Little has changed since my last post and I remain exhausted and hopeless. Last night I laid in bed, crying, (and then texted with friends, crying, and cuddled with my partner, crying – DO NOT LIMIT YOUR CRYING LOCATIONS, PEOPLE, BE READY TO UTILIZE ALL OPTIONS) because it keeps being so hard and I cannot think of any changes or solutions that I can implement right now and I hate myself and my life so much.
The end of December did bring a wonderful change for the better and X3 stopped the CONSTANT dissociation/screaming, again, just like a switch, one day it just stopped happening. Truly, children’s bodies remember trauma, and she has huge seasonal escalations that seem to end abruptly without any change or action by us. Which is SUCH A RELIEF.
But, after a couple days of much calmer, we are back to super elevated and really difficult defiant (just WILL NOT whatever the need or direction is, whiny, arguing about EVERYTHING) followed by escalation and eventually screaming intense situations.
I recently read a bunch of articles about how parents speak to and in front of children, and not making corrections unnecessarily, and using positive tones not sarcastic or snippy, and I vowed to change my interactions with both my children and my partner and to really endorse positivity. I made it almost 72 hours! Then, two evenings in a row I just ABSOLUTELY LOST IT, and honestly, I think that trying so hard to be positive made me WORSE when I finally lost it because I was so exhausted by relentlessly being positive while people yelled at me, sniped at me, stomped at or near me, threw things, fought with each other, argued with every single statement, and by the time we got to escalation I had nothing left to stay calm with.
I think so often that I am just entirely the wrong person for this job; but also, THERE WAS NO ONE ELSE, and my little one is doing SO WELL, happy, well adjusted, loving, growing, learning. I just do not know how to manage the emotional hell of “it will be like this forever and nothing you are doing is helping and you will just be miserable forever, NO CONTROL TO YOU!”. Day after day, there is no change, and it feels hopeless.
So, rather than detail HOW it stays hard so hard so so so so hard, I am going to describe the ways things are dramatically different now than they were approximately 30 months ago.
I can leave the room! For the first five months, if I left the room, X3 would throw her body against the door and scream non-stop. Now, she definitely trails me non-stop, including into the bathroom still. But usually if she is with the rest of the family, I can go to my room and close the door for a few minutes and she does not throw herself against the door screaming.
X3 can say the alphabet, count to 100, and 95% READ! At five, she could not count to five, say the alphabet, recognize any letters, and had a vocabulary of only a couple hundred words (for reference, 3 year olds usually have a vocabulary of about 200 words – X2 definitely has more than that – but a five year old usually has a vocabulary of approximately 10,000 words), Now, while she remains below average grade level, she is improving so much that her school claims she doesn’t qualify for speech and language special education services anymore! (FYI, this is in DIRECT OPPOSITION to her recent neurological evaluation, and more specifically TOTAL BULLSHIT, you do not get a kid to “at the bare minimum with maximum support” AND THEN REMOVE THE SUPPORT! Do not worry friends, I took care of this attempt to remove these services.)
Weekends together have more hours of pleasure and calm family time than difficult times. When X3 came, we rarely made it to 10 am inside the house on a Sat or Sun. Her escalation and chaos was SO SEVERE that we literally were out by 9:30 a.m. to the science museum, the park, a friend’s house, etc. We would come home for lunch, then go somewhere for the afternoon. The longer we were home, the higher she escalated and Sunday afternoons just about killed us. Now, like MOST families, our kids mostly exist with us at home. She can play with toys. She can move around more than five feet from me sometimes. She is an honest pleasure to play games with, and wants to learn enough to be able to play more age appropriate and then adult games. She can go in the basement play room (if her sister will go too) without an adult for minute at a time!
She loves hair washing day and getting her hair braided. She’s always sort of liked getting her hair done except for being impatient with the time it takes, but she absolutely HATED hair washing. It used to be a huge awful ordeal. And, once, she put her head back so her hair was under water and looked at me and said “are you going to drown me now?” in this really calm voice, and it was one of the creepiest, most horror movie moments of my life. Now, showers are highly desired special mom-time and the girls fight over their turn, so there you go!
She rarely breaks big things! At her last (truly fucking awful) foster care before us, X3 broke the ceiling fan, the door to her room 3 times, and various other things. When she came to us, she would tear every single item of clothing out of the drawers and closet, everything off the shelves, stand on her table and throw anything she could get her hands on. She would throw her body against the door, and if really in a bad place, bang her head against the wall. She pulled her own hair. These days, she mostly throws her own body against the ground, and kicks the wall and the bed – but has not broken either! She has recently started throwing her body against doors again, but has not broken any! She throws pillows and stuffies, but they do not break! She did have an episode of banging her head against the wall in May 2020, but that was related to pandemic chaos and she was able to stop that behavior pretty quickly.
