October 2019 – I Can Haz Baby

Never, ever, even in your own HEAD, brag about the progress your difficult child has made because I guarantee it will entirely backslide – maybe even the same day you have the thought! And, October is a hard month at our house – an interesting thing about trauma is it can be seasonally triggered. This is something I’ve heard from a ton of providers and I don’t think anyone knows if it is the season ITSELF – like is there a specific trauma event that is triggered? Or, whether it is the CHANGE – either just the uncertainty of of change, or the moving towards indoors, darker longer nights, colder weather, a sort of instinctive knowledge that restarts the trauma cycle? We also are super curious if we moved to Australia would October be the hard month, or would it flip half a year? So much to consider!! Regardless, last October was a MESS and this October has been super hard too (but LESS super hard! Like… super super hard, but not SUPER HARD OMG).

BUT even so, or maybe because of, and with full knowledge of the backlash risks, I’m going to do some serious bragging about these kidlets for a bit!

First, I sort of buried the date and therefore the lead (for a variety reasons I don’t always post this blog in order of our lives) but, as many but not all know, WE HAVE ADOPTED! These kiddos are OURS FOREVER!! And, despite the endless hardness, and sometimes questions about whether I made the right choice for my emotional self and health, I am so so happy to be a forever family with these two amazing children!

X2 is .. . Basically perfect in every way. It’s really fascinating to have a control experiment of two full biological siblings with entirely different nurture – and here is what a securely attached child who has been loved and treasured every second of her little life looks like. She is sassy and silly and demanding and full of joy.

She loves learning – her vocabulary over the last month (at 26 months) is now nearly equal to what X3’s was when we got her at nearly 5 years old. Her comprehension of spoken language certainly exceeds X3’s understanding at 5, and often exceeds it now! She is SUPER FOCUSED on learning WORDS and a little about counting and definitely colors, and definitely NOT POTTY TRAINING. She throws age appropriate tantrums, and is entirely ridiculous and adorable when she gets mad about something. She loves to play, loves her mom and dada, loves her Roma and the kitties, loves to color, loves to name words, loves to run outside, to climb ladders, to play kitchen. She is scared of leaves falling off trees and sudden noises. She pretends to be scared of bugs, but is probably just being silly. She is brave and bold and loves to try new things and really wants to play hard with the big kids! She is ridiculously cute.

Perfect kiddos are still the worst (and the best!) I would give at least a toe in exchange for her just sleeping through the night already!! We remain, sadly, exhausted, but were able to address the nighttime fears and scared of the dark and she really is working hard at putting herself to sleep. She’s just always had us respond, and someday, someday, she will be old enough to just SLEEP AT NIGHT OMG SLEEP AT NIGHT! But since we did a reassurance cycle at bedtime (“time to sleep we will always come back” combined with coming back BEFORE she starts crying) bedtime, and middle of the night wake-ups have become SO MUCH MORE MANAGEABLE! We are so so lucky to have the chance to parent this amazing girl, who is no longer a tiny baby, and is now a big growing learning toddler.

Despite a hard October, and hard transition out of day treatment, and hard transition in to school, and just a rough couple months, I honestly cannot BELIEVE how far X3 has come, and how hard she is working, and how much she can verbalize.

She has learned SO MUCH! But her language reception/comprehension remains severely delayed. I’m honestly worried that she will never catch up in this area because she will never gain the neuro-linguistic pathways that a child that is nurtured, and spoken to, and read to, and feels safe, should usually develop during infancy/toddlerhood. And it’s so unfair that she will always have to work harder than other people because she was deprived of those basic human needs as an infant and child.

She also is still behaviorally challenged. She is great 90% of the time at school. But when she gets worried, all hell breaks loose, and if the adults don’t catch it immediately, it goes downhill fast with hitting, biting, running, taking off clothing, swearing, and rage-flipping tables. This is, for obvious reasons, pretty terrible in a school environment!

