The First 100 Days of Adoption

Three months home!

How’s she doing? Is she going to be okay? Is the emotional damage of two years in an orphanage and foster care going to be repairable?  I breathe in these questions everyday.

And I silently exhale the answer, No she’s not okay and she may never truly be okay.

Today, in this moment, I’m parenting in the weeds of trauma. I am parenting in a ‘no-mans-adoption-land’ that is filled with communication barriers, overflowing laundry, fear landmines, and lonely fatigue. There is no handbook for this. I looked for the “First 100 Days of Parenting a Child from a Crappy Orphanage Situation” and it’s not on any bookshelves. There are lots of books on adoption, and even more theories on how to parent adopted children, but what I find is that they are nowhere near what I am living. They cannot touch the surface of lonely, fear and hurt that I am often drowning in. I wish there was a book called “Adoption – It’ll Kick Your Ass and You Chose This…Again”.

We got off the plane and the repair work has begun and we have learned from Israel that it doesn’t really end; that it can never be completely fixed. Zorey and Israel are beautiful and amazing and HARD, and they both live with the consequences of adult decisions. They look like they are doing great, but yesterday I walked into the room to see the two of them sitting on the kitchen floor rocking. ROCKING and stemming, silently sitting in their pain because their little minds are hurting and I CANNOT FIX THIS! Imagine the horror watching two of your children sitting and rocking because this is how their minds cope with what has happened.

 

Sometimes our friends and family forget what our children went through. Behaviors are chalked up to “just a kid thing”,  or “my toddler did the same thing”. There is a need to believe that infants and children are resilient. It is a way to shelter our hearts from something horrifying and awful. Because when we look at Israel and we look at Zorey, we do not want to see the abuse, the neglect and the sheer emotional solitude and pain that they lived everyday. We want to believe that an infant’s brain doesn’t register neglect. We want to think that a toddler won’t remember the days of confinement.

I get this, I really do. I want to live in the same place. I want to believe that my children will forget the trauma and the neglect, and that they will grow up and will be too little to remember. I wish babies were resilient and had the ability to cope with stress and adversity. I wish babies could just forget and bounce back. I wish they could pull on and tighten the straps of their tiny booties and carry forward, unscathed and untroubled.

Unfortunately, it’s the opposite that is true. The time in life when the brain is most sensitive to experience—and therefore most easily influenced in positive and negative ways, is in infancy and childhood. The time my children spent in their orphanage was a time of great opportunity —  and great vulnerability.

What I live with everyday, is behaviors that must be seen through a trauma lens. My children may whine, fuss, charm, comply, defy, laugh, cry or rage and I cannot take these emotions at face value. I cannot say, this is a typical whiny toddler who wants a snack. I cannot say, he seems so charming and happy all the time. I can never read their external behavior without thinking about what lies beneath the surface. I have to remember that there were days my babies were hungry, there were nights they were cold and scared, and there were hours that no one came into their room to meet their most basic needs. My children were not born resilient because resilience can only be created by a constant, loving, comforting, and secure presence.  So, I must see behind the external emotions everyday and this is what I never really read about in a book. Here is what I didn’t understand until I lived it.

With my daughter you might see emotionally connected, and at times I even believe Zorey seems emotionally connected. But then I’ll question everything because there are days she also seems emotionally connected to the grocery store checkout lady and the Sparkletts water delivery man. I’ve learned to carry her in a front pack, because in public she still wants to throw herself into the arms of all adults. I know what this is, in the adoption world it’s called ‘caregiver shopping’. It’s the result of a steady turnover of caregivers in an orphanage. It’s the result of a move to a foster mom and then a move to an adoptive home. She has had more ‘caregivers’ in her two years, than I can count on two hands. It’s the result of a very young child whose basic needs were not met. So, she is ‘shopping’ for survival because in her world constructs, we may leave tomorrow and she needs an adult to survive.

She likes food and is never picky. Great you think, but no, it is not great. She has severe anxiety with food and is constantly begging to eat. If she can’t eat immediately, she will scream and cry and scratch her face. So we leave snacks for her everywhere, because she is terrified to not eat. Israel is opposite. He doesn’t like to eat anymore unless it is a food he deems safe. He finds his security in mac and cheese, and he tolerates all the other food.

 

Both my son, Israel and my daughter, Zorey spent their most formative year in an orphanage. When an infant cries and their needs aren’t met, they learn to stop crying. When a baby smiles and coos and no one smiles and coos back, they learn to have no facial affect. When a child grows with no one touching or rocking them, they learn to rock themselves and seek touch by biting, scratching or hitting themselves. When a baby has no one to regulate their system, they develop an unorganized system of regulation.