I Can Haz Baby

The hardest thing on the hardest journey is finding yourself re-walking ground you thought you had passed, often at great effort. Whether an evil fairy carried you backwards in your sleep, or you took an exciting short-cut that turned out to be a backwards loop, or you just happen to be living with a child with multi-factoral multi-year trauma.

I tend to be reasonably stoic about miserable experiences with a very “I can survive anything, solve any problem, and am always right” attitude (except for hiking up long inclines. Then I have a very “come back for me on your way down, I’ll just wait here attitude!”) As long as I feel movement, my self-image of “a survivor” will not let me quit. Inversely, feeling stuck and without control to move myself out of stuck or make changes creates the greatest overwhelming despair and panic.

October was awful. October is ALWAYS awful, but somehow we always seem to forget. (Part of the goal of this blog is to remember things – “parent brain” is a real thing where parents immediately forget how fucking hard parenting something was – for an example, see anyone with a second baby! Especially right about that two-year/three-year age gap!). And this year’s October was uniquely awful so it took a while to remember that the constant escalation and just miserable interactions were likely related to October. We have a 7 yr old with age-appropriate snottiness, talk-back, rudeness, whining, and boundary testing, but ptsd-meltdown response and/or delayed emotional growth 3 yr old tantrum response to any equally appropriate parenting response or boundary setting. It is so UNFAIR and HARD for her to overcome years and years of just delays. (As I was typing this a crying spell happened because the game she is playing told her to point to a wrist. She doesn’t know what her wrist is. She guessed her neck, her armpit, her shoulder, and then flopped. Apparently, she ALSO does not know shoulder or armpit – she could remember neck when pressed a little. Who knew?).

BUT, October 30, dawned following the first night of sleeping through the night in a month, and we all breathed a sigh of hope. It’s like a switch, whatever the bad thing was, her body’s memory ends on October 30.

Halloween was a joy, with my neighborhood coming together to give all the kiddos a Covid-safe super fun night of trick-or-treating. My Moanna and The King (Hamilton) were the cutest EVER, and both had signing costumes and both were great at performing their characters.

X3 received some pro-social feedback when both her cousins said they did not want to play with her because she would not stop screaming and we, as parents, breathed a hopeful breath for the motivational power of peer pressure.

The first week of November was maybe the best week we’ve had as a family in ages and ages. On Tuesday November 3 (remember Tuesday? There was some little election thing happening too, I think) things were a little hard because she did another big emotional drop of prior trauma disclosures to her therapist and we got to go our fourth round with CPS interviews, and she felt fragile and easily escalated. But she also was interested in the election, and watching the results (literally like 1 state before she had to go to bed!) and talking about Trump and Biden, and her fears if Trump was reelected and trying to figure out what a president even IS or DOES, and why adults cared, but going ALL IN on caring too. It was so amazing and heartwarming to have those conversations and have a moment that is positive AND something other than “you are safe”. The kind of thing you imagine having when you start thinking of parenting and what kind of joys will make the pains worthwhile.

And the rest of the week was good too! X3 had early night nightmares every night, but soothing back to sleep was fast and easy, and she was not as snotty/escalated/intense every single day like October. Most importantly, my partner did not look like he was going to die when I finished work on Friday!

And then it all hit. Friday the 6th seemed fairly normal and nice. Bedtime was normal. We moved into the early nightmares. But then there were more than usual. And then the endless wailing “moooooommmm”. But not going back to sleep. For hours. AND HOURS. Yelling, demanding attention, refusing to do her work to calm, to remember “then” vs “now”, being angry when I reminded her, until everyone in the house was awake, then WAILING that no one was very happy to be awake.

And then… hungry. SO HUNGRY. Despite beings stuffed full at dinner and having a pre-bedtime snack and drinking a complete water bottle. Clearly, NOT ACTUALLY HUNGRY, this is all flashbacks to when she WAS afraid and food insecure. She had to take food back to bed before she could even try to sleep. Note, she did NOT finish eating it – despite repeating over and over and over “SO HUNGRY”.

Then I had a baby to get back to sleep (another 30-40 minutes). Then of course kids are up at normal time, despite complete lack of sleep, so a whole day of crabby kids, one of whom is now the rawest nerve with an EXHAUSTED MOM.

The entire week was that. She now sleeps with a bagel under her pillow, but of course since we did that, she is not actually worried, so just wakes up in the morning and eats it in bed spilling bagel crumbs everwhere.

Last night I was up seven times with my kids, five of them with X3, the last time being almost two hours. And we are so tired that sad/sympathetic/empathetic is long gone. Her brain is so constantly activated she can’t do any work herself. So everyone in the house is exhausted, everyone is frustrated with her, she knows it and is in a shame spiral, and gets more and more out of control.

I feel like I already lived this. Wait, I DID. She hasn’t needed to sleep with food for over two years. She hasn’t been up all night since she came and we slept with her every night for five months, until she knew she was safe. We cannot go back to this. We just CANNOT. We are so tired and so sad and so frustrated. We are so sad for HER but we are also so sad FOR US. Other people’s needs can drown you, and hers are pulling her and us under. It feels like there will never be forward progress, and it’s beyond horrifying to go back to the beginning.

I cried and yelled meeting with her therapist today – her therapist noted we are living in military boot camp, where they torture you keeping you up all night, then expect you to function at maximum capacity during the day (parenting a second child, working a full-time intense job, having a relationship, living in a fucking pandemic). Because every solution she has WE HAVE BEEN DOING FOR TWO YEARS. The truth is, this child needs a village. She didn’t choose to be abused, neglected, and hurt; we didn’t do any of those things. We chose to try to help her move forward with growth and love and safety, WITH THE KNOWLEDGE THAT SOCIETY EXISTS AND THERE IS A TRAUMA INFORMED PROFESSIONAL VILLAGE. We had plans, backup plans, when things changed we pivoted and found new options and took advantage of every opening. BUT WE THERE IS NO FUCKING BACKUP FOR THIS. IT is ONLY US (and my seriously saint-level sister).

She needs trained therapists, she needs her daytime chaos and intensity spread across skilled paras, and therapists, and OT, and trained special educators, so that we can have a tiny break so that when I then have to stay up all night I have had the tiniest moment to breath first. There is no village. Covid took the village, and selfish people who can’t wear a fucking mask or stay away from parties, or stop hanging out with friends, or going to bars, or going to church, or having weddings, or funerals, have taken away everything our family needs to survive. Of course we won’t actually DIE. But we are all being scarred, most of all the little person who needs, and deserves, a chance to grow into the human she was meant to be, not the bundle of rage, nerves, worry, sadness, and self-loathing that has been forced on her. Right now, the kids are not ok, and neither are their parents.