BUT, most of the time, MOST OF THE TIME, she is really great. In fact, it seems like on a day-to-day basis (outside of October) she is probably actually just about the same as raising a normal kid? She really wants to follow the rules, she wants to please, she wants to do things right, she wants to help and be involved!

Sometimes when we see other kids we actually start to wonder if we are actually just people with unreasonably high standards for children’s behavior – because many, many, other kids seem less socialized and less well-behaved than she is. (We were recently told that poor X3 went from a life of pure chaos to the most regimented marine boot-camp when she came to us. It’s probably true! They say consistency is gold for victim of trauma. (CONSISTENCY I CAN DO!))

Unless she is severely dysregulated, X3 is amazingly sweet and caring. She wants to play with other children, and will clearly state her desires and preferences, and attempt to negotiate play that will make everyone happy. If a kid is hurt or upset, she will do everything she can to help. She will share toys, and invite kids to play with her. If she sees someone on the street asking for money, she wants to give them whatever she has or at least some food. My neighbor across the alley is an older black man from the south; he collects junk, and speaks with a nearly incomprehensible accent and cadence. He gets so happy when he sees the girls, and he likes to give them a dollar! I don’t love people giving my kids presents, I hate that people without much money are giving my kids money, but he loves it, and I want them to have positive interactions with adults of color living in our neighborhood, and I can’t see any reason to tell him to stop. And, she just wants to give those dollars to the people on the street any way, so it’s a general win!

She loves her teacher at school, loves gym, loves music, loves loves loves to dance and sing. She will make a song about ANYTHING, and I think it’s a sign of comfort and trust that she sings non-stop (even when she’s angry!). We had teacher conferences and she is last on every metric of learning for math, science, reading, comprehension. Her teachers gave all this direction about how to be teaching her at home, and I kind of lost my mind and freaked out because she DOES NOT LEARN, and then I was specifically instructed by her therapist TO JUST STOP TEACHING – her brain cannot learn yet, she is still too “in the trauma” and cannot absorb or listen. We need to make life and school safe and non-traumatic, get through this month, and maybe this year, and stay calm and safe. With that direction, a big stress that I didn’t even know I was carrying was lifted. I just feel like it’s my responsibility to make sure this one child has EVERY OPPORTUNITY TO LEARN AND BE A SUCCESS and you do that BY LEARNING EVERYTHING AND BEING GOOD AT SCHOOL. But, releasing that pressure, has made it a lot easier for me to just… be sad, but not angry and not try to FIX IT, and I’m sure has made our home life less stressful for X3 right now.

For about 10 weeks before October hit, X3 was actually sleeping through the night. Since October started, we are having the night terrors again, but it has been SO MUCH EASIER to get up and handle them, with the knowledge they are NOT going to go on forever, and with the fact that some set routines seem to be working. She hates the coping routines, and screams the whole time (because she is exhausted and wants to be asleep!), but as long as it is me, she does the work (need to get present in her body, oriented to place, and able to use words and recognize common objects – if she doens’t get all the way back, she is up again over and over all night). Unfortunately, she is less willing to accept that and do that work with my partner, and will just scream endlessly until I come down and do it. This remains frustrating and unfair to everyone! But also, I guess some signs of ongoing attachment work. And, poor X3 herself is so aware and dialed into how this is hard…during the day she says “I’m just so tired all the time! Why can’t I sleep at night now??”. And even at night she’ll say “I’m just so scared someone is going to come and the adults won’t keep me safe. But I used to be able to sleep. I want to sleep!!” It’s kind of magical to hear this out of a trauma-six-year-old’s mouth! And it truly makes it easier to stay calm and sweet and connected during these times, despite the exhaustion of night-time screaming.

Her emotional conversation and knowledge is so advanced for her age (her self-control and needs, so far below her appropriate age…)! As we were leading up to adoption, we talked tons about her past and what adoption means. She asked questions like “why is my brother living somewhere else and not being adopted with us?” And, “why did my first family hit and yell and use unfriendly words?” During a long conversation about these issues, on her own she said “so, in my first family, the adults didn’t know that it’s not ok to hit and hurt other people and couldn’t keep kids safe. So I didn’t learn that either, and I thought it was ok to hit and hurt my brother and other people?” WOAH!

