Naiveté

Sometimes it's better that you don't know what you're getting into ahead of time. Not going in with your eyes totally closed, but having enough ignorance that you think you can handle things-- because if you really knew what you were in for, you wouldn't do it.

Having kids is one of those things. I was scared when my new husband first started talking about having children because of all the things I'd heard about the difficulties involved. At some point, I began to think it was worth it and that we could handle it-- it was a good thing I didn't know that I would go 18 months without sleeping more than a few hours at a time and that I would fully understand how sleep deprivation could be used as a form of torture. (Firstborn now has no trouble sleeping 12 hours at a time.)

When we were waiting for a referral during our first adoption, we found out about a baby boy who was on the "special needs/ waiting child" list because he only had three fingers on his right hand and two of them were fused together. "Is that all?" we asked. "That hardly seems like special needs." True, it is less severe than many physical problems, and 10 years later he can do so much that I forget sometimes that he only has 8 fingers. However, I wasn't aware of what it would feel like to watch my 14-month old son be put under anesthesia and be wheeled away from me surrounded by doctors and nurses.

Maybe it's not so much naiveté as it is underestimating what something is going to be like. That's quite the paradox because I have been known to overestimate the difficulty of a task often enough. When we adopted Curly Girl, we knew that it was very likely that she would have Attention Deficit Disorder. After years of working with kids with diagnoses like Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, and Schizophrenia, I thought that ADD was not going to be a big deal. I don't know if I should call that naive or stupid. I had no idea of the constant need to be "on," of what the impulsivity would be like (I'm mad at you so I'll swing a pool cue at your head and not remember 10 minutes later when you ask me about it, of how weary it would make me. Or of her not wanting to eat at dinner and wanting to stay up until 10:00 when bedtime is hours earlier-- and then finding out that side effects of meds she's not even taking yet are decreased appetite and difficulty sleeping.