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.