Ya’ll writing a blog is a lot like calling a friend on the phone; if I do it regularly it feels easy and lovely and connecting. If I haven’t done it in forever, then it feels impossible – where do you start talking? So let’s just pretend we haven’t been apart all this time and flow right past the awkward pause of the last half year, m’kay?

Like everyone, and especially everyone with kids (except those awful humans who have really enjoyed all this time that has allowed their family to really bask in the joy of togetherness and had the truly bad taste to tell the rest of us about their joyful experiences) the last six months have been FULL ON HELL.

We moved into a new house in March, but we only moved 1/2 our possessions so we could stage the old house to sell – we literally sat on an outdoor couch as our only seating in the entire house for 2 full months… And, we moved in, and a week later went on full on pandemic lock-down, schools closed, working remote, in a new house – trauma kids all freaked out and ours FREAKED THE FUCK OUT. It was a huge and awful regression, that we now experienced 24 hours a day 7 days a week – there was no help coming, no breaks, no support.

Side note: we had HUGE fears and doubts about moving before we did, for all kinds of reasons. I HAVE NEVER BEEN HAPPIER ABOUT ANY DECISION IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. A big outdoors, a pool, a bigger house. I’m honestly not sure we would have survived these last 6 months in our old home.

People with special needs children truly suffered in this essential lock-down and distancing; children were not receiving OT, PT, PCA care, in-person therapy. They are missing both the need that the essential service is filling, AND they are missing the stability and routine and regularity that creates a feeling of safety. Kids LOVE doing the same thing over and over and over – cry and mom comes, the movie ends the same way, the story has the same adventure with the same ending . Each of these things tells kids that their world can be understood and predicted and they will be safe in it. For trauma kids in particular, or kids with anxiety, a disruption is not a little deal, it’s a world-collapsing terrror-inducing hellscape where ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN (but not in a good way). For parents who are already living on the ragged edge, in families that revolve almost entirely around the special needs child’s requirements, removal of these essential services was like watching your life line float away while you drown.

And, for a trauma kid like mine, who has been hurt by caregivers, being locked in a home with only caregivers at a time of crisis she isn’t able to BELIEVE even though she KNOWS that we will never hurt her, and we will have a house, and we will always have enough food. Suffice it to say, major, major, regressions were experienced. At one point I sent my coworkers a video of me sitting in my home office, with screams just reverberating around me, to explain my absolute lack of productivity for months.

We made it – right? We all did. X3’s therapist is amazing, and started meeting with her virtually twice a week, and also with us every few weeks trying to help us all cope and remind X3 that she has the same world, with people who care about her, outside this house. But there is only so much you can DO – we are ALL better parents with some breaks. And honestly, there’s a reason kids generally learn better from people who are not their parents – especially our kiddo who goes into immediate panic brain if we try to teach her ANYTHING. As we tried to normalize this new life, new house, no school, no going places, we kept hitting the same walls over and over, in ways that were really a struggle for us as parents.

X3 is growing and learning and catching up so much lost ground. And she’s physically so talented, she learned to swim incredibly fast out of pure determination, and she is THE FASTEST EVER, how I wish there was a track team for 7 yr olds! But directions, true learning, sounds, vocabulary, understanding, all seem just…impossible. She is learning to sound out words, and it is like magic to hear, but there is no comprehension of when she has it right, or what it means once she says it.

It’s amazing and tragic to have a reasonably direct comparison:X2, at 3 has a larger vocabulary than X3 did at 5 and 6. At 3, X2 comprehends more from casual conversation or questions/directions than X3 does at 7. X3 can listen to to a 30 minute podcast and cannot tell you even ONE thing that happened in it. If I try to read something without pictures to X3 she has a complete screaming meltdown. At age 3, X2 wears the same size X3 wore at age 5. Very recently, X2 has started to answer questions faster than X3, like “x is for X-ray” or “what rhymes with fox”? Trauma, neglect, and abuse, for the first five years of life effects literally every single facet of a child’s growth and development, and I have a literal nature/nurture experiment in my own living room. Mostly, this science just makes me so so sad.

(Accurate comparison of sisters facing same exact experience)

Because of these plateaus, X3 underwent neurological testing and evaluation. Before X3 came to us, she had been diagnosed with ADHD, Sleep Disorder, and ODD – but had never actually been professionally evaluated! She was HEAVILY medicated, with things that made her confused and woozy, because she did not sleep in her last foster home (and who could blame her – she was being abused there, had no idea what was going on, and no one was listening or protecting her – I wouldn’t want to sleep either!). When we put her in counseling and day treatment, the old diagnoses were thrown away and the initial evaluation showed C-PTSD and a possibility of ADHD, with disrupted sleep, but with nothing formal except PTSD. We slowly took her off every medication, and focused on her trauma coping and fears and creating routine, stability, safety, and comprehension of where she is and how she got here.

Neurological testing has now confirmed distinct diagnoses of Anxiety, Depression, PTSD, ADHD, and learning disability – language and slow processing speed; with a side of “some other stuff still needs more testing”. That’s a hell of a list. And I am all up in my feelings about it.

Truly, the first feeling was COMPLETE RELIEF. We have been SO STUCK, and just at a loss how to go forward. We have done EVERY SINGLE THING the therapists have said, and have been just STUCK in this unlivable place, where she has plateaued, does not seem able to learn to navigate life without constantly falling apart. And by “constantly falling apart” I mean “flopping to the floor screaming” or “screaming incessantly for 2 hours after she is told to take a 2 minute break in her room after hitting her sister” or any normal “please do this now” request. Getting through a day with out a screaming fit has become unusual, when a year ago, she was getting better and better. And, no matter how great her day is, no matter how many special things happen, no matter how much love and cuddling and joy and attention she is shown – at the end of the day, she is is angry that she had a hard life, and jealous of any affection and joy shared with her sister. No one loves her, no one likes her, and her life is awful – no matter what is ACTUALLY happening.

It’s a crappy way to live, it’s exhausting to parent, and it terrifies me for her future – it’s very hard to have friends with that kind of nervous push-pull/insecure attachment. LUCKILY, that is apparently the depression – she can’t be available to feel better and actually heal or grow through her pain, if she can’t feel anything other than rage and misery (trust me, I get it!). It is SUCH A RELIEF, to have a plan of action, to have additional diagnoses outside of just “trauma” because the trauma work-around weren’t getting her where she needs to go for a life with joy and pleasure – we were stuck at “miserable survival”. And, her anxiety is SO HIGH (I went through some of her questioning sheets – this peanut is in a seriously intense place) she cannot accept any reassurance or safety even when she knows it is illogical.