She was SO HAPPY about the adoption and the judge let her speak, and she got to say she wanted her new name and for us to be a family together forever. I cried, the GAL cried, X3 cried.

(Waiting for court for adoption)

She is brave and UP FOR IT!! She learned to swim, mostly, this summer, and in one afternoon, learned to go off a diving board WITHOUT floaties and just wanted to leap and leap and leap!

She loves going out on our paddle boards, she likes to go for walks in the woods, she likes to help with chores. We are starting gymnastics next week, and then hopefully hip hop dance class, and then hopefully breakdancing class! She would KILL as a B-girl and I think the focus and practiced physical repetition would be SO GOOD for her!

We really need a break from our kids. Our marriage has suffered hugely from the fact that all emotion and work and time and maintenance goes into supporting X3. We are exhausted and overwhelmed. We have some sadness and resentments that we have never had a chance to just be HAPPY and joyous about X2 or X3 because every day is so much and such a battle with ourselves and the past. But we also desperately need to focus on and celebrate how much love and growth we have had. We aren’t those people who gush about our amazing lives, neither of us is a perfect and always supportive partner, we both get snappy and frustrated, and I’ll never be an earth-mother-goddes-fulfilled entirely by the act of mothering. But we ARE a family, and a fucking amazing one.

I haven’t been updating because I am just so stuck and so sad that I am so stuck and so unable to convey how hard it is to just.be.stuck.

Things are WAY BETTER in a lot of ways. X3 regularly sleeps through the night! She is not getting kicked out of school – as far as we know she has not yet hit, kicked, bitten, sworn, run out the door, taken off her pants, or rage-flipped a table this school year! (ALL things that definitely happened within the last two months at her last school).

BUT FUCK I am exhausted living in a house full of constant trauma. My brain is able to be compassionate, but my emotions are just angry and frustrated and miserable. We have had X3 for 17 months; she has now lived in our house longer than she lived any continuous stretch in any other one physical house. In another 17 months she will have lived with us longer than she has lived with any other caregivers. Hopefully, that will be an emotional milestone even if it isn’t a conscious milestone.

But in the meantime, the endless, ongoing meantime, it is just so exhausting and demoralizing and hope-killing to live with other people’s constant trauma. My partner has his own long history of intense trauma and he’s been working hard on it – but has had a lot of regressions due to being constantly triggered by a small walking emotional sink/bomb. And X3’s “doing way better” is still a constant constant level of need, and RAGE, and sadness, and low self-esteem. The thing about c-ptsd is that the trauma-behaviors can be identified, and managed, but they just keep happening forever. I love laughing at shows and movies about trauma – it’s always a big THING, and scary and hard, and then NAMED as THE PROBLEM and then GET HELP, and then things are BETTER!! And once they GET HELP it is a tidy linear process that allows everyone to love each other and connect emotionally and grow together and be a team against the past and the pain. That’s… wildly not accurate and not our experience!

It is emotionally draining to give constantly with no end in sight. Most of the time, and certainly with other adults with whom she is not comfortable testing limits, X3’s behavior is actually exemplary – she knows how to follow rules and care about doing so more than other children. She is emotionally aware and able to coherently name the issues causing escalation. She has better self-awareness and better vocabulary to describe her emotions than many adults.

But people who happily would take X2 for an afternoon, an overnight, even a whole weekend, worry and say they don’t feel comfortable taking X3 because when something happens (even though it’s more of an “if” these days) they don’t feel comfortable handling it – even with detailed and clear plans to do so. It’s hard to find just a babysitter I could pay for the occasional night off, because we would need to pay for like…7 visits WITH the family before we could comfortably leave X3 and feel like she is even remotely capable of weathering the experience – and we have promised her we will never leave her with someone she doesn’t know. My family and close friends are already overtaxed with the things we NEED, child care for therapy, IEP meetings, work, etc.

