Rosanne and Martin have three adopted children: 'In an ideal world they would not have been adopted'
Rosanne (41, obstetrician) and Martin (38, has her own company in marketing and strategy), have three adopted children: Shawn (12), Josiah (9) and Hannah (3). All three children are from South Africa. First came Josiah (when he was 11 months), then Shawn (who was 5.5 at the time). Hannah came in April 2020, she was almost 1.5 years old then. The family lives in Veenendaal.
No need to be pregnant
Rosanne: 'I don't recognize the need to carry a child. Not even to give birth. As a midwife, I am often asked that, logically. I think it's fantastic to experience, but for myself I don't feel that need so strongly.
Now that I am a mother, I can miss that feeling that you know from scratch where your child is and what it is going through. That sometimes saddens me. That I couldn't be there for them from day one. They were able to save them from that difficult and sometimes damaging start they had.
Repair the damage
I have a strong feeling that I want to repair that damage. So I make sure that they don't have that feeling of abandonment under my care. When Shawn had surgery a few years ago, he had to go to the pediatric ICU immediately after surgery.
“You can't sleep here,” the doctors told me. To which I replied, "The first to be with him when he wakes up is me." Certainly. Paw stiff. If I tell him I'm here, I'll be there. The same goes for the children's intensive care unit. When he woke up, I was lying next to him, on a stretcher.
Medical trajectory
Our children have a backpack. During the adoption process we checked that we were open to a child with special needs . Everyone is welcome with us, that idea.
Getting pregnant was not easy. We went through a medical trajectory, but let it go. It was too emotional. What are we doing to ourselves? We had a great time together. I couldn't imagine becoming a mother.
When a friend said: "Hey, you have the house, the heart and the space, isn't adoption something for you?" that was an eye opener. There are many children in this world who grow up without parents. We had the space to be those parents for them.
Visually impaired
You start fantasizing about the baby in your belly. You also do that as adoptive parents, but there is no physical or hormonal experience involved. It takes a while before you feel familiar.
Hannah has a cuddliness factor of 100. She is small for her age, has a very cute head, a doll. We melted when we saw her. She was in a good children's home and we got a diaper bag full of things they thought were important to her.
Shawn was a big toddler when he came to us, already a real human being. We had no experience, we really did it by feel. Talk a lot together and seek help if we couldn't figure it out. He was visually impaired, but we had no idea how visually impaired he was. We knew a little about his background, but not much.
Fight to survive
I sometimes think: I love you a hundred thousand, but you really should have been with your biological mother. In an ideal world they wouldn't have been adopted, then their parents wouldn't have had all that misery either. We see Shawn having to grieve for what he has lost, and what he has not known.
Both boys had to fight to survive, sometimes they still suffer from that. We try to help them with that as much as possible.
Checked out on vacation
The children live in a fairly white environment, but in our church they are not the only ones with a different skin color and also not in primary school. They are really accepted in our close network. But when we are on vacation, we are stared at horribly.
Josiah is missing part of his nose and sometimes people comment on that. When he was a toddler, I was walking down the street with him when someone said, "Oh, war victim, right?" People touch their hair or ask things like, "What happened to him?" And if I know. Sure, but that's his story. He decides who he will or will not tell later.
Sometimes I joke, sometimes I get angry, and sometimes I say, "That's private." So that Josiah experiences: everything is okay, you can choose your own reaction.'
'