The biggest relief was that the testing diagnosed a very specific neurological issue with regards to language that we have been trying, for two years, and entirely unsuccessfully, to explain to her teachers. Her teachers are so RELENTLESSLY CHEERFUL. “She is doing great!”; “I would never have known she didn’t have a full working vocabulary”; “I rarely have kids in my speech classes that are as verbal as her” etc. – which is great, except they are missing this THING this big THING that X3 is able to work around and fake, but that we experience constantly and we know is a missing building block. And the testing showed the exact issue that we had no name for, AND provides a plan for mitigating it! *BIG SIGH OF RELIEF*

The next emotion was amusement; the one funny result is that she scored in the 5th percentile (or “really fucking low”) on “common sense shit kids her age would usually know”. Which is sad, but kind of funny? Because when your kid seems like kind of a dingbat all the time, it’s sort of funny to have a “missing common sense” confirmation. It’s not really a “diagnosis” it’s just a fact – her head held ONLY “how can I survive” and literally NOT ONE THING MORE for five years – it is astonishing how much even tiny babies are learning during those early years, that’s a big gap. Which is why if we say “could you bring me the blue bowl from the kitchen table?” She will hop up, run off, run RIGHT PAST THE BOWL ON THE KITCHEN TABLE, run somewhere (upstairs? The basement? The bathroom?) and then yell “what did you want? The what? Where? I CANNOT FIND IT” over and over, while meanwhile the 3 yr old has obtained the blue bowl from the kitchen table and then X3 flops over and starts screaming because she doesn’t understand what happened, and we implore her, for the 1,00,000th time, to please “slow down, listen to the words, and ask us if there is a word you do not know”. If she does not run off, there is a lot of “what is a table?” And she looks around vaguely and hopefully and guesses – this? Then, what is a bowl? Repeat for every step of the instruction.

After the relief, and very brief amusement, the sadness set in. For her, for us, for the world. Not that any of it is a surprise, exactly, more like, the severity of it, the pervasiveness of it. That she isn’t just getting better through time and love and stability and near-constant life-style monitoring and catering by us as a family. Like this kiddo needed ONE MORE OBSTACLE in life, one more thing that makes her different, alone, scared, confused. And like we need one more thing to try to manage, or one more depressed anxious person in this house! And it’s more of a soul sadness, for her, for the many many children struggling through life, and how absolutely unfair it is.

I am not talking to her much about the diagnoses right now; I don’t think she’s ready to understand them all, or what they exactly mean and it’s a kind of overwhelming list. We are going to start some medication, hopefully get the constant depression/anxiety under control, so she can be available to start feeing safe, happy, loved, calm. I’ve talked to her about that, and she knows I take medication to help regulate my brain which tends towards sadness, so I think that’s a nice place to start. I am ok being sad about this for a bit; I think that is a normal part of the process of addressing a child’s special needs – acknowledging that it IS a harder path. But then I think I will get back to hopeful which is overall where I want to be with these concerns; naming an issue is the first step to addressing it and managing it. And I love a plan!

Mother’s Day is an emotionally rough day for me. I don’t want to harsh the squee of the many people so lucky to have wonderful mothers. And that is particularly true because I receive so much support and love in my challenging parenting journey, and this year, received the best Mother’s Day present I have ever received and ever expect to receive:

I’m literally going to frame a copy of this.

But even with this amazing gift, I truly wish this holiday did not exist because this mother-mythos is FUCKING HARMFUL (and maybe was created and continues to be used to replace the strength and blatant sexuality of female goddesses, which frankly we could use at this point!). It is my greatest wish for gender parity in relationships and child-rearing, that all children be lovingly cared for, that women – regardless of their motherhood status – be celebrated in their everyday lives for their gifts and strengths both in and outside the home. And I wish to just not ever have to get through the complex emotions of another’s Mother’s Day.

I have been blessed with four mothers, three of them very complicated, two of them now dead, and one the example of calm loving motherhood that I lean on today. All of them are a piece of who I was and some of them guided my decisions regarding who I have intentionally chosen to become. The one thing they all had in common was a fierce all-consuming love of their children, and a joy in the concept of motherhood. Despite these examples, I have never wanted to be defined by motherhood and despite having intentionally made the decision to parent children, I am daunted, daily, by the expectations of society, the needs of my children, the lack of space to exist as my own human self in the margins between work, marriage/partnership, and parenting.

Mother’s Day pushes female parents into a single shape that excludes the lived experiences of so many. The fuss and hype of Mother’s Day is inescapable. The women posting about their pregnancies, labour, the children they made out of their own bodies, and their family resemblances. And, the postings that motherhood is “the best job on earth”; being a mother is “the greatest gift”; literally “I was put on earth to be a mother to this child”.

In my own life, I receive so many wonderful accolades and gifts and support as a mother and I am beyond grateful. But despite attempts to include non-traditional mothers, I feel no space for me, my family, and many of my friends in this “holiday”. For me and my family, the painful heartbreaking history with my own mother, the reality of being a mother after 4 miscarriages, and adopting through non-traditional paths, the complicated self-doubt and pain of my relationship with my older child, the complications and pain of adoptees like my children (many of whom feel thrown away or abandoned by mothers – BUT RARELY BY FATHERS), and particularly of foster care adoptees who may have complicated feelings of disloyalty to their biological family while they are pressured to treat their adoptive mother as a savior, means that Mother’s Day is just amplified pain.

The celebration And deification of mothers as the center of children’s definition of self reinforces the societal notion of what it must mean to be or have a “mother”. Last year someone said happy Mother’s Day to me then said “Oh, should I say that to your partner since he’s more the mom and you are more like the dad” (because I am the working parent and my husband is the primary caregiver). Thereby offending both of us in one fell swoop, while reinforcing the idea that mothers must be the primary caregivers to children, even if we are smart, driven, career-oriented, and not particularly warm/nurturing by nature, or even just don’t want children! And, that dad’s are by nature absent, hard-working, less-important, and not emotionally available and are at least extraordinary if they are remotely close to equal parents. That my partner is feminine because he chooses to do the intense, constant, overwhelming work of raising young children without daycare; and that I am masculine because I do not wish to be surrounded by young children all the time and feel validated by my intellectual and economic successes. This (hopefully becoming dated) vision makes no space for modern families seeking gender parity, single parents fulfilling all of these roles, or same-gender partners.

It also leads to increased pain because mothering is NOT simply natural. There are a lot of bad mothers out there. And a lot of mothers who do not live in pure joy simply because they are raising children.

