Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! It is always an honor to have women share their hearts in this series, and this week’s post really touched me with its honesty and rawness. Autumn, a blogging friend from Stay Gold Autumn, is opening up about her experiences growing up with a sister with many mental health issues. I can relate to some of this from my own extended family and some of it from friends and their families, and I hope that anyone who’s in Autumn’s (or her sister’s) shoes is encouraged by her words here today.
A Doctor approached my dad in the hospital. “Is this your child?” My dad replied. “Did you adopt your child?” My dad replied. The doctor looked back and forth from my sister to my father and said: “I wouldn’t have bet a penny on this child’s life a year ago.”
My parents adopted my sister at the age of 3, but she had almost died from malnutrition multiple times before being placed into foster care. A year or two after the adoption, my parents were in an abuse seminar when my Mom realized that they were passing my sibling’s pictures around as examples; in that meeting, my parents found out that my sister was placed into foster care after being in the worse child abuse situation the state said it had seen.
I’ve always been very cautious about talking about my sister’s experiences, and my experiences as her younger sister, because I did not want to add to the stigma of foster care adoptions or perpetuate stereotypes of children who are adopted having “problems.” Instead, I want you to understand that my sister’s illness is indicative of being severely neglected and abused, having severe psychiatric illnesses, and that I forgive her.