Category: Adoption

There used to be moments of crazy. Days that I would find myself feeling like I had failed without the understanding of why or how.

Now, I find myself passing and I try to grasp onto the sanity that comes with it. I rarely know how I have found the sanity or how to get it back after the moment passes and the crazy returns.

At least that is how I feel at this moment. This moment when I have once again taken personally the lies that my daughter has told my husband to try to make me look like the worst mommy in the world. “Why are you so surprised?” he always asks. I am not surprised, I have just reached my fill of being able to let it roll off my back. My character has been attacked one too many times in the last few weeks to be able to let this one slide without hurt.

It hurts, this game of taking care of those that need to hurt you to show that they still don’t trust you. The ones that glare at you throughout the day and then turn into sheepish lost puppies when their father walks through the door. It hurts, even though you know what they are doing. It hurts because you are the one that is working so hard to help them heal. The one that spends everyday scheduling their therapy, their ortho appointments, their tutoring, school, and their social life. You are the one that notices their clothes have grown too small or have too many holes so you take time out of your day to buy more. You are the one that goes to bed every night after them, the one that wakes up before them, the one that eats last and sometimes hours after they have. Yet you are the one that they choose to say the worst about.

I get it, I mean it has been four years of the same thing. The pictures all show happy little smiles. There are always words of encouragement that she so polite and sweet or how nervous she looks all the time. I get complimented on how much she has grown and how good of a job I have done. I know that all this is true, she is a sweet girl. She knows how to be polite and most of the time she means it. However; there are most nights that she tries to see if she can hurt me or make me look bad in the eyes of my husband. I can deal with it most of the time. Roll my eyes and smirk “Oh, ok. Yes that sounds just like me.”

I can let it just go and tell myself I must be doing something right if she feels the need to see  if I will react and send her packing.

Can I be honest?

Can you handle my honesty?

I kinda wanna throw my hands up in the air, repeat the words of my mother of just wanting to disappear, and then actually follow through with it. I sometimes wanna look in her hurtful eyes and scream “you win!” I can see myself throwing in the towel and walking out the door, jumping in the car, and driving for days.

I drove through the mountains of Montana just yesterday and I dreamed of running deep into the woods and never looking back. The fog over the water of the lake called my name and invited me into the safety of its shield. The lone island whispered its freedom of solitude and I longed for the comfort of its quiet. I am tired.  I am hurting and I am not the only one. I know she hurts when she can’t just help me bake cookies and talk about her day. I see the longing in her eyes when I talk about getting nails done with a friend. I can hear the frustration in her journal as she describes her jealousy over her brother having a friend stay over. My brain gets it. My heart breaks with every lie told to her dad about my made up careless actions towards her. My heart aches with every milestone that passes without us getting to enjoy it together. I feel the guilt of being happy to leave for a work trip just to be able to put a few days in between the thick cloud of anger and hurt. I feel the guilt of not missing her while gone. I fall into feelings of inadequacy when I find something the rest of her siblings would love and don’t think twice about what she might like.

I long for just a moment of sanity during these times of crazy. I know it will pass, I will recover. My heart will heal, and in the meantime I will continue to do what I do knowing that I will be lied about on a regular basis. Some days it will hurt more than others and some days I will look out the window and wonder if there is life out there (a little Reba throwback). I know that someday she will look back at the mom who stayed and appreciate her. Until that day I will search for moments of sanity and so I write……………..

I get asked the same question all the time, “I could never do what you do, how do you do it?”. I always answer the same “I don’t do it”. There is no way anyone can help a child of trauma heal alone. I am only human, I can’t offer everything my children need and so I have to find those that will add to my abilities as their mother. I learned from day one if you aren’t here to add to the healing of my children then you are not welcome in our camp. I had to circle the wagons. I put my children in the middle and then placed the right people around them as a circle of healing. The rest of the world was cut out. No one was safe from that cutting block, I didn’t care who they were, if they weren’t able to add to the safety and healing then they were placed on the outside of the circle.  I had to put my own mother on the other side of that circle and it was a hard and lonely choice to make.

