Exposure to Life
Exposure:
a laying open to the action or influence of something.
Can you imagine a life where the beautiful sound of a symphony orchestra playing Elgar can make your senses feel overloaded? Where the simple fun that we all enjoyed as kids of a seaside penny arcade can make you feel anxious? Joining in with new experiences is overwhelmingly scary? Holidays make you nervous and edgy? Where fear can come from the everyday things that most people enjoy? For many adopted children this is a reality of every day life.
This weekend I decided to cast aside my worries about Girl trying yet another new club. She wanted to join a martial arts club, something she has been asking about for a long time. We checked it out and decided to take her for the free thirty minute taster session that they were offering but it came with conditions. In moments of fright, flight, freeze Girl can have little control over impulses and I was worried that she would use her new skills against us. She is already very strong and in those (now rare) moments of sheer uncontrollable violence she can already inflict as much pain as any grown up. So I set my conditions that if her skills were ever used inappropriately lessons would end immediately. She didn’t look entirely happy that she would not be able to use her skills to enhance her play-fighting and it did leave a niggling doubt that she did not understand the nature of what she wanted to do but I need not have worried.
Less than thirty minutes after Girl and The Hubster left for the taster session they returned, Girl in floods of tears and tucked into herself. She couldn’t say why she was crying, there were no words available to her but I knew. It’s the same reason she can’t enjoy a party. The same reason that she can have a meltdown after visiting the penny arcades. The same reason she can gouge my wooden dining room table with a pencil when she is upset about her spelling. The reasons are different in nature and yet somehow the same. A new place, new people, a dark low-ceiling room where all the sounds echo around you, self-confidence, self-esteem, fear of the unknown, sensory overload. Did I miss anything? Probably. I did my best to reassure her that it didn’t matter but no words could take away the disappointment she felt and I cried inside for the little girl that was hurting beyond comfort.
That thirty minute incident set the tone for the whole weekend. Girl went from relatively happy to emotionally exhausted and regressed back to the baby talk, the noises and babbling and self-absorbed behaviours. I was tested beyond measure, dirty looks, pushing boundaries and buttons. It can take Girl a while to recover from disappointment and it was with gritted teeth and steely determination that we ploughed through the rest of the jam-packed weekend and we made it. Exhausted but relatively unscathed, as we always do.
So the question is, what do you do? I knew that taking Girl to the new club could be courting disaster but do we shy away from exposing Girl to life? Do we say no when she wants to try something new, something we know in our heart she probably won’t cope with? Do we not book tickets to see a concert at the Symphony Hall because she might not cope with the sounds, the crowds, the noise and the hustle and bustle of the city? Can you imagine a life where we don’t try and experience everything good the world has to offer? The sounds, the sights, the smells? We know it comes with an emotional pricetag but how will we determine what makes Girl tick if we don’t expose her to anything at all? How will she learn to enjoy the world if she has no experience of it? How will Girl cope as an adult if she has not learned how to visit a city and use public transport, join a club, make new friends?
So it’s with this in mind that I expose Girl to life, sometimes maybe it’s a step too far but I hope with it she learns that by pushing your boundaries a little beyond your comfort zone there is a whole world out there to be enjoyed and that she grows in confidence.
Executive Functioning and Adopted Children, Can’t Do or Won’t Do?
We went to see a family therapist just over a week ago, one that specialises in children in care and adoptive families. We were referred last year but for reasons that I still don’t understand (and makes me very cross) our PASW felt that their services would be of no benefit to us so our referral was declined. To cut a long story short we went back to the community paediatrician with a long written list of the issues and she referred us for the second time. Neither the therapist or the CP could understand why were declined by PAS in the first place, this time without the intervention of PAS our referral was accepted. Ours, we were told is the sort of family that the service is aimed at, no question about it.
The appointment came, the therapist sat and listened to our concerns and said that he had spoken to our PASW so knew some of the background. He said that she was under the impression we didn’t need any further help. Do I chuckle good naturedly or scream with frustration? I went for a chuckle. Yes, we were happy to finish seeing the PASW she wasn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know, was offering us nothing new and lovely as it was nattering over a cuppa it felt like a bit of a waste of time. At the time I was feeling confident that we were moving along the right tracks, we were ‘coping’ with the unwanted behaviours. The PASW had visited the school and insisted on extra help for Girl. An IEP was put into place and that was ultimately what we wanted, a recognition that school and education were stumbling blocks for Girl and were part of the triggers for some of her behaviours. We felt as though we were moving in the right direction.
