It’s been a long while since I posted a Truth Tuesday, but I think it’s time to open up about something going on in our life right now. This is one of those things where there is a lot I can’t say because I need to protect my kids’ privacy, but I am going to speak in generalities about what is going on and how it is affecting me. I hope that in doing so, I will help people close to us to understand and also that if anyone else is walking a similar road, they will know that they are not alone. I read a post that made me think I should talk more about this for those who don’t understand why I may seem like I have pulled away recently or am not as cheerful as I usually am!
It is no secret that Snuggle Puppy and Dancing Queen came to us as older children. They were 4 and 7 at the time and it stands to reason given that they were in an orphanage in Ethiopia that somewhere along the line, they had experienced some loss or undergone some extreme trauma. (We know a lot of specifics, but won’t be sharing them on the world wide web.) Even if they hadn’t gone through anything particularly traumatic, the experience of losing everything they had ever known three times (they were in 2 orphanages before coming home with us, and we were strangers to them at the time) would certainly qualify as traumatic. They lost their caregivers, their country of origin, their culture, their language, and their friends.
When they first arrived, we were mainly concerned with attachment. We spent a year doing attachment therapy with Snuggle Puppy and taking him to see a play therapist. We worked on eye contact and trust and made huge strides. He is now a securely attached boy who is very good at talking about his feelings. I would say that he has more language and skill when it comes to emotional health than most kids his age because we worked hard to get there and he has worked hard. He is amazingly resilient and I am in awe every day of how far we have come. He is even sometimes to one to initiate talk about feelings now and has been known to say to his sister, “Really, *Dancing Queen*, you will feel so much better if you talk to mommy about your feelings. I promise.”!
With Dancing Queen, we did some attachment work, but I had read a lot and spoken to a few professionals and the consensus was that attachment therapy cannot be effective if done on more than one child at a time with only one caregiver and since The Husband works outside of the home, we could only go ahead with attachment therapy for Snuggle Puppy that first year, though we did a lot of attachment strategies with Dancing Queen.
We later noticed that she was showing signs of needing more work on attachment and went ahead with that. My efforts appeared to be working and I felt confident that we were moving in the right direction and then Miss Optimism ended up in the hospital for a week and so poor Dancing Queen woke up one morning to find me gone and I did not appear again for another week. Other things have similarly disrupted attachment efforts such as me getting sick a few months ago, but the day to day strategies I have been using seem to have made a difference and she is showing fairly healthy signs of attachment!
BUT…
She is showing extreme signs of trauma. It can be difficult to distinguish the two as some of the symptoms overlap, but we are now confident that what we are seeing is the result of trauma and its effect on her brain. If I explained all the factors here (prenatal malnutrition and the effects on brain development, early trauma and its effects on brain development, malnutrition, prenatal stress, …), this could turn into a short book, but what we are seeing is fairly extreme symptoms worsening as time goes on.
Here is where I don’t want to talk about her and what behaviours and symptoms we are seeing as to me, that gets into the grey areas of what I should be saying on such a public site, but I do want to talk about me and what this is like for me. (sounds pretty selfish, hey?! but I’m sure you know what I mean)
It is exhausting. I have to be “on” all day. I have to be on high alert for situations that may trigger her. I have to be hyper-vigilant about my words, tone, body language, and actions. I have to give more than I feel I have to give (to one child) and then turn around and give more to the other kids. I have to keep the other kids safe during incidents when my focus has to be solely directed on that one child, so I have to be always thinking of what I can do to keep them all in view if a situation occurs when I have to be holding that one child for HOURS…on a weekday…with no other adult in the house. (those seek-and- find books were my friend last week!) I have to be sensitive to how this is affecting the other kids and have to debrief with them after an “incident”. That debriefing is done at a time when I am so emotionally spent that I feel that I am beyond being able to do what they need. I am embarrassed to say that I literally wrote the book on self-care, because I am a pathetic example of it. I am exhausted. I feel guilty because there are just not enough hours in the day once I get through with giving her what she needs to give everyone else what they need…this includes my husband. I feel guilty because there are things I haven’t yet tried, books on the subject I haven’t yet read. I spend my down time reading articles and watching videos on how to best help her. They are some awesome videos, but that is draining. I am exhausted. Have I mentioned that I am exhausted!
Worst of all, we are just at the cusp of how bad this is going to get. We know she needs therapy. I start next week phoning around about that. I know who I want, but don’t know how we will afford her. Dancing Queen also needs Intervention for speech and possibly auditory processing. We go for an assessment next Monday. I am dreading the results as I think within a few weeks, I will have to admit that I don’t have two children with actual diagnosed special needs, but three. How I feel about that could be its own post and may get written someday, but I have wrestled with it. I have had some pretty honest conversations with God about what I think I’m capable of and what He seems to think I’m capable of!
The severity of what we are seeing with the trauma is affecting her ability to learn, so she is functioning at most at a preschool level at age 7. There is also a possibility that she may have other issues affecting that as well, but we won’t know more until we have further testing done. It’s enough to sometimes make me feel so overwhelmed that I don’t know how to go on…
And then she smiles at me and gives me one of those real hugs, the kind where she just melts into me and she looks up at me with those big, beautiful eyes and I know that I can go on advocating for her and helping her and learning how to be exactly the mom she needs.
And so tomorrow, I will get up and by the time you are reading this, I will be with six of the kids at the Optometrist (thankfully, she is a close friend) and will be able to check another thing off the ever-growing list of things I have to do (dentist appointments for all, get coverage for Miss O.’s expensive drug, find the best therapist for Dancing Queen, find a way to pay for said therapist, follow up on speech language assessments for Dancing Queen and Granola Girl, book IQ testing for those same sweet girls, book a doctor’s appointment for myself that was supposed to happen five months ago, and the list goes on and on…) And I will put one foot in front of the other and pray that no huge incident happens while out in public!
For now, I am turning to God a lot and also relying on distraction (I am hoping my good friend R. is coming to visit at the end of the month as that would be a fabulous distraction!), chocolate, Slurpees, and the occasional glass of wine! Therapeutic parenting is not for Sissies!!!
I found an awesome printable for an outdoor pirate nature scavenger hunt where the kids could find things in the yard. Pictured here:
Snuggle Puppy sailed his ship on the high seas!
We used some books of course as part of our study. For reference, we mostly used the Pirates Eyewitness Book. The kids especially enjoyed learning about all the different terms for pirates and how women pirates used to have to dress up like men! For fun, we read The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything and the kids watched the Veggie Tales movie. As a read aloud, we read Grandma and the Pirates. It’s a book that we’ve had for a long time and for some reason, there’s just this goofy element to it that the kids really relate to and it was just perfect for this week’s theme!
The kids learned how to tell a moth apart from a butterfly and began another study of the life cycle as we prepare to watch our caterpillars begin their transformation. Of course, we also made daily observations of how our live little critters are doing (there is already a fair bit of webbing in there).
