Five years

Five years ago today, we officially adopted R. as our daughter; just four days before we had adopted Y. in another province. It has been a roller coaster. 

As so often happens, because we had been on a roller coaster parenting-wise for a while, we blithely thought we knew what we were doing, what we were in for. How wrong we were. To recap for those who are newer, we adopted both Y. and R. on the same adoption trip, spending three weeks in China as we traveled to various provinces to meet children and complete paperwork. This was just a couple of weeks after we received the phone call that my father had unexpectedly died. To say we were all off balance would be an understatement. 

To add to the grief and chaos of that time, less than a month after we returned home, our three year old labrador died from systemic cancer that we were unaware that she had. Looking back, I'm sure we were all walking zombies as we slowly processed all the changes just two months had brought. It was hard. Then, a year later, J. was offered a new job and we made the decision that he would accept it. This meant that we would need to move from the city where we had lived for over thirty years and our house of 17 years. It was not an easy move to make and I think we are still working through it all. It has not been the easiest five years that we have experienced.

Through all of this, we were helping two girls begin to adjust to their new lives. We kid ourselves if we think that they change they endured was equivalent to what we had been through. Their loss, because it also involved everyone and everything they cared about and understood and felt comfortable with made our grief pale in comparison. We still had the people we loved (well, most of them), our language, our culture, the things we understood, that food we loved, etc., etc. Y. navigated these changes by expressing grief and talking about how she felt, allowing us to comfort her as she grieved. R. did not have these tools available to her. Life was chaotic and confusing and scary and she had no words, no understanding, no ability to even begin to process what had happened. She was adrift.

This feeling of confusion and general sense of being untethered to anyone or anything came out in horrible coping mechanisms... indiscriminate affection, disassociation, psychogenic seizures, post-ictal psychosis. These are difficult enough to manage and live with if you have some idea of what is going on, but all of us were clueless about what behavior was coming from where, how to help her, how to survive. It was four years of talking to doctors, trying different thing, tapping out when reaching your limit, and generally feeling like the worst parent in the world. 

Today I spent the afternoon (finally) writing up our fifth and last post-placement reports for R. and Y.'s adoptions. As I wrote R.'s I realized that this was the very first time that I had real positive news to share. It was the very first time that I felt we had made real progress. It was the very first report that I didn't feel overwhelming despair about the future as I wrote it.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that the past couple of months have been a little bit dire due to the after effects of having Covid for R. and then knocking out her front tooth and having to endure a horrible dental treatment. The past couple of days have seen a return to more normal behavior, so I'm hoping we are past the worst. (Assuming, that is, that she doesn't need a root canal. Ugh.) These unusual blips aside, R. really has made so much progress. One huge thing I realized is that the amount of time she spends disassociating throughout the day has gone down significantly. This means that for much more of the day she is involved and paying attention to what is going on around her. All of this means her brain is thinking and creating more neural pathways and creating new connections. (Brains that are disassociating are pretty quiet, not doing any of this important work. It is why disassociating is a tool for those in distress because they can literally stop thinking.)

Just this one improvement could mean big gains eventually as her brain essentially begins to wake up. We've also seen other signs. The other day she identified the number '1' all on her own and unasked. She manages to identify the names of colors correctly more times than she gets them wrong now. She can move her body in ways she couldn't manage at all five years ago. I know it all sounds like little stuff that for typical children would barely manage to make it on the parental radar, but for R. they are huge. 

I have no idea what the future holds for R., but it could be much brighter than the one I feared five years ago.