She doesn’t swear! The first time she stood up in the bath and called me a bitch, I was like…oh… this is not that awesome. I know when she came into foster care at 3, her favorite “play” was “phone” and the (now adoptive parents to her older brother) first foster parents report that all the “conversations” they overheard which were along the lines of “these motherfuckers can’t say shit fuck off bitch” as to various subjects. At day treatment one day when triggered, she put up her fist to punch her therapist and said “get the fuck away from me you fucking bitch” (in a tough adult voice). These days, she doesn’t swear at all! And she HATES IT when others use “unfriendly words” it’s a triggering sound to her instead of something that naturally comes out of her mouth when angry or sad.
She never takes off her clothes at school or hurts others! Her entire kindergarten year, so through age 6 she would hit people with her water bottle, spit, take off her pants, try to run out the door, rage-flip the tables, etc. when things were hard at school (that was always). It was so intense that she had to come home early almost every single day. That school was also a mess, but regardless, SHE DOES NOT DO THIS STUFF ANY MORE! (she did punch a littler kid in first grade because a big kid told her to. Look, she has NO self-regulation and NO self-confidence, and apparently no understanding of how to navigate peer pressure…) She still has a 1:1 para and tons of special ed services, but she IS learning at school, AND she is not a danger to other kids. She’s more likely to be rude and snotty to her para or have a crying meltdown.
She rarely wakes in the night asking for food. At her last (AWFUL. FUCKING AWFUL) foster home, she would wait till everyone went to sleep and then scour the house binge eating. She’s told us she was always hungry and scared – I believe her. But they would try to hide things, and she would find them, so like, she would binge eat the entire pack of donuts they hid in the dishwasher. SHE WAS FOUR BTW. AND TINY. When she came, we kept food in her room all the time, and put a snack on a plate for her at bedtime so she knew there was always food. She did it for a while, every night. She wasn’t hungry, but she was scared there wasn’t food so she would take 5 bites and go back to bed.
She sleeps alone in her own bed! We slept with her for the first 5 plus months. It was not awesome. She is hard to sleep with, and her bed was on the floor for her safety, and you had to stay the whole time or she woke up. It was super hard on our marriage and our exhaustion levels. But, she never slept in her foster home and, except for night terrors, she started sleeping through the night almost immediately upon coming to live with us, so it worked. And, she dealt with the transition to her own bed fairly well, all things considered, and being able to sleep in our own room most nights is a super big deal!
She doesn’t have night terrors! She still has nightmares, and calls out, during rough times up to 5 times a night (1-2 is more average, and some nights she ACTUALLY SLEEPS THROUGH THE NIGHT!). But for the first 18 months she had intense, overwhelming, and LOOOONGG night terrors, in which she would wake up screaming, BUT, was not actually awake. It took forever to get her into the light, awake, relocated in her body, and able to answer grounding questions. If we did NOT do that, she would go back to sleep and be back up screaming in about 15 minutes, repeat forever. If we did the grounding, it was usually only 1-2 wake-ups in a night, but the waking up and grounding process could take an hour plus.
Her imaginative play is depressing and inappropriate…BUT IT IS NOT VIOLENT! The imaginative play at the beginning was just miserable and overwhelming – the police being called, brothers and sisters hitting each other, moms, dads, and grandmas, having guns, and knives, and fighting. Just remembering it makes my blood pressure rise. She still plays MEAN, and games that are…escalated/intense. But, no guns, no knives, no brothers, no grandmas. All of the direct violence is gone.
She is accepting some relationship with my partner. For almost two years, she would not allow any comfort, support, response, from my partner if I was home (AND, as a special treat, she ONLY has these episodes if I am home. If I am NOT home, she magically can hold it together…) I am still strongly preferred 89% of the time. But there are times when she screams “I WANT DAD” at me, and/or has an escalation reaction to my partner having a meeting, or needing space for a bit. Growth!
I cry maybe once a week – less in a good month. When she came, I cried at least once per day, frequently more. For a loooong time. I cried every time anyone asked me anything about my life. I cried when her therapist at day treatment was supportive and comforting. I cried to my sister and brother and moms and partner and coworkers and myself.
Now, my family life is nothing like what I hoped. The hopelessness stems from being stagnant and, for the last year, actually having gone a significant amount backwards. The progress feels infinitesimal on the best day. But looking at that list, there is a LOT that HAS changed!
