Month: August 2018

And then some big progress was made!

Literally, every day since I wrote that last post, X3 has made such enormous progress! I attribute it in part to the brilliance of her day treatment program which wrote her a book titled “X3’s Story”.  It chronicles, in a very simple, and not blaming way, her life:  How when she was a baby, she lived with adults that called her (her real name); when she lived with these adults she was often scared that she would not have food, or a place to live, or that adults would hurt her.  Then she lived in a lot of different houses. Then she lived in a house with a lot of kids – that made her worried that she would not have enough food or toys.  But now she lives with us.  We take care of her in (variety of ways).  She still gets worried that these adults will not take care of her and will not giver her enough food, or clothes, or toys, or might hurt her. But these adults are good at the adult job of keeping kids safe.  They will keep her safe.

Seems pretty simple right? SHE LOVES TO READ THIS STORY.  We read it OVER AND OVER AND OVER. And it’s like the tension melts out of her.  I am sure it won’t work forever, but right now, this story is giving her the exact magical reassurance she needs, over, and over, and over.  Before this book, she liked to hear the story of how our dog came to live with us – that before us she lived where people hurt her and broke her tail when she was just tiny.  But we wanted a dog so much, and had so much love to give a dog, we went out and found Roma to come be our dogger forever and we take good care of her.  She TOTALLY got this allegory and, if you hang out with her a while, she will tell YOU the story of Roma too!

Since “the book” she has been really practicing being a kid in sort of hilarious ways.  My…difficult…FIL was over recently and she followed him around the house saying things like “in this house, we put the toilet seat DOWN after we use the bathroom”; or, “we don’t yell at Roma, she is a GOOD dog”.

My amazing beyond belief sister took the kids for their first overnight – AND IT WENT PERFECTLY! She had a hard time saying good bye, and I doubt my sister got any sleep (neither did I when my niece and nephew slept over at my house!), but EVERYONE SURVIVED, pretty much as well as can be expected for even a normal five year old and an 11 month old having their first ever sleepover.  And she was not overly activated when I picked her up – a little more need for reassurance, but not significantly more.  AND my partner and I were able to celebrate our five year wedding anniversary by really partying like adults – i.e. going out, but still being home and (for me) fast asleep by 9:55 p.m. ROCK STARS!

She is also practicing having OPINIONS.  We went shopping on Saturday, which she usually LOVES… and every clothing item I held out to her, which she would usually love, she said “I hate that!”.  So we didn’t buy any for her!  But usually she looks at me to see what I think about everything and then parrots it, so even though this will likely get old pretty doggone fast, it’s lovely seeing that she is feeling safe to test boundaries by hating everything!  On the way to school yesterday I kept asking her questions and she said “I don’t want to talk about stuff every day”.  And, when I switched topics, said, “I SAID I don’t want to TALK, OKAY?”  And so we sat in silence ALL THE WAY TO SCHOOL….today, she chattered the whole way and noted “before, I didn’t want to talk, but now I DO want to talk, so let’s talk about some more things, ok?!”

Because we had already had almost 48 normal hours in a row, and I’m not travelling or having any crazy plans for the next week, we also finally made the move (with medical and therapeutic support) to take her off her psychiatric medication.  She was put on it to control behavioral outbursts, ADHD, and to get her to sleep at night.  And it has honestly been such a relief to KNOW that she will go to sleep at EXACTLY X time every night, and it was hard to give that up for the unsurety of “will she sleep again?”.  BUT – at her old home even with her medications she never slept – so we know she can fight through it if she is anxious enough.  And she reacted really badly we accidentally gave her an extra dose one day – so we know it is disorienting in some way.  And we don’t fully believe in the ADHD/ODD/etc diagnoses, we think she is likely trauma and anxiety induced chaos – but we cannot know unless we get her back to baseline and see who she IS in a safe, supportive, and therapeutic environment.