Some months later I think we came to the realisation that the school were giving us lip-service to appease the PASW. Forced into a position that they didn’t believe in, they still don’t understand Girl, they don’t understand attachment and the struggles that adopted children can have with the little things. They are not seeing what stands out like a sore thumb to us. Perhaps because of class size, perhaps because she has two teachers and numerous classroom assistants, perhaps because at school she is no bother she is compliant, easy, kind and sociable she blends into the background, exactly what the first paediatrician pre-adoption predicted might happen.
Her IEP targets have been moved at each review, she is no further forward and in some things I have noticed she has gone backwards, such as counting, she can now no longer count to 20 confidently, she gets very muddled. One of my friends suggested that because in Reception they count daily then in Year 1 they count in different styles 2-4-6-8, 10-20-30 it’s confused her and forced her backwards. That makes a lot of sense to me. It’s only now, three terms later that they are beginning to give her more frequent extra lessons and help.
So back to the therapist. He could clearly see that school was not giving her the support she needed and suggested we do a parent and school test called a BRIEF. It stands for Behaviour Rating Inventory of Executive Function. He felt that the form would steer the school in the right direction and focus their attention on Girl a little more carefully. He explained that some schools are reulctant to involve an EP (eductaional psycholgist) just on the basis that somebody is adopted and may have attachment issues, EP’s are a precious but limited resource; that we needed to get some focus before attempting to get the school to involve the EP.
I have to be honest I came out of the meeting feel a tad underwhelmed, we had been given the usual flannel that parenting adopted children is difficult, twice the work of most other children, he actually said ‘parenting one adopted child is the same as parenting two children’. Yeah, yeah we’ve heard all this before, it’s hard, I get it. I am so disillusioned by the whole service that I failed to see that we were being given some genuine support.
When the parent part of the form arrived yesterday I didn’t fully understand what the title meant so I Googled it, I read the information attached with the form and a friend (who happens to be an educational psychologist) sent me a more in-depth piece of research literature on the subject by Family Futures. It was only after reading the last piece that I had a dawning realisation that we might finally be getting some real, proper help. That the therapist hadn’t been giving us flannel, he truly understood and possibly has recognised what is happening with my Girl.
What I read (as I understand it and put in very simple terms) is that during pregnancy and post birth the immediate environment and experiences can affect the normal development of the babies brain, neglect, abuse, drug misuse, emotional neglect etc. That 80% of the neural pathways are formed in the first two years of a babies life. OK we’ve heard all of this before with attachment, we know this bit. What Family Futures have realised in their studies is that it can go deeper than the emotional issues of attachment and what people have perceived as ‘Won’t Do’ is sometimes more likely to be ‘Can’t Do’, that many of the children they tested had some weakness in Executive Function and had experienced high level of trauma in the first couple of years of their lives, they have termed this as Developmental Trauma Disorder. Executive Function is the ability to plan and manage everyday tasks using past experience.
Family Futures have been moving away from attachment and parenting style strategies which concentrate on the ‘won’t do’ and more towards strategies that recognise that the children ‘can’t do’. Non-competitive strategies which place the parents, teachers and carers as mentors rather than managers. It’s non-competitive and removes the power struggle of control. They have in place a model of therapy they call Developmental Re-parenting which addresses both the emotional and psychological and basically means that carers revisit earlier developmental stages.
I’m sure I could tell you a lot more but I think you get the general gist. If you want to read more the following is a link that you can find on Google using the terms Family Futures Executive Function and is the scholarly article my friend sent.
Is it that they won’t do it, or is it that they can’t?
So based on everything I have read I have a feeling that our new therapist is on the same page as those of Family Futures and I am starting to feel a smidgen of hope again.
Sibling Rivalry and Adoption
Bringing a second child into your family is tricky and if your family is made up by way of adoption, well, it just makes things that bit more complicated. I am not by any means saying that natural families don’t have issues with expanding the family but when your family is expanded by way of traumatic (yes, that word again) life changing events rather than (what I imagine to be) the joyful moment of childbirth it kind of sticks. These adopted children will always feel a sense of insecurity and I would go as far as to say that all of them will feel like this, it took me a long time to realise this but the truth is why wouldn’t they?