My biological mother made every effort and choice to give me the best life she could and was home with me full time for the first six years of my life. She read to me non-stop, she co-slept, nursed me until I was four, found ways to send me to camps and special education opportunities while we were so poor we ate at the Loaves and Fishes dinner and from government hand-outs regularly. There is no doubt of her love for me.

Despite this, she is severely mentally ill, revisionist, difficult, toxic, manipulative, and abusive. She has no boundaries, has no respect for or ability to follow the boundaries set by others, and is rarely able to maintain long friendships. She is the victim of parents who so severely abused their children that 6/7 remain unable to have a stable romantic partnership, they cling to relationships with each other like war survivors, unable to separate despite constant enmity because they are the only ones who can understand their past together constantly reinforcing their unhealthy methods of interactions as somehow normal human interaction. Even that is not enough – my mother and her sister are in a fight right now because one of them believes their father was more abusive and one of them believes their mother was more abusive; this pain is so alive decades after getting out of the parental homes that the inability to see and validate the other’s suffering leads to an enormous emotional blow up. The majority of children produced by this group of siblings carry on, in some way or another, the generational trauma of this abuse, and struggle with depression, mental illness, and addiction.

I have a toxic, painful, hurtful, guilting, mother. So many of my friends have toxic hurtful parents. But there is a guilt to not celebrating your mother even when she is awful. I have heard so many times, in so many cultures, that you owe your mother fealty and celebration because she birthed you or because she raised you. Just being a parent is NOTHING to celebrate. Being a not crappy parent is a lot like not going to jail, finishing high school, not getting fired from your first minimum wage job, it’s the minimum expected of the person who took on the job of raising children. The contract between children and parents runs one way; from the parent to the child. Hopefully, the bonds of a lifetime together mean that the children grow up to love and cherish their parent and have a lifelong mutually supportive love. But it is like all relationships, it requires mutual love, respect, and not actively harming the other person. Mother’s are not and cannot be exempt from the general standards of humanity just because “mother”.

For me, and my partner, and many that I know that have mothers who are deceased, Mother’s Day it raises sadness and guilt. We were not close enough while alive, we missed chances and opportunities, we have holes where important people should be. We can already have those emotions on birthdays (ours and theirs), holidays, parents’s birthdays. We do not need another day dedicated to poking that bruise.

And, after four miscarriages, it doesn’t matter that I have two wonderful children – I have a moment of sheer pain that penetrates my entire body when I think about my friends and colleagues being pregnant. EVEN THOUGH I AM SIMULTANEOUSLY SO HAPPY AND SUPPORTIVE OF THEM. (It turns out you can be bitter from BOTH sides, before I wanted kids I was all “ugh, being pregnant” and now that I been unable to physically reproduce I’m all “ugh being pregnant”. Pregnant women ARE smug – but mostly societally)

Mother’s Day again celebrates women as the creators of life, that nurturing and motherhood are women’s natural state, that our very selves are created by our mothers. This societal focus on motherhood as the epicenter of self-creation and emotional support creates crises in adopted children. Studies have found adoptees are between two and four times as likely to attempt suicide than children with their biological parents. Go search for blogs and groups of adult (malcontented) adoptees – there is a common theme that their mothers threw them away. In addition to having adoptees like this in my own life who are very critical of the mothers who (IMO bravely and selflessly) gave them up for adoption, I’ve read so many of these blogs, and I rarely even hear fathers mentioned. It is this toxic awful concept that women are mothers and mothers naturally love and nurture that causes adopted children to feel that THEY must be damaged, otherwise no mother could give away her own flesh and blood. It is painful, heartbreaking, and infuriating to read. And it is in part the result of the societal fetishization with motherhood that means adoptees are deprived of “self” or believe they are worthless. The less fetishized we make motherhood, and the more we normalize alternative families, and discuss the multigenerational trauma and abuse in many families, the more that we can foster healthy self-image in children who have all sorts of stories that do not involve “perfect mother”.

Mother’s Day is also an amazing source of guilt for me. Guilt that attachment for my daughter is not automatic and that I do not feel that overwhelming joy in motherhood. That I feel most fulfilled when I succeed at a task that requires self-determination, work, and public accolade for my skills. That I would rather be on vacation without my children, because it is their constant need, the lack of sleep, the lack of time alone, the lack of space to be myself uninterrupted without the pressure of knowing I will be rushing back to children momentarily, that I need to escape. That my greatest need as a parent is NOT a celebration of my female parenting role but space away from my children, to connect with my partner as adults not as parental roommates. Especially RIGHT NOW, when we have been locked in a home together for six weeks rubbing against each other’s last nerves and trying to keep a very dysregulated child feeling safe and connected.

Being a mother is the hardest job I’ve ever taken on. It is overwhelming, constant, exhausting, exhilarating, loving. My children are strong, brave, sassy, tender, sweet, and amazing.

But I loathe the cult of motherhood, its exclusionary aspects, its celebration of basic biological reproduction as the highest form of humanity for women, and honestly believe that there is no way to have this unnecessary societal celebration without doing more harm than good.

OK! We are (about to be) BACK!

So. My site got hacked and/or was insecure and my partner didn’t have time to fix it for a bit because life so there was a hiatus.

Meanwhile, OMG I had a mental health goddam fucking CRISIS at the end of 2019. Like, things were GOOD. X3 was doing the best she’s done. She was doing well at school, she was holding it together, against all odds she was learning to FUCKING READ something I honestly had no idea if she might EVER do. And X2 remained the generally charmingest kidlet in history (except she still doesn’t sleep, whatever). And my job was going well, with colleagues supporting me and clients liking me and winning and stuff. And my partner and I were generally not fighting or having hard times.

And I just went OFF THE RAILS. Hours and hours at work staring at the screen doing nothing. ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY all the time at home. Unable to get out of bed. Crying in my office. Simply a massive, intense, overwhelming, mental health depressive episode, made harder by the self-awareness it was happening and the crushing double-depress that it had been 3 years medication-free and I was so proud and happy to be in a good place and it just all felt apart for NO REASON. (That’s how problems with brain chemistry work, FYI).

Turns out, it’s really hard to get in to a psychiatrist! But luckily my (brand new!) OB was willing to prescribe the generic of my old stand-by, 10-year anti-depressant. So after an awful awful December (FOR NO REASON) I went back on anti-depressants.

AND LOST MY MIND. Something about the release timetable, it seems, just killed me. I was alternating SCREAMING RAGE that took over my whole body and just felt like it came from outside me and SOBBING DESPAIR, just hopeless, heartbroken, misery at everything but most especially the state of ME. Day-by-day it was a battle just not to have myself committed, where at least I could just let go and scream or sob or stare blankly at the wall 24 hours a day and would be hurting no one and letting no one down (except by my absence, failure to earn a living and support my family, and complete abrogation of all responsibilities. A girl honestly cannot even schedule a nervous breakdown these days).

