My son and I finalized our adoption Sept 2005. I have known him since he was 10 months old. Unfortunately, his biological egg donor pretended that she wanted him returned to her and played around with both my life and his for nearly a year and a half. It was not until 15 months later before the state finally took the decision out of her hands and terminated parental rights. Within that 15 month period, my son had 11 different placements between the age of 18 months and 3 years old. We don't treat dogs this way. This disruption came at the worst possible time, when attachment and bonding is at it's most critical. By the time I was able to have contact with him again, it was at his 3rd birthday party. He was already seeing a psychiatrist and was prescribed a nice little cocktail of medications usually reserved for adults.
My son is now 7 years old and has Reactive Attachment Disorder, no surprise there, right? Practically speaking this means that he has difficulties establishing relationships with others, particularly his caretakers. There is also an implied trauma; for some the trauma may be the separation from the birth mother, for others, not being able to rely on a single caregiver to meet needs is perceived as traumatic. Even at 10 months old, he was showing signs of this condition. Human touch was physically painful to him. The first night I got him home, I decided to rock him to sleep. That baby screamed bloody murder for two solid hours, all the while holding himself stiffly in my arms. I continued this routine nightly and would hold and cuddle him throughout the day. He nearly brought tears to my eyes when, right in the middle of his 1st birthday party, he left his friends and climbed up into my arms and went to sleep. That was quite a milestone for us.
As I said, it took awhile before I could get him home again. Because I had moved to a different state, even after terminating parental rights, the process to get him returned to me took a little over a year. He finally arrived home in May 2005. I had expected a time of adjustment. My child was pretty much terrorizing all around him then. His foster mother at the time was feeding him cake for breakfast because that was all he would eat and if she attempted to give him anything else, he would throw one doozy of a tantrum. The staff at his Headstart program had stopped trying to direct him, and just let him do whatever he wanted because even at three, when he was corrected, he tended to destroy things in a big way. In fact, his foster mother had quit her job because she was being called to the daycare almost daily due to the severity of his acting out. My son and I had been visiting monthly for a year at this point, and while he was comfortable with me, there was no reason to assume that my house would feel any more permanent to him than any other home. He gave me about a month and then the honeymoon was over.
My baby, hereafter referred to as My Heart and Soul, is one of the most courageous little people I know. He is strong-willed, highly intelligent, curious and capable of the most tender compassion at times. He has an outgoing personality, unlike his mother, and rarely meets strangers. In fact, that was one of our early lessons, teaching him not to speak or interact with people he does not know, particularly adults. I say courageous because he has had to make some serious adjustments since moving back home with me. I am told that I am directive and structured; I just think I'm organized. I spent enough time around my Southern grandmother to believe that children need very clear boundaries and that their job during childhood is to be a kid. They have no place in grown folk business and they follow rules, they don't make them. This was and is a complete and diametrical opposite world to the one he had been living in prior to May 2005. My parenting philosphy also, no doubt, incited a fear response in him, particularly for a child who needs to control the world around him the same way he needs the air to breathe. A weaker child could not have made the adjustment nearly as well; a weaker child may have been broken spirited by now, but by the grace of God, he has hung in there and tries his best to please me. I am so grateful and so proud to be able to call this Hero my son.
However, there is a big, gaping, chest wound where my son's heart used to be. He does not have the words to describe his pain, but I see and experience the manifestation of it daily. I see it when he goes to school and deliberately annoys and alienates those that seek to get close to him. I see it when, also at school, he refuses to complete assignments, instead choosing to run through the classroom pulling things off the walls, destroying books. He is so good at pushing people's buttons that, one afternoon when I'd been called to the school to pick him up, I got there in time to see my then 5 year old son running as fast as he could down the school corridor, followed closely by a group of 5 or 6 adults. When I finally got into the building, I found him laying on his back in the middle of the floor surrounded by these adults, all yelling. So inappropriate.
I see his pain when I get angry at him, but rather than avoiding me until I cool off, he either becomes even more defiant and resistant or he tends to cling passively or to display excessive fearfulness. I see it when he has gone out of his way to be defiant and noncompliant, or just being plain mean, and then sneaks into my bedroom overnight to climb in my bed, doing his best not to disturb or wake me (which is hard to do when you have two dogs also sleeping in the bed). He gets in the bed, not to cuddle, but instead, he crawls to the very edge or a corner of the bed, curls up in a fetal position, sometimes even without covers and returns to sleep. He does all this, I know, because he is fearful of being alone or more likely, he is afraid that he has finally done the one thing that will cause me to abandon him. When I wake up to find him all huddled, nearly shivering, I feel badly for all the anger we had exchanged the day before, but then, he opens his eyes, and then it begins over again.
We've been going through this for the last three years. While I expected a period of adjustment, I naively expected that it would be over by now. I'm tired. I'm frustrated. My creative bag of tricks is empty. There has been significant improvement overall, don't get me wrong, we are nowhere NEAR where we were 3 years ago. But he accomplishes one goal and then, as soon as things get too peaceful, he disrupts things in some way (also symptomatic of Reactive Attachment). My tiredness comes not only from the rollercoaster I've been riding with him for the last three years, but I also have to admit to some serious stressors that have nothing to do with my child. I do not have the extended family support that I expected to get when I first started the process of adoption (see my earlier post on
forgiveness). I made an unwise financial decision about a year ago that has come back to bite me, and I've also recently gotten myself out of a hostile working environment. A big part of the stress and the chaos in our home is moderated through me; when I am in a calm, peaceful place, so is my child. And when I'm stressed, he picks up on it and magnifies it times 10.
I read a blog post recently on
disrupted adoption placements. The author expressed her frustrations towards the adults who returned their adoptive children to the Child Welfare system. This is not a choice I could ever see myself making, but I do understand. I would no more think about giving him away than someone else would think about giving up their biological child. I am frustrated and I want things to be different, but he is MINE, for good or for bad. While I would not choose to return him, I do understand the level of frustration and anger that likely motivates it. INSTEAD, I have chosen to finally reach out for help. I got in contact today with the social service agency that oversees and provides support services to adoptive families in my area. We have been assigned to a therapist who practices Thera-Play, a treatment approach that has been found to be particularly helpful to attachment challenged children. I agree with the blogger's advice to not give up on our children. In the end, they are the ones who suffer. Instead, we need to try and try, and then try again to get our children the help they need. We need to keep reaching for and accepting any and all support. And for me, I needed to recognize that I can not do this on my own and I have finally come to the realization that there is strength (not weakness) in recognizing when to seek help.