With one child it’s simpler to work on creating those secure attachments and life can be enjoyed, you can build the trust, you can concentrate your efforts solely and get through the tough times together with no added complications. Then comes along child number two. Suddenly life is as complicated and confusing as it’s going to get. You need to create a bond with your second child but yet maintain a good bond with your first child but then you have to consider that your first child still needs that concentrated effort of attention but your second child needs it just as much or actually more and the more one needs it the more the other needs it. Even thinking about it sends my head into a spin.
I have come to the conclusion that a lot of the time one child is going to feel like their nose has been put out of joint. The squabbles and bids for my attention are never ending. I might sound bitter, I am not. What I am is stretched to my limits. Whatever my moves are with one child I have to make sure I have the other child in mind, ready to spring into quick-witted action, I have to be forward thinking. If anyone has ever met me, I think they would agree that quick-witted or forward thinking would not be the first words you would use to describe me. I am a thinker, I like to take my time to mull something over, I am not really very good at being one step ahead unless I have already learned previously from a similiar mistake and I guess that’s the important thing, learning from the mistakes.
Take for instance the other day. Girl came home from school and Boy laid into her as he does most days. Whatever she picks up he wants, ‘it’s mine (whether it is or isn’t), I want it’. If she sits down he shouts ‘my chair, me sit there’. Resigned, Girl slipped to her room quietly with the excuse she was going to the toilet. After twenty minutes I went to check on her and she was sitting playing snap with herself on the floor, looking utterly miserable. I tried to talk to her but she was stubborn that she was not going to say she was sad about Boy picking on her again so I suggested she find her Guess Who game and I would play that with her (while I cooked the dinner I hasten to add). To cut a long story short (because it really is dull), Boy soon sniffed out that Girl was having ‘Fun with Mummy’ and he was not. Much squawking later Girl is happy but Boy is not and refuses to eat his dinner, he suddenly has tummy ache, leg ache and mouth ache (and Mummy has a headache Boy dearest). In hindsight I could have picked a game for us all to play but Girl looked so sad I thought she needed some special attention but by doing that I put Boy’s nose out of joint. What do I do? Is there ever a point of mummy coming out champion of everything?
It’s not just Boy being mean to Girl, we do get the opposite where Girl has tried to push herself into whatever activity Boy is doing. She calls it sharing but differently to boy it’s more sly. Boy will just shout his desires, ‘mine, I want it’ but Girl pushes herself into Boy’s space so eventually he is pushed out of the activity altogether, comic reading, brushing the dog, playing on the ride-on motorbike etc.
Our (new) family therapist told us to consider that in parenting terms having one adopted child is the equivalent of having two children, just in sheer input and extra measures we have to take. In my words I would say adopted children have extra needs, not necessarily special needs, just extra needs. They have been to the dark side, they need to know they won’t be there again and every move towards the sibling is a small rejection for them, I think that’s important to understand.
I hear so many adopters excited by the prospect of a second adoption, frustrated at having to wait the two years required by most adoption authorities and possibly more excited than when they adopted the first child. I have been there myself. The grim reality is, it’s bloody hard work parenting two very needy children and juggling all the different sized balls that come with adoption but by golly I must be a glutton for punishment because I actually love it. Honestly at times I have felt like I haven’t liked it very much, that the incessant demands for my attention have been overwhelming but I would not change a thing. The moments when you get it right I am sure feel a million times better because those cuddles and smiles, moments of relaxation are fought so hard for.
Insecurities
We have had a bit of a roller-coaster ride for the last few weeks, one thing after another after another. It’s no surprise that both of the kids are feeling insecure. Where we normally try to stay in control with good routines and planning events have left us going from one catastrophe to the next. Girl is teary and fragile and Boy, well he’s angry. Really, really angry We are battling from one tantrum to another and this is unusual for Boy. He wants control of everything and when he doesn’t get it? He really knows how to tell us how pissed off he is.