My partner, who is NOT the most sensitive, emotionally available partner of all time… JUST KICKED ASS. He survived. He did not fight back at me. We actually came to each other the same night and said “something is wrong with these little white pills”. And it was so amazing to be united and supported in the fact that SOMETHING WAS REALLY WRONG. And he survived it, and pulled us through it, during a time I almost gave up.

I tried all sorts of things, and I can’t even go into the health system BULLSHIT that prevented faster or more precise treatment… but on March 4, (it was mid-October when things started falling apart, mid-December when everything fell entirely apart, and early January when we realized new pills were equal in chaos to the nothing of the depression) I was able to get in, and started a new medication. I am too tired in both the morning and the night (but not as much in the middle day) but otherwise, my mood has stabilized.

Luckily. Because the world just fell the F apart since March 4, and maybe a little before, and along with the world our family has really been OMG trying to get through it. There has never been a time that I needed more outlet or more processing than right now, in a pandemic, with a trauma child, coming back from a mental-health breakdown. So, we’re BACK.

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.

 

 

Why are you so loud? And direct? And maybe crude? And kind of rude about your kids and life? And why do you swear so much? 

I guess the question is really, why do I write this blog, and more specifically, in writing it, why am I so painfully honest and/or fucking intense?

(Surprise! It’s not alcohol that makes me honest!)

There’s a few reasons.  First, it’s selfish.  I cannot overstate (except I DO! Regularly! In this very blog!) exactly what an emotional roller coaster I have found this process, from deciding to try to have children at all despite my own history of trauma and personality difficulties, to not being capable of physically having children, to the analysis of whether and how to have children when the easy way didn’t work and weighing the pros and cons of so many different alternatives now that “just relax and have some sex” isn’t useful advice.  Shouting into the void gives me a way to organize my thoughts and, often, to let the immediacy of the emotions slide away, and to bring some logic to the pure emotion of the situation.  Life is nothing but decision after decision and I can’t even start the pros and cons list until I get my general belief system sorted out.  I have almost always done that by writing.  And I feel a real sense of calm and release after I write and post blogs.  It’s not just venting endlessly to friends, it feels more contained and process-oriented, even though it is descriptive of experience.

OK, sure, but why so PUBLIC?

When I started walking this path, I didn’t know anyone who had done this.  I knew lots of people who had done parts of it – I knew women with miscarriages, I knew families that had adopted, I knew some adult adoptees.  I was not close with ANY woman who had lots of miscarriages; I was super-lucky to have one friend who had, and who gave so much more of herself to me than any human should have to. But she was the only basis I had for personal journey.  The internet has A LOT of support for women experiencing infertility, but very few to none of those writings felt like ME. There is a lot of god in many infertility stories, and a lot of “being a woman is…” – none of those felt particularly accessible.  None of them helped me process my own journey.  None of them made me feel “normal”.

Then, when we moved through the different ways of adopting, and the idea of adopting through foster care in particular, I looked everywhere for true and honest discussion of this journey of adopting non-private and more specifically, non-infants…and I just again did not find much that matched the road we are walking. You can find some saccharine shit about being some sort of saviors and the joy of being a child’s last hope.  You can find religion-based journeys, but those do not resonate to my own journey – different motivations and positive feedback loops.  You can also find a LOT of absolute horror-stories of people who reversed adoptions and/or placed their adoptees in basically asylums for being psychopaths. I especially was not able to find any long-term honest journeys of BOTH the joys and the pain.  And I still haven’t found any stories that start in misery and move into joy.  I really want to be the success story that I was looking for when I started –  the honest one, so people fee connected and supported and NORMAL.

But why are you so MEAN?

I actually do not think that the way I talk about my kids is MEAN but I do think it is way more honest than many parents are – or should be, with their kids when they are kids.  In contrast, I believe that honest discussion between adult parents and their securely attached adult children about the reality of parenting is really important and could help a lot of people make a lot more informed choices and walk forward with intention.  But in general, I think most of us have negative thoughts about the weight of parenting.  And some of us, who CHOSE this, but are not NATURAL at it, (surely, surely, I am not the only woman like this!) have more than most.  And I share that because we all know that visibility matters – I talk to women all the time who wonder if they are bad people or bad moms because they have so many doubts, and fears, and even anger.  And moments where just falling apart seems so much easier than going on, but it would be so EMBARRASSING to tell anyone how HARD it is to do this thing that is supposed to be the pinnacle of human (or at least women’s) existence.

I am a lot more direct than many people – some people find it stressful and off-putting.  Which is totally fair! I find Minnesota-nice, passive-aggressive, beating-around-the-bush, being nice over resentment, off-putting and I deal really really well with people just calling me on my shit and then we deal with issues.  Since I cannot be the ONLY person in the entire world who has ever found direct honest self-reporting and self-reflection refreshing, I feel totally fine with my tone.  There’s plenty of bubbly happy mom-blogs out there for those that are looking for that version.

You really swear…a lot. 

I DO! Well, I do on this blog.  Amazingly, since we got kids I think I have only dropped one f-bomb in front of X3! She came already full of swear words and as a result we have cut our own usual use of swearing down to almost nothing – way more that we would have with natural-born or opted from infancy children.  With her, we REALLY have to live the life we describe, there is no “do as a I say, not as I do”.  We have to model every second of every day.  As a result, I swear ALL THE TIME when I am not around children.  It’s like a swearing pressure that must be released! Also, I think swearing is really important punctuation when used appropriately.  Also, I think swearing is just funny. So, if swearing is not your thing, my blog is probably just not really your thing either!  That’s ok, there’s lots of mommies out there that DON’T swear.  Go read THEIR blogs you fucking prig!

 

I have been so miserable for so long I have been entirely unable to update this blog.  It was a vicious circle of outside misery input that I could not change, and constant internal questioning my life choices and self-blame for always, always, walking the hardest path, and self-flagellation and shame for BEING so miserable for a grouping of situations that I chose to walk into with my eyes wide open.  The last few months were FUCKING HARD.  And it’s only when you have 22 seconds to breath that you (me) can accept that life can actually BE that hard, and it’s ok to just be goddamn fucking miserable and regret every choice that led where you have landed.  AND, to be able to see through that cloud of misery to a time that you were not THIS miserable and to hold onto that memory like a talisman to keep drawing you forward to a future that, if there is any fairness or hope in this universe, will not be this miserable.

And you know what? At last, AT LAST, we made it (back – we have stopped here before in the last year) to the ultimate goal – less miserable!

