The Trust Apple..

 

about that.... we talk a lot in our house about earning and then losing trust, especially in relation to stealing and lying behaviors... I don't think I really understand how this all works with trauma kids. Are we constantly trying to re-glue the apple... or are we just switching to oranges completely?

 

 

 

Of Cadbury Eggs and Cat Poop...

There was an argument.. about a lock. Dad had purchased a new lock for the deep freezer  in an attempt to try to hold on to some designated food items for longer than a day or two.. (and a place for Melissa to keep the specialty food she has been buying for herself). The lock was "borrowed" and then "misplaced" before it could even be installed on the freezer. It was the resurfacing of the lock in the girls' room that caused the unpleasant interactions that followed. I can' t tell you exactly what that looked like. I wasn' t there. Thankfully.. I was out enjoying a High School hockey game. Apparently it must have been a doozy of an argument because I woke the next morning to a note from Dad to his girls thanking them for the gift of the cat poop in his shoes, and promising them a gift from him in return. Ah.. revenge. We use humor in our house. A lot. It does admittedly border on sarcasm. Often. But it does help to keep us sane in the midst of the craziness of raising children from trauma. In this case... the humor worked fairly well. Cheyann, the finally admitted culprit in all of this, was on pins and needles all day just waiting and watching for her father's return act. He kept her waiting. That was the best revenge of all. By the end of the day I was ready for the game to move on so I stopped to by a Cadbury Cream Egg for Cheyann to give to her Dad as a peace offering. They are his favorites. I think it worked.. I never did see any itching poweder in the underclothing.

Shifting Ice

I read a Facebook post from a friend the other day. She and her husband were out taking a walk on the iced-over lake when they heard a big cracking sound. The walk was all-of-a sudden much less peaceful! I feel like that a lot lately. There are big changes coming up for our family, and as the 'ice' attempts to shift itself around, the cracks that appear are kind of scary. One of the big things happening around our place right now is that our oldest child is getting ready to leave the home to be married. She is my baby - my firstborn - and it is hard enough for me to adapt as that baby bird prepares to fly the nest; for her younger, adopted siblings, it is almost impossible. They are not coping well. And as they attempt to deal with that loss by taking ("stealing")  items from her in a primitive attempt to hold on to her, their relationship just gets worse. The cracks are really growing.

It isn't as though Melissa hasn't experienced this behavior from her siblings all along the way. The stealing/hoarding/lying triad has been a very large component of both of her sisters' RAD-related challenges since day one.. and probably like all of you reading this - nothing we have tried has really helped change anything except for the way we look at and manage it all. It just feels harder to deal with right now because not only is it getting worse as the marriage date gets closer, the sibling relationships get even more damaged. I want Melissa's last days at home to be full of happiness and joy as she finishes up this part of her journey, and honestly, part of me feels more than a bit angry that this behavior of her sisters' is getting in the way of the vision I have for this last leg of the journey of my oldest. And the other part of me just feels sad.

Breaking Families

So, the interesting thing about the idea of a family never breaking is that as I reflect back on our journey as a blended family, I think that is kind of what happened.. but I am getting ahead of myself so let me back up a little..  My Blog is actually named after a book I have written with the same title; and the words themselves came from my now 13 year old daughter, Cheyann, who was just 5 at the time and soon to be adopted. Our family was just coming off a year of full blown RAD-type behavior including wallpaper being ripped off walls and stuffed in grates, kicking and hitting classmates, locking adults out of cars and houses, all kinds of stealing and lying and general raging, frequent public self-stimming and zero fear of strangers. Although we were still committed to this child who had wormed her way into our hearts, we now had a much better idea of what we were in for and it was a little scary. I thought I had had a pretty good idea of what we were getting into as foster/adopt parents. I was wrong.  One day, after a particularly rough week of behaviors, I was driving Cheyann home from daycare. It was a quieter time where things were relatively calm and regulated when I heard a small voice from the back seat call out to me - 'this family will never break"  I have never forgotten that.. and I still go back to that day, during those times when things get really rough, to help me remember. This young child who in her short 5 years of life had already experienced the 'breaking' of two families, was desperately hoping, and continues to hope to this day, that this time, her new adoptive family, would stay whole. And so we push on.

So the breaking idea?  Well, I think when you bring a new child into a home with already established roles and routines, that family structure has to be broken in order to allow for the new sprout to take root and grow. This is hard work and can be very painful for everyone. I have faith that the end result will be a beautiful newly grafted family that just would not be the same without the addition of our three adopted 'youngers'. We just have to navigate all of the 'hard' that is in the middle... and this is our continuing journey.

So..why the title..

As I begin to get my feet wet in this world of blogging, I think it makes the most sense to start at the beginning and tell you a bit about our blended family. My husband and I started out in a more traditional way. We met at a college fraternity party and married two years later after we graduated. After waiting 5 years and working in our careers, we had our first daughter, Melissa. (I am going to use our children's middle names since many of them are tender about being "recognized"). Her brother Donny followed a few years later and I played the game of Sequencing- blending my career and stay-at-home time to meet the needs of my family. When Donny was about 6 or so and beginning school himself, I felt a strong impression that there were more children for me to raise, but by this time my career was in such a place that we didn't feel like babies would really work in our lives (I had always felt strongly that babies and young children needed to be home with their moms), and I had always wanted to give back by raising foster children and adopting, so we opted to take that life path. A few years after that, Cheyann joined our world as a 4 year old foster daughter. Two years later, Cheyann was adopted and Lynn entered the family as a 5 year old foster daughter and was adopted a year after that. Finally, and most recently, Charles joined our family just before Christmas and we hope to adopt him some time this summer.

And so our family grows. There have been many sweet and special times; and there have been many challenges. Our younger three have all been through many traumatic situations and all have numerous diagnoses. Cheyann is diagnosed with Reactive Attachment and we have had to stretch a lot to learn about and learn to live with this disability. Lynn is 'only' diagnosed with ADHD, but is struggling to unthaw from her years of neglect and learn to trust the trustworthy in the world as she enters the world of adolescence, and we are really just beginning to get to know Charles, but we can already see the very deep currents of rage he contains deep in his soul. Our older two kiddos have experienced a great deal of secondary trauma because of the joining to the family of these, their adopted siblings, a consequence we did not fully anticipate as we set out on this journey.

As I mentioned in my profile, I learn a lot through writing about what is happening, and I also learn a lot by reading the blogs of others on a similar journey, so my hope is that we might all find each other and thereby become stronger in our individual quests by bonding together. I look forward to meeting many other of you "trauma mamas."

Life in the Grateful House#links

Life in the Grateful House#links

And so it begins...

I have been wanting to start a blog for a long time.. not only in the hopes of finding others on a similar journey.. but also as writing helps me to heal myself during this challenging journey of parenting traumatized children. I find comfort in reading the Blogs of others who are similarly traveling and hope I will find more companions along the way.