A few weeks ago Boy caught chickenpox and ended up in hospital after a high fever and turning blue around the hands, feet and mouth. When we got to the hospital we were rushed through A&E and within minutes had about eight doctors plus nurses all trying to do different things to him, boy was so poorly he barely reacted to any of it but what was scary for us as parents must have been terrifying for a toddler because once his fever had settled we could relax into ‘phew, he is going to be ok’ but Boy? Well besides age-appropriately not really understanding, here he was in a strange place again, strange bed, strange smells, feeling poorly, he had been jabbed multiple times because they couldn’t find a vein, a nurse was taking his temperature every hour and administering medicine; not bad in itself but imagine what Boy is thinking ‘hey that’s mommies job, last time somebody took over my mommie’s jobs I got taken away by them’ not actually thinking that but probably it had to be there in the subconscious, a little alarm bell warning him of danger (see where I am going with this?). All this time Girl is sent to her grandparents, knowing that her little brother is really poorly and that she was ‘second best’ because we her parents didn’t want to take her to the hospital.
Life settled down a little, we adopted a puppy the puppy nearly died (more trauma) and then Boy got sick again, high fever, a fall down the stairs, head pain, tummy ache, leg ache. We had NHS direct on the phone during the night and Girl was aware of all of this, another disturbed worrying night for both kids. A few days later we are still worried about Boy and his unwillingness to eat and complaining of tummy aches all the time, I had a feeling it wasn’t through being ill but made a doctors appointment anyway just to be sure. The Doctor (bearing in mind this was the third visit since the chickenpox because Boy has some lymph glands swell up) had a check over Boy and sent us straight to the hospital, his heart is galloping like a racehorse he could have a serious illness. Shit! What did I miss? Was Boy really ill and I had been putting it down to a control issue?
So if you read regularly you probably know that I don’t really swear on my blog but this is how bad things are. We got to the hospital and had to endure more blood tests, more searching for veins, a long, long wait to hear any results and an unavailability of any senior doctors to check the raised blood results so yet another night in hospital (by this time it’s after midnight and we are all exhausted). In our haste we had had to dump Girl at my parents house with no change of clothes and with the knowledge that there was something wrong with her brother’s heart as she had been to the GP appointment with us.
Well, this is the thing. There was nothing wrong with Boy’s heart. The GP had misdiagnosed a child’s faster heartbeat for a galloping heartbeat. It was quite, quite normal. In fact there wasn’t much wrong with Boy at all except for a viral infection from the chickenpox. We were told that we could leave once Boy had eaten his lunch. Boy refused to eat his lunch, we were back at square one, the reason we had visited the GP in the first place. Eventually we coaxed some lunch down and left the hospital with our tail’s between our legs. Traumatised, tired, battle weary after a number of meltdowns, a refusal to let mummy do anything for him and this is continuing. Boy is barely eating anything consistently except for breakfast. He does not want me to help him. He is having screaming fits over the slightest thing, he wants control over every aspect of what we do and if he doesn’t get his own way a full scale tantrum ensues, hitting, being spiteful to Girl, refusing to eat but making demands of sugary foods. Life is difficult and of course all of this is having a massive knock on affect on Girl.
So we are back to trying to make Boy feel safe, he won’t accept a cuddle from me but will let me press his nose or ruffle his hair so we are at the very least maintaining touch until he is back in a good place again. The timing could not have been worse really as Boy always feels more insecure when Girl is not at school and with us only the first weekend into the Easter holidays I am expecting a testing couple of weeks.
Friendship and Understanding Post Adoption
When you are a parent to a child with attachment issues or a child that has come through adoption you find that normal friendships and relationships become more complicated, that you almost shut off a part of your life for fear of being misunderstood. I do not talk about adoption or attachment issues with my non-adoption friends unless specifically asked, they just don’t understand that parenting an adopted child or a child with attachment disorder is different. There seems to be this belief that children are resilient, their past is made sort of irrelevant, ‘oh well kids adjust, they’re with you now and you’re a great mum’. So it doesn’t matter what traumas they experienced in the eyes of my friends anything that happens henceforth is down to you.