I started at the top, I am a woman of faith so of course I could not do this without prayer and trust that God would be there guiding me every step of the way. I strongly believe that He has done just that. I have been blessed to have a husband that trusts me and has been the support that I needed, and not because he has always agreed with me. There have been many times he has had to look at me and remind me of my place in the circle. I am a better person with him standing by my side. I have lost friendships but have gained so many more. The friends I have lost had not been bad friends, just friends who could no longer relate to my world nor could they handle my world. The friends I have gained I cherish, they see me in all my broken glory and hold my arms up when I need it and hold me when I can no longer hold back the emotions. I have had old friendships strengthened and at times my husband and friends have had to circle around me inside our camp, my children seeing that has had its own healing factors. I had to teach my church family boundaries that are uncommon to the fabric of their being and it has created a safe place for other adoptive families to go to. I researched and found a therapist who would be a good fit for our family after being with one that only encouraged the behaviors of our children. I was open and honest with our caseworkers. There were days that I would answer the door in my PJ’s and just say “Today I do not like her and I am not going to hide that from you, how I look is how I feel and it is a direct result of her raging for the last three days straight!” I thank God that I had caseworkers who truly cared about me and were there to make sure my kids made it in our home. Not everyone on this journey has had that same support. Lastly, I have had to teach my children’s teachers how to be what they need, and those teachers hold a special place in my heart.

As summer is here and another school year has wrapped up I am brought back to just how big of a role those teachers have played in the healing of my little ones. I can remember feeling so nervous that first year our daughter was going to start school. We had been able to spend the whole summer working nonstop to help find healing. Her nor I left the house for most of it. She couldn’t handle the public eye, or the pressure that came with that eye. We had a routine down and the rages began to slow and became less intense, now we had to let the public schools have her. I was freaking out to say the least. Seriously, I can’t stress the control freak in me enough. I remember going into the first school meeting, with our case worker Ms. D, sick to my stomach. They weren’t going to understand, they were going to judge me, they were going to ignore me, and I just knew they were going to undo all the healing that had already taken place. I sat at a round table and looked at all the faces that I had known for the last five years. They all knew me as a mother to my son, a volunteer, and a room mom. Now they would all meet a new me. A mom that has a trauma child, a mom that has been beat on all summer, a mom that has already started the fight for healing, and a mom ready to fight even them. My case worker and I introduced my daughter through papers that day. We passed around the diagnosis as well as what would be the best atmosphere for that diagnosis. We gave examples of what they would come against in the year to come, how easy it would be for them to be manipulated by this beautiful little girl, and how hard it would be for them to understand what kind of boundaries she would need to succeed. We were met with the responses we knew we would get. They didn’t quite get it. I walked out of that meeting more nervous than when I went in. I can remember asking if I could please just home school her and  Ms. D looked at me and reassured me it would be ok because she had my back and would support me when I had to remind them what our girl needed. It was only three weeks in when I got the first phone call from her teacher.

“I think I met the real Syd today.” she told me. I sat and listened to her story of my daughter standing up in the middle of the lunch room and throwing her lunch box across the room because she didn’t want what I had given her and the monitor wouldn’t let her up to throw it away. I asked how long it lasted and how loud it had gotten. She said they were able to calm her quickly and sat her in the office for a few minutes to make sure she was safe for everyone. She had been happy the rest of the day and was able to admit it was a bad choice. I gave a little giggle and replied “oh, that isn’t the REAL Syd, but you are getting a glimpse. She is testing the waters of how easy it will be to control those in charge.” That day was the day that the best teacher I have ever had the blessing of being teamed up with started to get it. She would spend the rest of the year being tested by my girl and she passed with flying colors! I can’t tell you the number of times I would have to be called to be asked if she could be physically moved out of the classroom, how many books were ripped to shreds by her, how many threats she made to kill someone or herself, or how many pink slips my son had to deliver to me on her behalf. What I can tell you is how many A’s my daughter got on her report card this year, how many times I was complimented on what a great girl I have, how many real friendships she has been able to make at her new school, and how many moments I have closed my eyes and thanked the woman who worked her butt off to make it happen. I can share with you the day my daughter walked out of her parent teacher meetings and cried because it was the first time in her life that her teachers all told her she was a joy to have in class. I can tell you about the car ride home and how she recognized the first teacher that cared enough to be able to make that meeting possible. The teacher that she told she would kill, that teacher that didn’t shrink to the challenge, that teacher that shed tears because she cared so much, that teacher that spent a day off to drive across the state to watch her adoption finalized, that teacher who fought for her to get the education she needed. I will forever be grateful to that teacher.