So, where have we BEEN and WTF have we been DOING that caused SO MUCH MISERY?

Well, there’s the every day reality that parenting a child of trauma is just endless and hard.  X3 went through a huge regression, that consisted of a few months of (1) a nighterror of spiders – up LITERALLY SCREAMING hours at night.  Trust me, we tried EVERYTHING. Yes, we tried that idea you are thinking of right now.  She eventually spent over a week sleeping in full body-covering PJs with no blankets or pillows or stuffies or anything that could possibly allow a spider to hide, in the direct middle of her bed; and then, (2) a general trauma regression at school which resulted in multiple days of problem behaviors such as swearing, running away, taking off her pants, hitting other children, and rage-flipping entire tables; and then (3) a trauma-regression of general reactive attachment of general horrible home behavior; and (4) finally, approximately a month of night terrors (this is post-spider!) with 2+ screaming wake-ups every night that require an adult to remove her to a lighted area, force her to do jumping jacks or dance or move her body to come back to it, often while she is sobbing, until she is present enough to be aware and then be ABLE to start calming down.

At the same time, X2 decided she isn’t all that into sleep herself, and then there were two! Either alternating back and forth wake-ups or one for the first half of the night and the other for the second half of the night.

Exhausted parents are REALLY BAD at parenting.  At least this one is.  And, I have my own history to battle; one of the reasons I never wanted kids because I know my capacity for pure rage, and I never wanted to parent like my own mother who was terrifying when she lost control.  And there were moments in the last few months where I was literally dissociated from my OWN body watching myself and thinking, “how can you feel/act this way towards a traumatized child?” while simultaneously being SO. FUCKING. DONE. with the constant BULLSHIT.  (to be entirely clear, I have never and WOULD NEVER hurt my kid.  But I have been angrier than I ever think I should be).  And then I was both despairing and full of rage – at my partner, for wanting this life so much but now hating it and being in his own misery of rage; at my kid, for just honestly being so difficult; at the baby for JUST NOT SLEEPING and also kind of for being so easy and amazing and just a reminder of how unfair life was to her sister; at myself, for choosing a life that I am so-poorly suited for.

And the more exhausted and angry and resentful and miserable and self-hating for feeling these ways I became, the less I had to give to my partner or kids.  And X3 is a bottomless hole of need – so the less I have to throw in there, the more she constantly demands with endless touching, escalated behavior, and defiance/oppositional behavior for attention.  It is hard to describe the combination of sorrow and rage a person can feel while parenting a child who believes that “mom shows love” mean mom touches me in anger or roughly and then does everything humanly possible to elicit that reaction from you.  And so, depleted, sad, angry, frustrated, and generally miserable we survived more months.

AT THE SAME TIME (so, meanwhile?)…shortly after Christmas (literally 6 days after I purged the house of all the tiny baby clothing and toys after deciding we were truly done) we learned our kids’ bio-mom was pregnant again.  And so we faced the question of whether we had the capacity to parent another kid.  The reality is, I am already at more than full capacity.  There is no more of me – so another kid means less of me for the kids we have, more struggles with fulfilling expectations at work, less of me for my partner, and even longer until there is some day enough of me for me to direct any thoughts to what my own needs might be.  X3’s therapist was clear that she thought it would be survivable but very traumatic for X3 and likely cause regression. And it would mean signing up for the entire foster process (meetings, visits, terror the court will make the wrong decision) again – which we are so desperate to get OUT OF.  And like, MAYBE we could do 3 kids. But we don’t want 5. Or 7. Or 10.

But when and how do you say “no” to a soon-to-be baby? How do you tell your adult children “yeah, we could have also had your sibling but we decided that was too hard, so we just sent them into the system”? I literally can barely trust a coworker to write a brief for me, there is honestly no way I could calmly say “no” and just let someone else be responsible for this baby that is my kids’ sibling.  And, we are also sort of are sad to be saying goodbye to the baby phase with X2 and knowing that we will never have another chance for “the baby experience”.  But that’s no reason to have a baby in our current depleted state!

So we vacillated and planned our lives around having a new baby, and terrified ourselves, and fought through “yes we are doing this” to “no, we absolutely fucking cannot” and back to “I think we honestly have to”.  And then, at last AT LAST we learned that new baby has gone “poof” into the wind.  Whether it never existed, or existed briefly only to vanish before becoming a viable being we need to make decisions about we will never know, but it’s enough to know that there is no new baby heading our way in the next month or so.  Seriously, thank goodness!!!!!! It is the very best possible thing for every single involved being.  But also seriously, sadness at no baby again.

AT THE SAME TIME, we got news that a family member had contacted social services and suddenly wanted all the kids (bonus vanishing baby was still pending at that time as well).  After these kids have been in care for YEARS, and this family member had specifically stated that they DID NOT want them, and had never seen them, and had had no contact, AND is the subject of my kids’ trauma-therapy-play, we were suddenly plunged into “are you fucking kidding me right now”?” status of uncertainty and more delay.  After all that, it seems the family member now appeared to change their mind and NOT want the kids – but who will ever know until this process is DONE.  ARGH!

AT THE SAME TIME, X3’s school really fell apart on us.  This school thing is a TRIP!  Stable kids probably do well in just about any school.  My kid is not one.  And she has a lengthy and detailed IEP that confirms it.  And she is in a disaster school, full of kids like her but undiagnosed and in families of origin living at crisis point.  And, I chose this school specially and could not be more frustrated that I failed so hard!  The school is FULL of seriously dedicated individuals working every second to make the lives of these children better; but if I told you the absolute ridiculous lack of administrative responsibility and constant chaos you would be appalled.  And so, I am now that parent – I got my kid into a great suburban school that we can’t wait to start next year.  But in the meantime, we have been pushing through at chaos school with meetings, and calls, and emails.  We are so lucky to have the staff we have, but so additionally exhausted by trying to demand the level of competence every kid deserves.

But … we made it.  At last, AT LAST, it was May.

And we have had X3 FOR ONE ENTIRE YEAR!  AND THINGS WERE TERRIBLE BUT WE NEEDED TO CELEBRATE ANYWAY!  We went to Perkins on our together anniversary, where we used to go to spend time together before she moved in, and where I had the joy of having a woman in the bathroom ask me how old my granddaughter was.  To be fair (TO BE FAAYYYRRE) it’s not inconceivable, especially in my neighborhood, that I could have a two year old granddaughter.  But I was NOT. AMUSED.

(NOT A GRANDMA MY GOOD BITCH!)