I never dare utter the word trauma to a non-adoptive friend. Moving to a new family was not traumatic it was ‘a difficult time for them’. That’s as far as I can take it with a non-adoptive friends. I have used the word traumatic before and been given The Look. They may as well have scoffed ‘traumatic? don’t be so dramatic’. Friends view adoption as a rosy, glowing moment not unlike the time they held their newborn baby for the first time. ‘How did you feel the first time she called you mummy?’ I am asked repeatedly. I never know how to answer because it wasn’t an easy moment. The children (that can talk) are ‘trained’ to call you mummy, it doesn’t come from an emotional place or a place of love it’s just they have no other name for you. I can’t tell that to my friends because it’s a bit of a conversation stopper, it’s a bit too downbeat when they are expecting the answer ‘oh it was such a special moment’. There are special moments but the first time I was called mummy was not one of them, my daughter was far too tense and distraught for there to be any pleasure in the moment.
Friends don’t seem to realise that there is more to adoption than the actual event of adoption, the process we go through or the first time we are called mummy.
I have a friend that takes a great interest in my life and well, come to think of it, everybody else’s life too. She is vivacious and bubbly and wants to know everything about everybody and she remembers the important stuff. She remembers if your child has been to the doctors and always asks how you got on, you know just the little things that make you feel that somebody else is thinking of you.
This friend has asked a lot of questions about adoption and the kids and about all the different aspects and emotions that come with it but when it comes to me telling her about the difficulties that can arise or a bad day or Girl’s latest tantrum and more importantly why we have these problems I am met with the blanket phrase’ well you know…all kids do that’. An uncomfortable silence follows and I can’t even try to explain that they are reacting in the present to their past because in friend’s eyes the past is ancient history whereas actually the trauma Girl experienced in her past formed who she is today, the quirky but troubled Girl that I love with all my heart.
To invalidate her past is to invalidate my Girl and I myself also feel invalidated and I know it’s not intentional but it’s one less person I can talk to openly, another person I have to close off to because just in that blanket statement I have been labelled a neurotic mother and it leaves me questioning myself and our life and now more than ever I need friends who don’t sweep our issues under the carpet.
So I have read a lot of books, attended some training, I know what my girl has been through, I know the daily struggle my girl has with herself and I know I am vindicated in worrying about my Girl. Luckily, I have an army of friends in the adoption circle who know exactly how I feel, how lonely it can sometimes feel because talking to non-adopters can be really tough when they can’t empathise with your life. Our life isn’t talking about C-sections or breast feeding, it’s about contact, about privacy and security and placing authorities. Talking about the issues you go through on a daily basis is not a conversation stopper.
A Christmas Carol
I was sitting this morning thinking about Christmas presents, the fact that I have almost completed my Christmas shopping and as usual have gone completely over the top with the kids presents. I then started to reflect on last Christmas and previous Christmases Most adopters will tell you that Christmas is a difficult time. I believe that most kids will get a bit bratty in the run up to Christmas but when your child’s mental state is constantly set at high-alert and bracing for the unknown well that unknown can lead to some difficult behaviour. Everything is out of order, everything is exciting (and sadly over stimulating).
Christmas Past
Girl’s First Christmas
This happened three months after placement when Girl was two or to put it another way (that I think puts the time scale into perspective), twelve weeks. Only twelve weeks as a new family. We were very excited to be sharing our first Christmas together with our new daughter. We arranged a Christmas Breakfast and present opening with all the close family we could fit in our little house, my parents flew over from Spain to stay with us and I offered to cook Christmas dinner for all and sundry. (I bet you can see where this is going…). The day dawned, the stockings were discovered, the snow fell and it seemed so perfect. Thirty minutes into the most stupidly, humongous pile of Christmas presents you have ever seen and Girl has had enough. It was all too much. The screaming and tantrums started and they carried on right the way through dinner and all the way to bedtime. It was so bad my parents moved out the next day to stay at my grandparents. My sister’s new boyfriend (who was meeting our parents for the first time) was practically cowering under the table looking absolutely petrified. I was crying, my mum was crying and we finished Christmas feeling shell-shocked and upset. In hind-sight I’d say that we expected too much but we were new parents we had looked forward to this moment for so long.
