My Overthinking

Philly Area mom, Life forever changed by adoption

A tangle of roots {birth family searching}

23andme picWe’ve been practicing spitting. Maybe it’s more like drooling actually. Whatever you may want to call it, we’ve been practicing getting saliva from where it belongs to somewhere else.

She doesn’t know why. And, that’s fine for now. We’ll send it away and wait a bit. We’ll find out some random interesting stuff, hopefully some things that will help her later as she wrestles with her story. Maybe she can pull that info out when someone tells her she doesn’t “look Chinese” or when she has to do a school project on ancestry. Maybe it will even prove helpful when the doctor asks her again for some sort of medical history. It won’t give her all the answers, but maybe it will help.

But, I’m hoping for more than that. I’m hoping that another parent like me somewhere is thinking the same things for their daughter, maybe for their son. I’m hoping that they’re practicing spitting too and that our stories get woven together as our children discover they are family—cousins or maybe even siblings.

It’s controversial in the adoption community, you know, searching for your child’s history. Some say parents searching violates their children’s rights to choose and do it themselves. But, others say that if your child has a chance of learning anything ever, you have to do whatever it is you can do sooner rather than later. And, that’s where my view falls. I know it could get messy. But, in all actuality, it’s already messy.

I read the words of one adopted person:

How can you prepare someone for this tangle of roots? This road of reunification is not reunification. If it were unified to begin with we wouldn’t be where we are. But it is a road of meeting—meeting each other where we are in life.

It is a tangle of roots. This beautiful child before me with a sister who adores her and two brothers committed to her no matter what, with a mommy and daddy who laugh at her antics and marvel at her beauty, with an extended family who see her as another treasure in our family tree…this child also has a finder, ayis who cared for her for a year and heard her infant cries and bathed her tiny body and worried about her wearing enough layers of clothing, and a father who may or may not have known she even existed, an extended family, someone who had to know she was coming into the world, and a mother who felt her grow in her womb and birthed her only to say goodbye to her. It’s a tangle of roots for sure.

But, if there’s something that I can do now that may help comb out a tangle or two when she is older and those knots become increasingly painful, I’m in. As soon as we know she can get enough spit out to fill this little 23andMething, we’re sending it in. And, then we’ll wait, a couple months at first and then maybe years really. But, one day, one day, we may find a part of her family she doesn’t yet know, a part of our family we don’t yet know. Until then, we’ll be the family we are, growing stronger daily despite our tangle of roots.

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Another parenting epiphany at the fair

He had to take her to the emergency room.

We had been waiting in line at the fair for our tickets. I had told her to stay still too many times. Up and down, jump, up and down, jump. And, every time, the rickety metal steps leading up to the ticket trailer would rattle and shake. “Lydia, sit down! Stop moving!” She frowned and sat for about 5 seconds before she proceeded to climb the railing again and fall and hit her head on the corner of the step.

There she was, screaming and bleeding, clearly needing stitches. And, I was angry.

We were going to have a fun night at the fair, one of our last nights together as a family before Mark left for China for 2 weeks. I had told her to stay still; I had told her to stop; she didn’t listen…again.

He had to take her to the emergency room; I wasn’t ready to be the parent she needed there.

With the roar of the rides and all the bells and whistles of carnival games in the background, somehow my heart quieted, and I remembered what I knew to be true about my daughter. The world was not as it should be for my daughter during her first year of life. When that is the case, there is a profound impact on children, and we’ve seen that in our little girl. With the complicated integration of her traumatic infancy, personality, and the nature we all share to choose our own way, we have our Lydia. She’s always moving, always touching, always climbing and jumping, always sensory seeking. And, it’s really hard for her to not. It’s not simply an issue of disobedience.

I left the fair and met them at the emergency room. I saw my baby all curled up with her father in that big bed, sad and scared. All those feelings of compassion and fear for her welled up within me. I could love her now the way she needed to be loved, with the kind of love that pursues knowing her more fully, the kind of love that considers who she is and guides her based on that and not what I want.

She got a couple stitches that night as her daddy and I literally covered her with our own bodies while the doctors worked on her pretty little face. When it was all over, she clung to us, this little independent girl physically demonstrating her utter dependence on us.

And, then we went back to the fair as a family. Riding side by side on a kiddie roller coaster was just what the doctor ordered—for Lydia and her mom.

dogwood pic

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Dear Teachers (what I wanted to say and what I said)

I was tracking with her.

Lydia runs away. She can’t stay still. She’s not listening.

I nodded my head, identifying with her sympathetically, “Yeah, I know what you are seeing because we see that at home too.”

“Well, it’s not okay here.” (Apparently, time outs are though.)

Okay, no longer tracking. It was dismissal, moms were all hugging on their kids and scooping them up to head home, Lydia was nearly out the door of the building by herself and I’m finding myself starting to sweat as I want to defend our parenting and educate on the effects of early childhood trauma and subsequent parenting strategies.

What I really wanted to say, “Woah…wanna try that again with respect this time?”