And, this wonderful day that I had planned to be great was actually terrible, and I was so upset that nothing went right, and it was just another chance for me to be out of control and miserable, this time for really little stupid reasons, but I just wanted ONE NICE DAY TOGETHER SO IT DIDN’T FEEL LIKE I RUINED MY LIFE FOR NOTHING!

But then… at last, AT LAST, it GOT BETTER.  A LOT better.  It’s still hard (I hear parenting is just hard).  BUT, literally EVERY SINGLE DAY of the last month, has been better than EVERY SINGLE DAY of this month last year! That is REAL, demonstrable progress!

And, X3 just turned 6!

Last year, she said she didn’t believe she had a birthday. She didn’t want a party.  She wanted to be entirely alone, to eat a big cupcake by herself.  THIS YEAR, she was able to count down the days to her birthday (LAST YEAR SHE COULD NOT COUNT!), and able to understand that we were having the party on a different day than her actual birthday AND that she got two celebrations as a result!

And, I fear to even say this, but the last week, X3 has slept through the night every night, and X2 has only been up 1-3 times per night.  I have had 3 nights decent sleep out of the last 5, and I honestly WOKE UP ON MY OWN the other day, NOT entirely exhausted.  It was…so much easier to just do anything for that entire few hours it lasted until the exhaustion found me again!

AND, last week, X3 woke up in the morning and did not immediately start screaming for a parent.  She got up, and for almost 20 minutes she just played.  And when she called for me, I said “I’ll be down in a minute, play toys for a bit” and…SHE DID.  I was able to get up and CHOOSE to come downstairs, and it was SO EASY to give her real, enthusiastic, joyful, love.  The smile on my face was real, and the morning hug was actually glad to see her.  That break, for less than 1/2 an hour, from HAVING to fulfill another person’s endless needs to being able to CHOOSE to come engage, felt like I lost 1,000 lbs of pure pressure.  And, it opened up the space for hope.

Hope that X3 can keep getting better.  Hope that our lives can become more about joy and love and less about surviving and faking it till we make it.  And most, hope that I can keep getting better at this job I have chosen, but which does not come even a little bit naturally to me. And I better keep getting better!  Because I have promised that I will, to these kids and to myself. And because at last, AT LAST, we have been told that, barring yet another unknown, we WILL be adopting these amazing children in the next 90 days.

One of the questions that plagues pre-adoptive parents is “can it be enough”?  Will I really, truly, love this child the same as if I built it from my own body and soul?  Contrary to popular pressure, there is nothing shameful in this thought – it means you are spending the time doing the work before hand, because IT IS NOT THE SAME as producing a child traditionally.

Attachment is some real shit, yo, and it really, truly, matters in every aspect of parenting.  When a wanted child is birthed into your home, you have (usually!) spent a number of months preparing – talking to a swollen tummy, changing your lifestyle, preparing a room, planning for the future.  Before that baby ever pops its head out, parents are ALREADY attached.  It’s likely part of why children are not murdered during those early sleepless days… (it’s also, in my opinion, a piece of why shaken baby syndrome is much more likely from young male caregivers – in addition to being more prone to flash rage/frustration and less in control, they are less likely to pre-attach to a somewhat amorphous concept of a future baby).  We see the effects of long-term lifetime attachment (and lack thereof) every day in our household, it is so much easier to deal with X2 when she is being a terror than X3 when she is being a terror; it’s entirely UNFAIR to X3 and to us, but it’s just part of your emotional reality – and something to be honestly considered if a person makes a decision to choose adoption – especially of any non-infant.

Even of an infant, attachment is NOT immediate when you adopt (I am obviously assuming our adoption will go through in this post).  I’ve personally known people and read blogs and heard the stories of others who felt like failures because they did not IMMEDIATELY just LOVE their adoptive infants.  I know many people who felt like the child was not really “theirs” for some time.  I know my partner took a lot longer to attach to fully attach to X2 than I did – he’s not that into babies anyway, the complete upheaval of his life was overwhelming, and we had less than 24 hours notice from call of “hey, kiddo” to “new baby in arms!” (despite more than 3 years planning to have family, and 8 months preparing to foster, the actual call to placement of a foster child is still a FAST change when it hits).

And, there are a LOT of other questions; Whether you will feel sad day after day to know that this child will never look like you or anyone in your life (spend 10 minutes around individuals with biological children and you will hear a LOT of commentary about “sure looks like dad” or “those eyes are pure grandma” or “she comes by that naturally”).  That you will never have a full medical background?  Is intelligence inherited and is your child going to be somehow deficient? You can never be SURE that the bio-mother did not drink or do drugs. Is the behavior that is frustrating you as a parent your fault, the child’s personality, biology, or ADOPTION in some way?  For cross-racial adoptions, you are taking on obligations that are much more and weighty; CAN you possibly do these children and their culture of origin justice in choosing to make this parenting choice?  And with all these questions, with all these additional burdens on top of choosing to parent, will that hole in your heart be filled?  Because most people do not choose non-traditional family-building without a hole to fill – it’s just TOO HARD!

But I can say, unequivocally, without reservation, without hesitation, that an adoptive child is ENOUGH.  I will always be sad that I CANNOT grow a child; I miss having the option, and I miss having the chance to physically experience all the changes, and I am sad that we never had that months long time for excitement and anticipation.  But, I cannot imagine, under any circumstances, that it would be possible to love a child more than we love X2.  It’s harder with X3, through no fault of hers or ours; like I said, attachment is real, and nothing but time can overcome time.  She had nearly 5 years to become NOT OURS and we are only 8 months in to OURS and so much progress has been made on both sides, but it’s a painful journey growing into one form from very separate root structures.  But as a family, our experience could not be richer if we had produced these children through our own DNA.

So, for anyone considering adoptive parenthood and wondering, questioning, scared, or hopeful, ADOPTION IS ABSOLUTELY ENOUGH.

Things are hard right now.  I’m pretty self-aware, but right now introspection and processing is too hard and too much – without an end to the current stressors in sight it’s more about surviving than processing and moving through it.  I WILL but I’m not going to RIGHT NOW.  It’s the holidays, and I’m trying to keep myself in a lighter, frosted, sweeter, spirit.

So, instead, let’s have a talk about the dirty secret of non-traditional child-rearing; to do this, you have to make a lot of intense emotional decisions which have significant and immediate fiscal considerations.  No one wants to be making their family growth decisions based on money but money effects every aspect of non-traditional family growth.

SCIENCE!