So far, we are actually HUGELY pleased with her progress.  Going to sleep has been a little less like turning a switch – she used to fall asleep while we read the second story, now she is awake through both, then turn off the light time, and then she goes to sleep with us laying with her in about 10-15 minutes.  Not bad, really.  She is waking up probably more at night right now – but more importantly, she is JUST waking up, checking we are there, and going back to sleep (she has had one multi-hour marathon awake session, but at least no crying). Not waking up screaming, or weeping inconsolably.  We suspect that when she woke up on her medication she was super disoriented, so everything was terrifying and inconsolable.  This means she can now start to LEARN how to go to sleep.  WHICH MEANS SOME DAY WE WILL NOT HAVE TO SLEEP WITH HER!

I’m not trying to oversell it her – she is intense, and demanding, and needy, and delayed, and scared, and difficult, and exhausting, and adorable, and smart, and sassy, and often full of it.  But it’s important to chronicle the moments where she is also just a kid. My kid!

When I was creating this blog I vaccillated between the names “icanhazbaby” and “bloodfromastone”.  I can be a little overwrought and maybe wasn’t in the best place? Luckily I chose the lighter-hearted name, because the content is serious as a heart attack (which I often think I might be having, but instead is just endless stress that leads to pressure bands around my chest!). I sure don’t describe much that is cheery…but really, there is nothing particularly cheery about adopting a child through foster care – before that can even be possible, it means shit has gone WRONG, and gone wrong in a way that has seriously hurt children.  There are no children in this system that have not been hurt.  The VERY LUCKIEST are ones like Baby X1, who was taken for her protection, was lovingly cared for, and went home relatively quickly (about three months) after parents got everything fixed up.  Or, like Baby X2, who came straight to us from the hospital, so she did not experience the direct abuse, neglect, and trauma that her older siblings did (except in the womb, which it turns out is a thing!).  But she will still have emotional scars when she grows – the need to know WHY and HOW she came to be here, displacement from growing up black with white parents, and possibly some guilt that she doesn’t bear the scars her sister does.

X3 on the other hand is a classic case of everything being as fucked up as it can be – and how hard it is to be a good person and to fight through love as a verb in the hopes of arriving at love as a noun. The months since we transitioned her to our home have been the most challenging, heart-wrenching, overwhelming, exhausting, and doubt-inducing, time of my entire life.  There is nothing I have ever done that has as severe and profound a consequence on another life; and nothing I have ever done that has so permanently changed my own life for, in the immediate, the worse. And if those aren’t facts to make you doubt yourself and all your life choices I am not sure what are!

Every day is just…exhausting.  Because X3 is exhausting.  I was so amused when a friend said, after an afternoon backing up my partner, “I’m really not sure how you do this everday.  It’s just…so much.”  It really is.  And truly, my partner is the hero, because he does it EVERY DAY while I actually work A LOT, which creates a different level of chaos right now.

Every day with X3 is “fake it till you make it”.  None of what is happening is her FAULT but it is … just kind of awful to be living with all the time. Like, for example, her constant, unending, need to touch me.  Not a little. Like, have legs and arms wrapped around me, sometimes writhing, often panting, and, sometimes, licking or sucking on my skin… which seriously squicks me out.  Luckily, she is not as weirdly physical with my partner, who I think would run screaming from the room.  She just really, truly, entirely, has attachment terror, particularly with moms – she wants to be same/same with me every second on everything (dealing with the fact that we do not have the same skin and she did not grow in my tummy are already, somewhat early, being addressed very very frequently).

We are pretty sure that she was just left alone, starting at a very, very, young age.  And she has had 6 moves in foster care, aside from the instability of her original life.  It makes SENSE.  It’s just…way way too much.

