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.