Have you ever heard of the five love languages? I was having a conversation with one of my friends the other day and I was talking to her about how my daughter is overly affectionate. Now, seeing how my daughter came from foster care and she was probably not given that attention and love I think she craves it a lot more. She does know proper boundaries with other people outside of her family because we have worked on that with her, but she does like alot of affection from her dad and me. Okay now back to the conversation with my friend. She told me about this website that tells you how you express your love and I decided that I will go on there and see what she was talking about.
When you get on the website you can do a profile for yourself or you can do a profile for your child; I of course did both. What I found out was that I am the type of person that shows my love by the things that I do. Meaning I’m the type of person that shows my love and affection for my family members by taking them to places that they want to go or doing their favorite things. In other words, I show my love by my service that I give to them. I found out that my daughter shows love, obviously, in the affectionate/ outward way by giving hugs and kisses. What was interesting to me was that researching a little bit more about this told me that while I may show love one way and she may show love another way, she may not understand my language of love. So therefore, it is like I’m speaking Chinese and she is speaking German to me.
I remember when I was going through the classes that you have to take before you can adopt from the state the instructor said when you have the baby you start together and you grow apart, but when you adopt from foster care, you start apart then grow together. This is what I have found to be the case with my relationship with my daughter. We are both trying to learn how each other shows their affection and love. She does not understand how I show my love since it is not outward all the time. I must now conform to how she shows her love to let her know how I am feeling. I think this makes sense with most children who were in foster care because they probably were not shown that affection and love that should have been shown to them.
They may equate love in the form of hugs, kisses, and outwardly things like my daughter does. She cannot get enough of being hugged at 11 years of age . She has not moved to that stage yet where she wants her own space and I’m not for sure that she will be in that stage for a long time. I plan on trying to work more on giving that affection to my daughter while she is willing to receive it, and I do hope that in the meantime that she knows that I do love her and I just show it a little differently at times!