And, when we did go away for a weekend, relying on the immense and overwhelming generosity of friends to keep the girls, X3 definitely did just fall apart by the end – with rage and sadness and fear of abandonment. The first day of school, after more than a week of talking about every second of school, visiting the school over and over, practicing walking the halls and going through the lunch line, she asked “so, when I go to school, I’ll just live there forever?” ARGGHHH!! OF COURSE NOT, and also, OF COURSE she thinks that, despite all reassurance to the contrary. It feels impossible to ever move forward, impossible to ever get enough of a break to refresh enough to be able to wholly love her or each other. I could sleep for a year, and I think I would still want a nap. I’m pretty sure Sleeping Beauty is actually slash fiction for parents cleverly disguised as a cautionary tale against exclusionary parties.

I am caught in exactly my greatest fear about choosing to parent – watching the world go by and thinking of everything I will never do that I miss, and that fed my soul, the motorcycle trips we can’t take, the international exploration we won’t be doing, the gunner/best employee awards I won’t be winning, the volunteer work I will never do. And, resenting the trade I’ve made, not because parenting is actually a bad trade, but because the specific hard path I’ve chosen to walk is trauma on top of pain on top of rage and there is maybe 1 moment per month when I think “this is nice. This is some of what I hoped for when I decided to have children”.

(Example desired moment!)

Unlike other parents, I don’t see rosy futures through my children’s eyes – I fear the choices my child is going to make because she seeks domineering, bullying, associations instead of healthy loving attachments. I don’t experience the joy of watching and sharing learning and exploration – X3 doesn’t listen, doesn’t love to learn, looks for the negative, or dangerous, or mean, in every single situation, idolizes villains, deliberately seeks the thrill of being scared followed by resulting nightmares. I don’t overhear funny imaginative play seeking answers in the world, I hear hours and hours of violent, intense, trauma-family play. And not one of these things is her FAULT; and, they are heartbreaking individually and in the collective. And so, it is embarrassing to be so miserable to experience this with her, and it is frustrating and embarrassing that I cannot seem to just “be an adult” and be happy and content with what it is. And I’m so entirely miserable and there is nothing I can do or control to fix it – we have and are doing every single thing right, the right care, the right therapy, the right sleep patterns, the right medications, the right removing of medications, a healthy diet, supportive language, increased attention, physical affection, reading out loud, FUCKING EVERYTHING I SWEAR.

But this is just what this life is for as long as it takes…and that’s maybe harder than the prior intense behaviors (ok, it’s actually not, it just still sucks!) because there is no linear progression to understand and control. We can train behaviors, we can model behaviors, we can outline a scaffolding of how to learn self-control, but we cannot mandate healing. We can’t directly repair brain pathways permanently altered by a history of abuse and neglect. All we can do is wait and wait and wait for time and security to heal and hopefully create new pathways, some day, and allow a new person, one we haven’t even met yet, I hope, to emerge.

(Literally, as I was writing this, I had to stop and have the following conversation:

Me: What is happening?

X3: Ummm

Me: You just screamed, hit the phone, threw it, and then threw your body around yelling…what game are you playing?

X3: I’m playing a game where I am calling a really mean person and that person is yelling at me, and I’m mad.

OVERALL THIS IS A WIN – because the game USED TO BE screaming obscenities into the phone, because that’s what she was used to in her family of origin. BUT CAN WE HAVE ONE GAME THAT IS NOT SCREAMING AND BEING MAD? PLEASE??)

Parenting is hard for almost everyone – I was always afraid I would not be good at it and that I would not enjoy it. I love my kids. But right now, I truly do not love our life. And, after almost four years off my anti-depressants, I am looking to go back on them, not because of any physiological reason, but because of the everyday grind of barely surviving in a house full of trauma.