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.
Trauma and Loss
Trauma and Loss. Two words that go hand in hand with adoption and at the moment are a very real and current issue for us.
Girl’s grandad sadly passed away this weekend and we were faced with the question ‘how do we handle this?’ It’s a difficult enough subject for a child at any time but for one who can be volatile when anxious getting it wrong can really be traumatic for the whole family.
I have to add that this weekend Girl had already been feeling some anxieties about separation. I had been out for a long girly lunch for a birthday and also out with the hubster and some friends who we had not seen for a long time the night before. This rarely happens and Girl really did not deal with it very well and we ended up with a few bruises and scratches to show for it. Yesterday Girl was still not herself, like she was on the edge of flaring up again so to receive the phone call about grandad’s passing at this time left us in a bit of a quandary.
It was one of those times I really needed some advice so I called upon my army of friends who have also adopted and the advice was varied. My gut instinct was to wait until today to tell her, keep Girl from school for some nurturing and cotton wool treatment and send Boy to the grandparents so she could have some one to one attention. My best friend agreed this was a good idea. However, opinion between friends was divided. A child of six does not understand completely the implications of death, it can be confusing and some felt that breaking the routine for a child that thrives on routine might be even more confusing for her. That carrying on as normal as possible would be of far more benefit to her, to be there if and when I was needed.
In the end Boy went to bed early, exhausted from a few hours at soft play so we took the opportunity to tell Girl the sad news. I had hoped not to tell her so late in the evening so that she did not lie in bed worrying about it but it seemed a calm time and would not have too much impact on the day ahead, we could then judge her behaviour in the morning and decide what our next move would be.
This morning Girl was a little defiant but after a weekend of manic, silly and difficult behaviour perhaps not particularly much more than would be usual. We sent her to school and had a word with the teacher. Time will tell how she is feeling about things. She told me she was sad about her grandad, she also told me how much she missed Mary her old lady friend who passed away last year. She asked me for a photo of grandad for her wall pockets and expressed her concern for grandad’s lady friend, worried that she would be lonely. So really allt hings considered some good reactions, recognising her emotions and showing compassion for another. I told her I was sad about grandad too that he was a good man and that I liked him a lot, which I really did.
If you are dealing with beavement and there is a young child involved I took some good advice from this website:
Winston’s Wish
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!
Time For a New Strategy
Every now and again strategies for coping with behaviour that have worked for a while cease to have any effect and we are reaching that point in time. Our PASW has been on annual leave for a while (how do social workers get so much leave?) and has been unavailable to talk to and honestly? It’s been a difficult few weeks, hence the lack of posts, in fact I have started to write a few but struggled to put my thougts into words. We have had a number of meltdowns with many different reasons. I can only say that this is a difficult time of year, excitement over impending holidys, anxiety over saying goodbye to loved teachers, facing new challenges, new teachers, new environments, everything that really we should be avoiding. Girl’s head must be in turmoil.
Tonight we announced to Girl that she would not be attending her last day of school tomorrow and immediately it was like a weight was lifted from her shoulders. We witnessed Girl play nicely with toys, she was calm and considered, she listened and took on board suggestions about the game she was playing with her teddies and cars. This is unusual behaviour to say the least. It may have helped that Boy went to bed early because he is under the weather but she played so pleasantly that we gave her an extra hour before sending her to bed. It was lovely, a rare moment to be relished but definitely something so set the cogs whirring after such a difficult few weeks.
A Can Of Worms…
I have struggled to write this post, I am worried about writing a blog post stemming from somebody else’s unfortunate circumstances but it does have quite an impact on our lives and is part of Girl’s ongoing story so cannot be ignored. When we adopted Girl we did so with the understanding that she would have direct contact with her adopted sisters and one of her grandparents. The contact with her sisters was not an issue as they had no relationship with the birth family but we would all share the direct contact with the grandparent.
I was understandably more apprehensive about the latter contact, I was mistrustful of the situation, I felt as though my daughter’s security would be in the grandparent’s hands every time we met. However, our social worker assured us that the grandad had the best of intentions and would do nothing to sacrifice the little time he had to spend with his grandchildren, he knew that any failure on his part would result in contact being halted permanently and over the few years that Girl has been living with us contact has gone very well, in fact so well we are comfortable enough for him to know where we live.
When we first started contact we knew that a time would come when things would be a little more difficult, that granddad had a debilitating disease although it was in remission at the time. Last weekend was contact day and sadly the news was broken to us that grandad has been diagnosed with cancer and from the little information available so far the prognosis does not sound good. I can’t tell begin to tell you how sad I am, I have a massive amount of respect for this man and have grown quite fond of him over the few years we have known him.
I have not told Girl yet that her grandad is poorly. The announcement has opened up a whole can of worms before we even start to think about the sad situation of life and death and not for the first time this year.
We know that the contact guidelines are going to have to go out of the window but frustratingly it is at a time when Girl is not coping with contact very well. I am certain in the future she will appreciate any increased contact that we might have now but what about the immediate future? Can she actually cope with it? What about her getting used to seeing granddad a little more and then suddenly not at all?
Then of course we would like to support granddad any way we can but just don’t know how because of Girl’s security. We probably won’t be able to visit granddad in hospital or attend the funeral, which just seems wrong somehow. What happens if and when granddad passes? Will the birth parent become aware of the contact between us?
A million more questions seem to have risen to the surface and I am mixed between sadness for granddad, guilt that we can’t be of more help and also guilt that I am having all these thoughts about how its going to impact Girl, it’s quite a strange and awful situation to be in for all parties involved.
Am I a Neurotic Mummy?
I have a headache. Not a headache in the normal sense of the word but a headache from going round in circles thinking am I neurotic mummy? Am I one of those moms who constantly thinks that if their child isn’t perfect there must be something wrong with her? If I hadn’t been given so much information would I just think my daughter was a bit naughty and wilful? What would happen if I parented in a normal style, relaxed and stuck with it? Is my daughter’s behaviour worse than other children’s behaviour? How much of this behaviour is down to genetics?
Today the headache is worse than normal, I confided in a neighbour about our problems and she asked me if I was over-thinking things, that she had similar problems when her kids were younger and that she suffered Post-Natal Depression, it was like a body blow. I am confused and my brain is tired with self-doubt.
All I can think that makes me feel any easier about all these self-doubts is that there is a big difference between our children. My children have been through the most traumatic thing that could happen to any child, twice. The loss of a mother at birth followed by the loss of primary caregivers, not forgetting that girl was so developmentally delayed that they even considered Cerebral Palsy.
I know if I lost a close member of my family it would take me a long time to grieve, I would probably get mad or sad. How can I expect my children to just accept their losses without some ugly behaviours rearing their head?
So if being a neurotic mum means that my kids are treated with, well…kid gloves, does it matter? Call me what you want, I’m just a mum who cares.
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