No, I don’t do this alone. I have a village helping me. The village has had members come and go, it has been a place of healing and strengthening. My mother is now there with us and we have all learned how to help these kids of ours heal together. We have had to create mini circles around our son at times. We have had to fight for others in their camps. The battle has stormed on outside our circle, and we have had breaches in the wagons. We have met many families that have not had the same results as we have, there have been many hurt mothers who weren’t protected in their circles. There are way too many people who still say they could never do what we do and there are still so many little ones out there who need the wagons circled around them, and so I write………..

“Okay, it’s time to go to bed. The movie is over and we have to take you back in the morning.”

It was a month after visits driving back and forth ninety miles each way that we finally got to have her stay a weekend with us. We had from Friday to Sunday to spend as much time as we could with our beautiful daughter. We chose to keep it low-key and stay home, play games, watch movies, and go for bike rides. It was a great weekend. We felt like a family. I knew the emotions were beginning to get overwhelming the closer we got to bedtime. She had mentioned many times that weekend that she was ready to just stay with us. I had told my husband privately how I was ready for her to just stay with us. I knew it was going to be hard to drive her back and leave her there for another week.
It was Saturday night and we had just finished a movie when I said to her “Okay, it’s time to go to bed. The movie is over and we have to take you back in the morning.” It was a matter of fact sentence, one similar to something every parent has said to their kids at some point. It was the last straw of her being able to hold back what she had been trying so hard to hide for the last several weeks. In that sentence the battle lines were drawn and only she could see them.

“I don’t wanna go to bed, I wanna watch another movie.” was her reply.

“Well, that isn’t going to happen, it is bed time.” I replied back

“I wanna play another game then.” The demanding voice was hard not to hear.

“Honey, it is bedtime. we have a long day tomorrow and we need our rest.” I was pulling from the training, I knew this was a test. I was ready to pass it. I had been prepared for this and I knew it was important to do this right. I did not think it would blow up too badly, after all we were in the “honeymoon” phase.

Every adoptive family has talked about the ” honeymoon” phase. It is a time when all the kiddos placed into forever homes try desperately to make their families see them as adorable little creatures. The length of every honeymoon varies. Much like a honeymoon you may have taken when you were married the length of it depends on how much money you have, time off of work, and where you go. Well, our kids honeymoons depend on how much hurt is built up, how many times they have been promised this is their forever family, and how capable they are to hide the fear of being let down one more time. Our hurt little girl wasted no time to begin the testing of our promise. We were her fourth family that had promised to adopt her. She was in three different foster homes  in between. There was a lot of hurt to test out on us. That was the first night we had a rage, but definitely not the last. She screamed at us that we couldn’t make her go to sleep and stomped up the stairs. My son looked at us bewildered, saw the looks my husband and I were giving, and curled up on the couch next to my husband.

“I got this, I don’t think it will last that long.” I naively said as I walked up to her room. I couldn’t calm her. She was wild with anger and rage. Her window was open and so I walked over to close it which only angered her more. “Well, if you need to scream I don’t want you annoying the neighbors” I said as if she wasn’t remotely bothering me. I closed the door behind me and was so glad I wasn’t in the same room when the pitch of her scream went ten octaves higher as she threatened “You’re going to think annoying when I SCREAM ALL NIGHT LONG!” Oh it was on. The sarcastic, competitive, control freak woke up right there. I opened the door and asked her one more time to go to sleep, her eyes were locked on me with a smirk like that I’ve only seen in movies, and started to scream “You can’t make me, I am going to stay up all night screaming!” I don’t know where it came from, but I looked at her and smirked right back and yelled down to my husband, “Honey, can you put a pot of coffee on, looks like we are in for a long night!” I still cherish the look of confusion that crossed her face. It did the trick, I had changed the rules of engagement that night. She had to rethink how to win this war, she needed to see how to hurt me before she could win. She gave in, until the next time. I closed the door and stood there thinking to myself that I had this it was going to be as easy as baking a cake to help her heal and trust us. Little did I know she was on the other side of the door telling herself that she had this, it was going to be as easy as it had always been to flip this house upside down and bring us to our knees.

