In which the day starts out poorly but ends okay and I hop on my hobby horse

When you are quietly waking up, sipping coffee in bed waiting for the neural connections in your brain to start functioning and you hear an unpleasant and loud wailing/moaning/whining noise outside your bedroom door, your heart sinks more than a little bit. When your husband gets up to deal with the wailing/moaning/whining noise outside the door and instead of the noise abating, it just increases, then you wonder how you can crawl under your covers and pretend you are not there. It doesn't make one bound out of bed. This is particularly true when the day was already feeling just a little bit overwhelming to begin with. 

I admit that it was with more than a little dread that I got up. It has not been a great week with R. and it didn't look as though positive movement was in the offing. My to-do list was also longer than I am typically comfortable with. I try to avoid that happening, but sometimes life gets in the way and there you are. 

My first decision, which made immediate life feel at least doable, was to take the week off from school. When I plan our yearly school schedule, I put in extra time because I've learned that there will be times when school just doesn't happen. If I was going to spend the week helping R. to regulate, taking school off my plate would make that much easier. There were no complaints from the other children. They immediately headed off and did their own thing. They spent the day playing games, baking cookies, reading books, doing puzzles, and playing their own live action version of Among Us which they made up. J. had gotten R. breakfast, but she was too far gone to feed herself, so that's what I did. By the time she had enough food in her, she was a little more coherent. I was able to pay the bills, get to my riding lesson, take a long phone call to a parent in crisis, make a grocery list, and get to the grocery store. As long as I kept R. near me while I was home and was very careful of preparing her for the times I would be gone, it all worked. This has not always been the case, so I am grateful. 

For R. to not verge into psychosis is huge. She needed a lot of support, it took a lot of active parenting, she was not terribly pleasant and definitely not happy, but sanity reigned. I'll call that a win. 

And here is where I get on my hobby horse. Trauma is a beast. It changes the brain and impacts every aspect of life. A child with a brain affected by trauma is just not going to function or see the world in the way an emotionally healthy child will. While I am the first one to say there is most definitely hope for healing, it is not a fast or easy process... for the parent or the child. If you have read here for any length of time, none of this should be news to you.

Today I realized what my beef is with the whole concept of 'catching up'. You know, when a child is adopted into a new home and the parent wants to know when they can expect their child to catch up to their peers. I have always felt it is the wrong question to focus on, but it became clear to me today why it makes me squirm. While I understand that parents want what is best for the children and I understand that for many parents when their child compares well to other children the same age is seen as positive, the whole idea of 'catching up' feels entirely too transactional to me. It is as if there is always that specter of 'being good enough' behind the catching up. The underlying message is too easily sent that I will do the hard work of helping you 'catch up' if you do your part and work hard. Then, when you 'catch up' it will all be worth it. What if the child never catches up? If that is the focus, then what happens? 

Or what if we aren't even talking catching up, what if we are talking basic functioning? Is there an acceptable time line for emotional healing? Is it one year? Two years? At what point does someone say this child is too damaged and not worth it? This is what comes to mind when I hear that a parent has tried everything and then learned we're talking about a young child not home even five years. After a day like today, it makes my blood boil a little bit.

Because at one year, for all of my adopted children it felt as though we were just truly coming out of the shock of the upheaval and starting to find our new normal. At two years for many of my children it didn't look much different than home one year. For a few, we didn't see real change start to happen until at least four years home, and this was with (for most of them) pretty significant connected and therapeutic parenting. At ten years home, H. will still disassociate if she feels worried she is going to get a question wrong or if she thinks she's made a mistake. Ten years. Ten. At five years home, we are thrilled when R. can stay calm with support and that she can accept that support. Heck, at two years, we weren't even sure what was up with R. because she was still so disorganized in her behavior and we certainly did not feel safe to her. 

Is it easy? No. Are we super parents? No. (Please, just take that no at face value. Don't try to tell me that we are. We are average parents who have had more than our share of not average experiences. We know a lot more than we did, but that doesn't make it any easier. We have days when we have to tap each other out because we know the other is reaching their limit. Some days it's a constant round of tapping in and tapping out.) But we did make the conscious decision that we were the ones who brought these children into our family. It was not their job to conform to our expectations but to change our expectations so that our children could succeed and heal. We were the ones who bent first, not our children. We were the ones who cancelled plans, who quite volunteer jobs, who stayed home, who directed dinner from the couch, who took turns staying up at night. That's not being super parents, that's being parents. Parenting equals sacrifice, sometimes a lot of it, and if no one ever told you that, then you were sold a bill of goods. Our children are not there to make us look good. Our children are not there to make us feel good. Our children are there for us to love... regardless of what they have or haven't done to deserve that. 

Love is not transactional.