The earliest ties of children who spend time in institutional care are often with the peers that share their circumstances. These bonds are complicated and forged around personal survival, trauma, and other complex human issues. Therefore, if children with such attachments to one another leave the orphanage setting, it may be difficult for them to maintain these relationships at all or to improve the health of the relationship in light of the changed conditions for one or both.
My daughter struggles to define her own connection with another child whom she used to describe as her sister. They were so close for six years that they hid together when it came time to say goodbye. For years, my child experienced something like survivor's guilt over being adopted while her friend remained behind and pleaded with us often to add her friend to our family. And yet, when this first friend finally also joined her own adoptive parents in the US, the relationship became even more confusing. With regular contact now possible, my daughter found it difficult to align her new American girl self with her former orphan self. Memories floated to the surface and were pushed down again at the expense of healing the attachment. Old loyalties and new priorities were in question and at odds. Language was a barrier. Distance, while reduced, continues to be an obstacle.
Cognitively, my child realizes the value of this friendship because no one else in the world can understand and share her first six years more than this single individual. No one can take away what these girls experienced together and how they supported each other through a fraught early childhood. Emotionally, however, maintaining the relationship is taxing, because it requires, in part, a sustained and voluntary psychological return to the place and time which hurt each of them so deeply that they will carry the scars forever. Still, we press on in the hope that the future will bring healing and a renewed closeness for them both.