Science might get you there – but there’s a reason that the rich are having babies late in life, and most of the rest of us are not.  Using science and labs to reproduce is not that cheap.  The average cost of one round of IVF is $12,000 – it can easily be $20,000 for a round; and, it often takes multiple cycles, and for someone later in life almost always multiple cycles, with no guarantees. With my particular circumstances, (age, no successful prior pregnancies, and multiple prior miscarriages) the chance of any one IVE cycle being successful was more like 10%-15%.  Not a great chance of return on investment; in fact, it sounds like a great way to pay massive amounts of money for additional heartbreak.

JUST ADOPT!

“I’ll just adopt!” I LOOOOVE seeing (usually young) people on FB or the internet generally talking about how easy it is to adopt, how they don’t want to mess up their bodies or deal with the gross, pain, and/or expense of child bearing, and how it’s socially better to adopt.  This usually comes with a lot of hand-wringing and moralistic statements about how there are “so many children that need love” and so if they decide to have kids “I’ll just adopt”!.  (There ARE so many children that need love- but they mostly aren’t infants, they are hard to love, they come with huge challenges, and they aren’t that easy to get a hold of either).

There. is. nothing. easy. about. adopting. privately.  Even if you thought that you were socially interested in adoption, it is generally faster and more cost-effective to produce your own if you are physically able to do so naturally.  Adopting (frequently) takes a long time; you either have to match with a birth mother somehow out in the world or work through an agency; in an agency your profile is given to prospective birth mothers and they choose someone. This CAN be fast, but it can take months or even years; and then you wait for that baby to pop out.

Adopting is crazy, absurdly, ridiculously, expensive. I know someone who adopted 18 years ago for $10,000 – from a friend of a friend, with no agency, so a total discount; the cheapest I’ve known. The average cost of a private American adoption is $34,000 – $40,000 (we did not research international adoptions so I cannot speak to the reasoning, but I understand they are comparable in cost). I looked into an agency that is supposedly pretty fast and pretty cheap out of California; but reading reviews it was shady as fuck, with terrible stories of birth mothers extorting hopeful adoptive parents.  I met one prospective family who had tried to use that agency with nightmare results…it CAN work, but it’s a super-risky route.  The very reputable consultant we were working with was giving us “best chances” in the $40,000 range, with a recommendation that if we wanted to adopt more quickly to have room in your budget up to $50,000 working with their reputable agencies.  DO YOU HAVE THAT LAYING AROUND? We def did not.  Even if you DO, that’s your child’s future college fund (or travel, or first home, or therapy because they are adopted!) that you just spent JUST GETTING THE KID IN THE FIRST PLACE!

Adoption is also not easy emotionally or time-wise.  You cannot “buy” a baby; which means that money you are paying is going for a bunch of birth-mom’s costs BEFORE the birth.  And, she has usually signed a contract saying if she changes her mind, she owes those fees back – but if she is about to give up her child for adoption you can assume she is not in a financial place to pay back massive quantities of cash.  So, if she changes her mind, and keeps that baby, you are out of luck for a large amount of that money. While we were making this decision, a friend of my partner actually had an adoption mind-change at the hospital while waiting to take baby home.

Different states have different laws; but down south is your best bet for laws that transfer the custody with no take-backs quickly.  All of the agencies we were looking at were down south, most in Florida, maybe one in Oklahoma and one in Utah (if I remember correctly). But, to adopt, you have to be present in that state where the baby was born for a certain amount of time; so, you will have expenses of travel (multiple times, likely) to the state, staying in a hotel or other short-term accommodation, in a foreign state, before and then with your new baby…even if you have paid maternity leave, spending your new baby time in foreign state in an unfamiliar space, sleepless, unsure, and worried, is a pretty difficult way to start your new relationship.

FOSTERING (TO ADOPT)

Fostering is BY FAR the least fiscally challenging way to build a non-traditional family; presumably because the emotional cost is so high people literally would not do it if there was no support for a least the everyday pecuniary costs of the children.  In many counties, putting the foster child in day care alone can use the entire reimbursement.  If you are rotating placements fairly quickly, you can go through A LOT of supplies, kids come to you with next to nothing (my baby literally was handed to me naked) and are required to leave your care with a certain amount of items (I am SO frustrated when foster parents send them with less than the required amount – this might be these children’s best chance to have one full set of decent clothing in their lives, and they need to go to their next step, which is almost always probably scary, and they can have this one support).

A separate post talked about the hoops, hoops, hoops, required of foster parents (visits, transportation, permissions, etc.) which can use up all the time and reimbursement there is, which is likely why people maximize by having multiple placements; it’s most feasible if you are already a SAH parent, and you are pretty money-smart, buy clothes second-hand, use cloth diapers, etc.  But children come with costs, car seats, clothes, activities, supplies, presents.  I know a foster family that took in a four-sibling group, for adoption, and their friends posted a go-fund-me to get them a van (a family of 6 needs a bigger vehicle!) and they were forced to take the go-fund-me down because it was too public and/or violated the privacy rules of foster care and/or other foster placements stated they shouldn’t have the kids because if they cannot afford a new van then they cannot afford to adopt children and the kids should be moved.  Because there are SO MANY foster parents breaking down DHS’ door demanding to take in large sibling groups.

The BIGGEST pecuniary benefit of adopting through foster care is that the kids have HEALTH CARE – usually even after adoption!  And that’s really important, because the risks and responsibilities with adopting through foster care are huge.  The emotional output required to do it well is obviously enormous. Children in foster care nearly always have one or more mental health diagnoses. Children in foster care are more likely to have fetal alcohol exposure, drug exposure, a history of sexual and/or physical assault, and significant medical problems than infants obtained through private adoption.  Every non-infant child in foster care has experienced significant trauma.  Even babies straight to your home from the hospital may have pre-birth exposure to domestic violence or other trauma, as well as prenatal tobacco, drug, and alcohol, exposure.

We chose fostering for a lot of reasons, but the very last deciding factor was a cost-benefit analysis.  We already had the resources to allow one parent to stay home with a child; with that, we felt that we could put in the emotion and the time and the work for foster children, and it would mean that we had greater monetary resources to invest in our children and giving them mental health support and education and opportunities.  We also decided that the uncertainty and difficulty of fostering and then letting go until we ultimately adopted was preferable to the uncertainty and difficulty of waiting to see if a birth mother changes her mind at the last minute and then we are starting over, with less monetary resources, later in life, and after more disappointment.  Interestingly, the risks that were hard for me in each of our possible scenarios were very different for my partner – but made us both want the same ultimate path.

People who want children take out loans, raise money through gofundme, hold benefits and bake sales, and cash out retirement accounts to do IVF and to adopt privately.  People  spend years fostering, search on line for birth mother matches, and give their hearts to a rotating cast of children who might never be permanent family members.  But for some reason, the discussions of non-traditional parenting often skip over the monetary penalty of being unable to “just have a baby”.