Last Christmas
In terms of behaviour we did not think we could top the first Christmas and actually Christmas Day itself was fairly quiet. Having had three previous attempts with Girl and being Boy’s first Christmas with us we felt fairly experienced and decided to keep it as low key as possible. We had the whole day to ourselves which worked out brilliantly. Unfortunately, Boy had just had an operation a couple of days previous to Christmas and was poorly, needing a lot of attention and the whole run up to Christmas was probably one of our worst periods as adoptive parents, Girl’s behaviour was so off-the-scale last year that we did not put the tree up till the last minute, did not go to see Santa or partake in anything very festive and this is what prompted me to write this blog post. I had been remembering how this time last year I broke down. I drove to my parent’s house (they had moved back from Spain by this point) sobbing and not really understanding why.I broke down on their doorstep and my mum packed me off to bed. We learned a lot from the experience of last year, started to understand Girl a lot more. I understand now I was suffering from Post Adoption Depression and Girl was utterly traumatised by well, frankly everything in her life at that point, new school, new brother, adoption, hospital runs for her brother…
Christmas Present
This Christmas
Despite how terrible this last year has seemed at points I am happy to say that we are excited about Christmas. We are always excited about Christmas with the kids, I mean you have to have hope that they will be fine else what else is there? But it’s different this year. We are coping, we have learned a lot in this past year more than any year before and madly we are not having a very low key Christmas, in fact both the grandparents are coming to dinner. Yes it might be bedlam, yes I am expecting some humdinger tantrums from Boy (he’s two, it’s his right), yes I am expecting some sulks and stroppy behaviour from Girl (but happily not expecting the violent outburst we had last year), yes I am probably going to have a few meltdowns myself (I’m a mum, it’s my right to get stressy over the sprouts) but as a family we are in a good place. My therapist taught me that although its probably not healthy to be always expecting the worst if I do find myself anticipating a worst case scenario (because that can be our life at times) I can plan positively how to deal with it, mentally prepare myself and mostly I have to say it works.
Christmas Future
Well what can I say about our future Christmases other than I hope they will always be merry and bright? I’m hoping to learn from this Christmas (but no too much eh?). Something that stay’s with me now though is that some of the other day’s over Christmases past have meant more to me such as waking up Girl last year to watch the New Year Countdown and share some late night quality street, a Boxing Day steam train ride, a Frosty walk… so even if Christmas fail’s miserably there will be other days to get oh so right.
Naivety?
I have recently had a lot of opportunity to mix with some new adopters. I always enjoy mixing with other adopters and hearing their experiences which are mostly positive. The one thing I find really interesting and I have done it myself in the past, is when asked how the child is settling in to hear the reply of ’oh fine, but she was in foster care from birth so we are not anticipating any problems’.
Gulp. I say nothing because like it or not from what I have read and seen and experienced all adopted children are going to have at least a few issues, the younger they are the better but I think experiencing the trauma of losing everything you know at any age is going to have a monumental effect, how could it not?
As adults we grieve for the people we love when we lose them and we know to recognise our grief, for relatives that pass away, for lost pets, friends who move away, when we move out of our parents house a certain amount of homesickness and lets face it I get homesick on holiday after a while. We experience loss and anxiety for all these things and more so why would a baby or a toddler not feel these things after moving from foster care?
I guess the important thing is to recognise that fact and understand it, which if I am honest is bloomin’ hard when you are embracing your new family and moving on and your child cannot express or probably even understand how they are feeling. It’s hard to see that your outwardly happy, seemingly settled child is probably inwardly anxious and to remember that they have felt loss that we for the most part would barely even begin to comprehend. So our wonderful, spirited little fighters are hard wired for self preservation from an early age.
I do believe that a lot of us go into adoption with an certain amount of naivety, me included, both times. Yes, it is joyful to finally make your family complete but it is not a bed of roses or a fairytale ending and it’s as well to recognise that from the start. I am not trying to be all doom and gloom or a naysayer, I love my family to bits but it is hard to adjust your life and come to terms with the fact they are sort of different from other children, that their young, tender hearts are already bruised from loss and trauma. It’s hard not to constantly be analysing their every move, is that an adoption behaviour or quite normal?
Both of my children have issues and both of them had completely different experiences of foster care. Yes they were both placed from birth, yes they were both with one foster carer throughout. One was cared for adequately and the other was not. One struggles with attachment, the other struggles with separation anxiety. Apart and with individual and constant attention they are both lovely children. Together, whew. Word’s can’t describe!
To be honest we are struggling to know what to do for the best at the moment, Girl is struggling with everything and the family is taking the impact. There is no easy solution with two children, we are just muddling through the best we can and hoping that we do a job of raising our children that is ‘good enough’. I am long past striving to be perfect!
