Post-Adoption Blues--April 1996

No one told me that adoptive moms go through something similar to postpartum depression. I thought there was something wrong with me. I had been counseled to not live in an isolated situation because of my high need to be around people. We had been home less than a month. We had temperatures in the 90's every day. Nights were unbearable! The nights did not cool down. I would take shower after shower trying to cool off! Our house was the oldest house owned by the mission and it was in pretty bad shape. This shows the shower! Later someone scraped all the blue paint off and that was a lot better. I'm not much of a fixer upper and neither is Milton so we kind of did the minimum amount of work to make the house livable! Paint and ceilings replaced in one bedroom so the bats couldn't get into the rooms! We had bats in the attic, but we didn't want them swooping down into our beds! Thankfully I had a baby bathtub for Alicia. I'd put her on a towel in the bathtub!

Alicia would not sleep through the night and my sleep was interrupted every night. Students were asking me every day why Alicia was crying. They didn't understand that that's what babies do! In most of the cultures in Benin you do not allow a baby to cry for very long. I learned to dance with my daughter in my arms to get her to sleep. Some nights I put her in bed and left her to cry herself to sleep. I was exhausted and I was beginning to spiral downward. I had laundry every day to do. I had no one to help me in the house. I could not keep up and it was so hot that I didn't know how much longer I would be able to stay in Kandi. We began to make more frequent trips to Bembereke, but even that was not ideal. They only had electricity during the day and if there was an operation during the night they put on the generator.

On one of our visits to Bembereke we talked to their housing committee and found out there was space if we wanted to move down. I could have househelp--Fulani house help and Milton could continue Fulfulde language learning. There were plenty of Fulani living at and around Bembereke. It seemed like a good solution but would the mission hear us out?

There are no coincidences and when our UEEB/SIM leadership was making a tour of Benin with our international director responsible for Benin we took advantage of their stop in Kandi to talk openly about our situation and request to move to Bembereke. We also offered them our very hot bedrooms to sleep in. We had no a/c and nothing but ceiling fans to cool us. Expecting our cries to fall on sympathetic ears, we were surprised when we were told that we would have to wait until they had met with the Bembereke board. It almost seemed as though administrative procedure was getting in the way of taking care of our needs. We had gotten used to this though. On another one of our trips to Bembereke we had read an article by a SIM missionary and author Myron Loess. Actually it was an unpublished thesis with a title like, "First term--crisis in self-esteem." This short thesis hit the nail on the head for us. We were in language learning, living in a remote location and trying to survive our first term. People would travel to Kandi and take a left turn to Banikoara! They seldom stopped at our house. Our language supervisor would walk in and correct whatever we had written on our black board. This was not an easy language to learn. We did not know that many of the words were Bariba words mixed in with the Fulfulde. Rather than being encouraged we felt like babes learning this difficult language. People traveling to Niamey would zoom right on through--I think we had visitors only three or four times while we lived 16 months in Kandi! We did have wonderful relationships with the two pastors living in Kandi. Those relationships have continued to this day! Each time we made our way to Bembereke or Parakou I felt like a flower in the dessert after a rain--refreshed and open, flourishing. Then I would return to Kandi and the drying up process would start again.

Easter that year was quite an adventure with a baby! We were supposed to bring something to share at the potluck. I remember making riz au gras--jollof rice, but I had no meat, so I used tuna. Everyone raved about how good it was! We met in a mango grove, and some Fulani women came by and talked to me. They wanted to know if they could have some of the milk I gave Alicia so their babies would be so fat! I explained that they had good kossam--endam--mother's milk! They didn't need powdered milk!

The relationships with Pastor Isaac and Pastor Jeremie along with their families made it difficult to leave Kandi when we finally got the green light to move. However, we would soon see how necessary it was to leave in order to get all the paperwork done. God would make a way! We just had to trust him.