette claims that she tried everything to feel connected to Ben, but her inability to bond with her new son led her to break down into tears in front of a social worker who visited the home, causing the social worker to recommend that Yvette not be allowed to be with Ben unsupervised. "That was very difficult to hear," Yvette says, "I knew they were only protecting the child, but I would never ever have hurt him." A psychiatrist then diagnosed Yvette with "post-natal depression" and "suggested that her inability to grieve over her infertility lay at the root of her feelings."
The Maguires have taken quite a bit of grief from friends and family members who can't understand their decision to give away their adopted child so quickly, viewing Yvette as cold, selfish, and questioning how she could have made such a major decision after only two weeks with Ben. Yvette defends herself by pointing out that she only had Ben's best interests at heart: "Ben did absolutely nothing wrong. It wasn't about him, it was about me. You hear so many different stories about adoption being difficult, but they are always centered on the children. No one looks at it from the point of view of a woman who has not been able to have a child of her own and the effect that can have. I simply wasn't prepared for it emotionally."
So the question, then, becomes this: how could this couple have gone through an 18-month adoption process without anybody seeing the warning signs? And does Yvette really understand the impact her actions may have had on Ben? It's hard to argue that Ben should be with the Maguires; obviously it wasn't a healthy environment for him. But shouldn't there have been some type of system in place to avoid a situation like this? Were Yvette's actions selfish or selfless? Or perhaps a bit of both?
On the bright side, Ben, who has been in four foster homes over the past two years, is now "flourishing" with his new foster family. The Maguires, meanwhile, have accepted that they most likely will never have children. "I wanted the fairy tale: the husband, the lovely home, and the babies," Yvette says. The fairy tale, of course, didn't come true, and now there are three lives that have been forever changed by the strange reality that life provided instead.
Why After Waiting Years For A Baby, I Gave My Adopted Son Back [DailyMail]

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