That wasn’t the last rage we would see, that wasn’t the last of threats to make us lose our minds, she wasn’t done demanding control of our home. No, we would see what real rage was in the months and years to come. We would be tested on our promise every day. We had not even scratched the surface of her behaviors and we had not even a clue as to what was waiting for us on the other side of the mask she wore. I would soon disappear from society, lose many friendships, lose myself, and lose the calm of our home. No amount of training can prepare you for that, and so I write………………

I can remember a time when trust came easy. I could walk into a room of people without the overwhelming feeling that everyone was hiding something. I once was able to listen to the stories being shared without looking at the body language of the one sharing it. I once looked into a persons eyes to show interest and respect and not to see if they could look back at me comfortably. I had a calm about me, a fun and trusting spirit, at least I think I did. I have lost touch with that reality.

There are many things that have to change once you adopt, even more when you adopt trauma babies. The frequency of eating at restaurants, going out with friends, dates with your spouse, less time on your calendar for spa days, and the list goes on. These things are a no brainer, easy to sacrifice for the healing of a child. You are willing to add to your already chaotic schedule for the therapist visits, doctor  appointments, case worker calls, IEP meetings, teachers emails, and wait lists for the specialists that you pray will be the one to offer the missing link to healing. Once your son or daughter is in your home you would move mountains to help in that healing, no questions asked. You have read the reports. You know you are in for a crazy ride. You’ve buckled up and surrounded yourself with all the safety measures you can prepare for. You know who you are and how perfect your home is for the healing of your children. You can see yourself as a complete family. The smiles on their little faces as you tuck them into bed, you can even see the tears streaming down their faces as you gently hand out the consequence that matches the behaviors they are struggling with at the moment. You have read the books, watched the DVD’s, and taken the classes. You’ve got this.

I had this.

I was strong, calm, educated, ready. I trusted the path I was on.

I trusted.

Somewhere along the path I fell into the sea of lies that comes with trauma and it is a deep-sea. I started on the shores and could see for miles. I knew when a storm was coming and was able to prepare or seek shelter. Then one day I blinked and found myself on a ship rocking back and forth in the waves of  make-believe stories. Wave after wave crashing onto the deck makes it hard to not slip and fall overboard and suddenly you are fighting to keep your head above water. Suddenly you can’t trust yourself to pick out your clothes for the day, you can’t believe you ever thought that paint color was a good choice, and you can see the cat hanging by its tail in her tiny little hands but you just can’t comprehend that she can be that diabolical! The veil between truth and lies is a thin one and once torn the repair of it takes longer than your nerves can handle. My days are filled with “I didn’t do it” followed by the “I don’t know” and completely overwhelmed with the “I’m telling the truth”. It starts as soon as their eyes open and doesn’t stop until they close. It is day  after day and with everyday I get more determined to see them heal. I see through the lies to the fear. I know that in their minds an untruth is the only thing that stands between them and safety. Even after this many years of make believe I can still see through the frustration of being told the lies. I can still see their smiles as I tuck them in and I am still willing to move the mountains that are in the way of their healing. One day her smile will be genuine, soon he won’t stare into space trying to come up with a believable story to tell, I know she will one day be able to admit her failure without blaming everyone around her. They will all be able to someday trust that I love them no matter what. I know this.

Until that day comes I will continue on the path filled with eggshells. I will try to balance on the tightrope of reality. Please don’t push me off, if my hair is a mess don’t tell me I am looking good. I still have mirrors that haven’t been broken. I can see the bags under my eyes, I know I  have had one too many cheeseburgers in between sessions. I realize there is a coffee stain down the front of my shirt and I can feel myself watching for your untruth. Be a safe place, a calm between the storms. Please don’t offer advice that will cause me to be unbalanced as I walk this rope, trust that it is still me, the fun, loving, and trusting girl you have always known. It is still me I am just a different me. I have just lost touch with that reality right now.

I have lost my ability to walk into a room and trust those in it but I  haven’t lost sight of why I said yes knowing my world would flip upside down, and so I write……….