Bucket loads of Stress
Life is never simple with adopted children. At the moment Girl is coping pretty well with everything and Boy is not. Weekends are still fraught and from the moment we woke up on Saturday morning this weekend Boy has been grumpy, mean, spiteful, uncooperative and stubborn. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that though he loves his older sister he also feels threatened by her or not actually by her but having to share the attention he gets throughout the week. It’s something he will learn to cope with as he grows older, it’s so hard for any two year old to share attention (adopted or not) but still pretty exhausting for mummy and daddy.
Life has been interesting with Girl in that she has been quite a different child recently. She has returned to school with no real difficulties, she is not particularly enjoying it, grumbles about having to go, gets upset with the playground politics and we have had some slightly difficult behaviour but she does seem to be trying very hard to control her impulses and share her anxieties which is just brilliant. We have learned the signals, we know the usual triggers and I think we deal with and understand the behaviours pretty well now.
However, today we have had contact with Girl’s older sisters, it’s the first we have had for a while and the behaviour this afternoon after a relatively calm weekend has been manic. We had a few warning signs of anxiety before going to bed and after her bedtime story she told me ‘My tummy feels funny and wants to do something but I don’t know what’. Earlier in the year this would have been a surefire start to some pretty horrendous bedtime behaviour, she wouldn’t have accepted me telling her that if she goes to sleep she will feel better, she would have fought me. This surely signals a step forward but on past record I also know that it takes a couple of days for Girl to process how she feels about contact and ‘fight it out’. It will be interesting to see how it plays out this week. I am hoping that it is not the straw that breaks the camels back. She is stressed with school, we know that but as I said she is coping but any extra stress could tip her over the edge and that’s the problem, stress is going to come by the bucket load in the next few months.
We do have more contact lined up at the weekend. Girl’s Grandad’s chemotherapy is not providing any quality of life and he is very poorly, his days are sadly numbered so we will be coping with that extra stress on top of normal every day life. The every day life that includes a trip abroad with a boy who we have realised does not like holidays and then the countdown to Christmas begins. (Yes, that in itself is stressful to Girl). So we are going to have to be very, very resilient and forward thinking in the coming months.
(Not) Understanding Adoption
Two days ago we received postbox contact from Girl’s birth mum. I opened it hesitantly, I normally like to give it a once over first to prepare my mind for the discussions that may follow but Girl fetched the post and was eager for me to open everything, she seemed to instinctively know there was something interesting in the big brown envelope.
I have always thought I understood the importance of being honest and open about adoption with Girl, right from the beginning it has been something we have talked about with her, offered information and answered questions. We have embraced contact with her birth family, direct and postbox. We bought children’s books explaining adoption, ones that emphasise that families are different, ones that give her sense of belonging - in fact you name it we brought it. We have tried to let the need for information be led by Girl but with the issue of direct contact that has not always been possible, sometimes it has been led by circumstance more than by Girl’s needs.
The postbox envelope we received contained a letter and an envelope of photos and we observed that birth mum looks a lot like Girl’s eldest sister. Girl declared that she would like birth mum to come and live with us which I took in my stride, she always says something like that, I don’t believe it to have any meaning other than she is a kind girl.
I left the letter out on the table and this morning she took the photos out again and her first question was ‘mummy was the names of the two ladies that couldn’t look after me Janet & Josephine*?’. I was a little taken aback by this, it is quite wrong but also the names she said were of her two young cousins – one of whom does share the same name as birth mum. She then went on to tell me a little story about how she chose us, she went looking for a nice house to live in and chose this one. I have heard this story before, it’s clearly how she likes to think things worked out for her and I do correct her (age appropriately of course) but it just adds to her confusion.
Since postbox we have slightly gone back to some habits that we haven’t seen much of lately, major fidgeting, unable to get her words out properly or make a comprehensible sentence, an inability to do things for herself and a certain slowness in activities, nothing major but a definite difference.
Some people are of the opinion that contact is not a good idea, I am not one of those people. Some people and particularly older adoptees I have spoken to think it’s ‘wonderful’ (that’s a word that is used often though I am not sure it’s very appropriate). The older adoptees I spoke to came from am an age where they stumbled upon the fact they were adopted, or had the fact given to them on their 18th birthday (can you just imagine the impact of that?). So all in all I believe honesty is a good policy but I have a million doubts and questions about the way we approach talking about adoption and maybe in a way it could be compared to any mum questioning whether they are doing right by their child.