Instead, I let things sit for a few days, realized that my first approach would likely not be taken and applied as I would want and that sometimes my overthinking can be productive in that it can lead to words that may help everybody involved instead. Apparently, it’s a lot easier to respond thoughtfully and with love after considering the teachers’ experience a bit more and when your 3 year old is napping peacefully in bed and you are sipping on a decaf pumpkin coffee.

___________________________________

Dear Teachers,
I’ve been thinking about the conversation we had about Lydia’s behavior in class. I wish we had had more time to chat right then and there. Since we didn’t, I hope you don’t mind me connecting with you now via email before class this coming week.

As we prepared to adopt Lydia and became aware of the unique needs of children who have experienced early trauma, we embraced new strategies to use in our family that better foster attachment and relationship while recognizing sensory and physiological makeup. We are not permissive in our strategies, but we do use strategies that may seem a bit “softer” than traditional ones. The way we see it, we can be high on structure as long as we are equally high in nurture.

Lydia is sensory seeking in most areas, meaning she physiologically craves more sensory input than the typical kiddo. She has to touch everything and moves constantly in a way that can look like hyperactivity. However, she is sensory avoiding to sounds and smells, meaning that she has a super-sensitivity that can cause significant distraction for her to noise (especially ones she’s not expecting) and good or bad smells. We realized early on that some behaviors that could be viewed as disobedient were really related more to sensory processing issues than a rebellious heart. We have found that “making her stay still,” for example, is not only frustrating for us when it doesn’t work, it also causes her to respond in a way that escalates things to rebellion. So, we make provision. For example, we have a rocking chair I keep in the car now for her to use in structured experiences where she needs to stay still. We have found that if she has the experience of motion through rocking, her craving for sensory input is satisfied and she’s able to stay more engaged in whatever is going on. We haven’t had any issues with the chair being a distraction for the rest of the class and would be glad to give this a try for your structured class time if it helps.

You also shared how she ran from you, specifically as you left the playground to come back to class. We deal with this a lot with her. Perhaps it stems from her more-than-typical need to control the situation, her sensory needs, as well as her rebellious nature! It’s impossible to totally figure that out as we look at some of her challenging behaviors. Regardless, our strategies are the same. Once I know a trigger (like leaving the playground), I’d be proactive and say to Lydia during line up, “Okay, Lydia, you have two choices [showing her my two fingers so she has some visual cues as well as auditory]: you can walk alone [pointing to the first finger] OR you can walk holding my hand [pointing to the second finger]. It’s your choice.” If she chooses walking alone, I’d say to her, “Good choice. Now, if you walk alone and I start to notice that you can’t walk in the line slowly, I’m going to have to hold your hand in the back of the line, okay?” That way, she’s making the choice herself and knows what will happen if she doesn’t hold up her end of the deal.

Does that make sense? I know it’s a lot to spell out here and a lot to ask you two who already go way beyond the call of duty to serve these kids and their moms (i.e., ME!). It would be a real blessing to us to have you able to reinforce in class what we’re doing at home. And, since she’s familiar with these strategies and we’ve seen them work for her, I’m hoping they are a blessing to you in class as well! If you see any other repeated behaviors from Lydia that need addressing, please do not hesitate to share them with me so that we can strategize together. I want to be a support to you guys as well as set Lydia up to succeed.

Looking forward to next week already,
Big hugs for all you do,
Kelly

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Progress

God has a way of moving at just the right time, doesn’t He?

Just as we started our Empowered to Connect Train-the-Trainer course, Lydia stepped it up.

The yelling. The hitting. The going from 0-60 in seconds. Throw in a bite or two, and that’s been our world for the last month.

Plenty of opportunities to practice what we’re learning. And, that we have.
Giving her the words to use (“I can see you are mad. That makes you super mad, doesn’t it?”… “You don’t like when I do that, do you? You can tell me that.”).
Giving her the redos (“Wait a minute. What don’t you try that again.”).
And, giving her a stop sign when warranted (“Lydia, you need to stop that right now, and use words that we can understand!”
We have so much to learn.
A few days ago, my invitation to get in the bath wasn’t accepted, and she was angry. She looked right into my eyes, bent over with her arms flung back, and yelled out, “I…want…to…hit you!” 
“Thank you for using your words! Good job!” 
She still had to get in the bath. But, she got some praise and a hug first which unnerved her enough that the anger dissipated.
And, yesterday, she snagged something right out of Mark’s hands with a “Let I have dat!” Mark simply looked at her with a message she clearly got, and she handed it back and said, “Let I try that again,” and then asked for it.
Progress.
And, today, as Mama went out to breakfast with some other adoptive mamas (a breakfast that didn’t bring me home until 2pm), she soaked up time with Daddy, asking to be held “like a baby” and falling asleep in his arms for 25 minutes. Tonight, she wanted him to feed her her bottle, and she laid close to his chest while he held it for her. 
Learning to use words. Redos. 
Progress.

Ni Hao Yall

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