Or recently, finally, realizing fully what we already knew, that poor babyX3 has an average 2.5-3 year old vocabulary; and that’s a BIG DIFFERENCE at that age…  She is not giving you that blank sullen look because she is, again, displaying ODD, ADHD, some form of dissociation, she actually has no fucking idea what you are saying. Words that only in the last week we have identified she does NOT understand include, light switch, home, uh oh, winter (any season, actually), creature, forward, turn, tomorrow, colors, and about a billion more.  I am pretty sure she wanders through life in a fog of having no idea what anyone is saying, like being in foreign country, hearing a word here and there that she knows, and trying to guess? ignore? the rest.  And the most frustrating thing, that she really cannot start learning, not intensively.  Presumably, simply being in our home she is learning (for example she now, at very appropriate times, says variations on, “woah, everyone, there’s a lot going on here, let’s all calm down” – surely a phrase I have uttered about 8 times a day for the last four months…).

But she cannot learn, not truly, because she has complete trauma brain – any attempt to push on anything causes freeze and dissociation.  I’ve been trying to encourage speaking and sharing experience and understanding – so, the other morning, we talked about things we like, i.e. I say “I like playing outside, and reading books, and so on” and then say, “What are some things you like?” to her…NOPE! Complete meltdown… after 20 minutes of my partner and I going back and forth…she GETS IT, starts whispering things she likes, and then chattering non-stop, and can’t be stopped! But, like…the whole experience of getting there. The same is true with school, where it literally took 8 weeks before she could remember her teacher’s name… And, it’s all because she is scared.  Every second.  Of every day.  And I know it is only time that can heal it, but it is so so hard being in this stuck position.

In fact, today, she broke the button off her dress.  She was scared about it and crawled into a corner, and was hiding in the corner when I walked in the house after work.  Just before I walked in, she had asked my partner if I was going to hurt her. FOR A FUCKING BUTTON!  When I walked in and said, “I would never hurt you, or hit you, or even be mad that you hurt a piece of clothing – we always have more clothes in this house” she just collapsed screaming and crying.  And this is the EASY part! This I get, while still not ever being able to actually “get it”.

The other parts, the tantrums, the fighting, the need, the jealousy, the not-sleeping, the not-eating or binge-eating, the never-stopping-moving-for-even-5-minutes, the having to be treated as a baby, the demanding to do every single thing the baby does, the itching, the hoarding, all of this is the fake-it-till-you-mean it affirmative decision to parent.  In theory, some day, we will feel love, instead of 10,000 forms of panic, resentment, sadness, pity, hope, hopelessness, and every other exhausting emotion that is just not the love you want to be exuding for your kid.

There are plenty of things that are good, they are just so…mild, or mixed in with the chaos, that it is hard to be focused on them – especially, when truthfully, we are resentful of the time she takes – we haven’t slept in the same bed in more than 3 months, we never see each other alone, we rarely speak of anything except her and how to help her, survive her, manager, her;, and, especially of the way that X2 is getting less attention than she truly deserves or than WE want to spend giving her.  But, I am killing it at this hair game! We go for long walks, her on her bike and me pushing the stroller.  During these walks (unless she turns into a nightmare and we have to go home) she is the most kid-like I have ever seen her.  We stop and look at bugs, and flowers, and sticks, and helicopter seeds, and smell things, and find beautiful stone treasures.

She has moments where she laughs, and it is not the nails-on-chalkboard fake horrible sound she made when we first starting spending time with her.  Sometimes she dances, and sings, and makes up stories that do not have violence in them.  She has been learning to swim, and she LOVED going out on a paddle board (“the tippy little boat”) and jumping into the water!

She loves to help. She is brave, and strong, and fast.

When she is calm and in control of her body, she wants to please; but when she is not, she is more than the standard child as tyrant.  She is, in effect on our lives, that abusive partner you once dated – demanding 100% of everything you have, giving little, controlling every moment, and doing it mostly because she is the victim of abuse and that’s the only way she knows to interact.  But, she’s only five.  So it’s our job – that we took on voluntarily –  to somehow get her through this so she can become something more than her past, more than her trauma, more than the shell that she reverts to in bad moments.

My baby is almost 1!