So I am thinking aloud now, I’m not sure there are any right or wrong answers but it would be good to hear your thoughts though. Is there a good age to start talking about adoption? Is it better to wait until they are old enough to understand completely rather than having them concoct wonderful little fantasies that you have to correct with a dimmer reality? Does Girl’s development delay have an impact on her ability to understand her circumstances and her relationship with people? Are we doing more harm than good by being too open and forward with information at such a young age? Is it too stressful to talk about different mothers; birth mothers, foster mothers, adopted mothers? How can Girl possibly be expected to understand that adopted mother means forever and come to think of it what is Girl’s understanding of forever when counting to 100 can ‘take forever’, getting to the seaside ‘takes forever’? That sort of forever is definitely finite.
We protect our children as much as we can, try to retain their innocence. Do we chat to our children about money worries, death, famine, war? Probably not but adoption is amongst the most stressful situations for a child to cope with and yet we are pushing (however gently) information at them at a tender age and I am beginning to think it’s too much and too complex for them to understand. What are we hoping to achieve by showing a five year old pictures of a woman she has never met (in Girl’s case) and reading her a letter that means so very little?
I decided to have a little ‘experiment’, I asked Girl what she thought some words meant, I told her there was no wrong answer just to tell me what she thought. I asked her what the word Sister or Brother meant and her answer after struggling for a little while was that she did not know. I asked her what she thought forever meant, she did not know. I asked her what she thought adopted meant and she said being born. We looked up the definition of Sister in the dictionary together
sis·ter
(ss
t
r)
n.1. A female having the same parents as another or one parent in common with another.
She said she did not really understand what that mean, I explained that she shared the same birth or tummy parents as her older sisters and that she shared the same adopted parents as her brother. I got a blank look in return and that’s probably my point, a lot of what we are telling our children is just words to them that they have no hope of understanding yet so why stress them out with it?
I have come to the conclusion that Girl is not capable of understanding the complexities or actually come to think of it the simple parts of adoption. She is interested when a letter comes and does ask questions, she has older siblings placed elsewhere that she seems to love though I guess it’s a very different relationship to siblings that would have been placed together. She has a lot of friends that were also adopted, we encouraged this to normalise adoption for her, so that she wasn’t ‘different’ but to Girl actually it’s just a word that she does not understand, something that she know’s she is but means nothing.
Would it be unethical to hold back letters from the birth parents until a time she could appreciate and undertsand them better? I definitely don’t want to hide stuff away but if she is too young to understand it why ‘worry’ her with it? Am I wrong to want to let my Girl enjoy an innocent childhood, one where she doesn’t have to think too much about her place in the world? To me her place in the world at the moment should be simple, we are her mummy and daddy and here is where she belongs. End of. No complicated interruptions thank you, let my Girl enjoy her childhood.
*Obviously I changed the names!
These Are The Days
I love this song by Jamie Cullum and particularly at the moment it seems to ring true because these really are the days.
These are the times of love and meaning
Ice of the heart melted away and found the light
These are the days of endless dreaming
Troubles of life are floating away like a bird in flight
Cheesy? Maybe, but we are about halfway through the school holidays and our days have been delightful, joyous even. Girl is relaxed and happy, she is not stressing about reading and writing or the politics of school friendship (you know what I mean, so and so doesn’t want to be my best friend anymore, so and so said I couldn’t go to her party, the boys wouldn’t let me play their game). Instead Girl has enjoyed her days playing with her cousins who are over from America for a few weeks and her brother, their friendship is unconditional.
Girl has coped with holidays, late nights, trips out, lack of routine, social workers, a visit to the paediatrician and has remarkably even spent some time playing on her own in her room. Girl has never liked playing in her room on her own, she needs to be close by to one of us; she has always struggled to create her own play and she has mostly needed some prompting on what to do or how to do it so for her to suddenly take herself off to her room for a few hours to play with toys is quite extraordinary and all this has come about since school finished for the summer.
On Sunday we went out for the day and Girl was walking in front of me with her Daddy, every now and again she would turn round and give me the biggest most genuine smile I have ever seen, enough to bring a happy tear to my eye.
These are the days to cherish and remember forever, the days to get us through the bad times with a lot of hope.
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