I’m totally stoked and also having kind of a hard time with it.  I’m so excited and delighted by her every day.  But she’s almost not a baby any more.  She is too big for me to easily hold on my bad shoulder.  She crawls super fast and knows the word “uh oh” (throw pacifier, say “uh oh”, repeat for endless good times!). She can stand for 20-30 seconds unaided.  She waves “bye bye”, blows kisses, and throws her arms up for “so big”.  She has two bottom teeth, and is growing four upper teeth at once. She loves all food – even sour kraut which I handed to her as a joke two days ago.  She mostly cries if the food is done or the book is done – although she is becoming much more opinionated, and more likely to fuss, cry, and throw herself backwards if she doesn’t get to do what she wants – and she wants more and more exploration and freedom every day.  As always, you are missing out horribly by not being able to see pictures of how doggone ADORABLE she is.

I think it’s normal to feel pangs as the baby gets bigger…especially when this is (almost certainly) going to be your ONLY baby.  I also have a big girl, and she is mine but she was never my BABY.  And I still have some FOMOS for not growing a baby.  And I didn’t get a maternity leave, and I work so so so so much, and when I am at home my big girl demands 110% of my attention, and is super jealous of any time I spend with the baby.  The baby is great, fine, thriving, growing, securely attached, chattering, babbling, and essentially fantastic.  But I missed so much already, and I never got to spend the time to get bored with the baby, to be over it, to be READY to go back to work and have adult conversation and to really love my time away from the baby.

Not that everything was easy with baby-time, DO NOT WORRY, I have NOT FORGOTTEN!  A friend just had a new baby and I had the simultaneous THRILL OF JOY and SHIVER OF SADNESS/JEALOUSY as I thought of that new baby… and then I also thought… wait, wait, wait, I GET TO SLEEP ALL NIGHT TONIGHT!  Yes, miracle of miracles, at just about 9.5/10 months, BABY FINALLY STARTED SLEEPING IN HER OWN CRIB WITHOUT BEING HELD BY AN ADULT AT NIGHT! The relief.  The serious, fucking, relief you gulls, I can barely describe it.  I admit that I had an actual moment of hesitation about whether I would want another baby, because while I am constantly EXHAUSTED from stress, and emotional need, and chaos, I am actually NOT tired/sleep deprived every second of every day the way we were just a few short months ago.

Baby will even, (most times), sleep in her pack and play when we travel now!  (Truly, there is no way we could handle another baby, but that’s because big girl X3 is 7,000 screaming monkeys worth of constant need, not because we wouldn’t want another).

We are now debating the 1 year old birthday party.  Babies do not care about their birthdays – but WE care that we have survived ONE WHOLE YEAR! But we also are not even through the appeal process, and impressively, in the five months since parental rights were terminated the State adoption worker has started…as far as we can tell…NOTHING! We know the date for the appeal decision (look for update in November, friends!) and the court hilariously said that adoption could be “just a couple weeks after the appeal”…yeah right.  The timelines we are hearing, and which seem to be true for us, look more like a year or so after TPR – so, we are hoping to adopt early next year.  This is literally one of the fastest foster to adopt stories I have ever heard… and that is still going to be 1.5 years.  So there is something hard about holding a birthday party for a kid that STILL is not ours – but don’t worry, she IS ours.  If they tried to take her now (other than to return her to parents) I would have legal standing to intervene and argue our case and I have no doubt I would prevail.  And, I have no fears of them being returned to their parents – I finally went and pulled all the court documents, and I now know the general history and, yeah, these kids can never, ever, go back there.  Knowing only the little amounts I actually KNOW I cannot believe there was ever any question about it.

I was never a “baby person” – although more baby than kid, because warm sleeping squishy cuddly things are always easier than energy-sucking-perpetual-motion-machines.  But we ALL wondered and worried how I’d take to having a baby.  Pretty freaking great, actually! And, I’m just a little maudlin that this time I wanted so desperately, and only got to half-experience, is already coming to a close.

This baby though. This baby.