e-mail
Yesterday was spent traveling home to Kansas after my endoscopic surgical procedure in Indianapolis. I awoke this morning at 5 AM with a migraine—no surprise there, after general anesthetic, a little extra stress (although I wasn’t really worried about this at all) and a completely out-of-sync sleep schedule. My throat still hurts but it is better. I had dinner with my doctor the day after my surgery (he’s a long time friend), and he mentioned he wasn’t sure the big tube would fit down my throat … so that tells you how tight it was. No wonder my throat felt so violated!
Dora spent four days with a neighbor. Dora couldn’t afford to miss school, and she’s been singularly unpleasant to be around, so we opted out of dealing with that while I was having surgery. As expected, she worked her magic on the neighbors; the mom was effusive in her description of what a delight little Dora was to be around. Dora headed out to school this morning with a nicely decorated Valentine’s Day box. Dora has not said one word to me about it; although I suspected the class was doing them. It wasn’t up to me to beg for the privilege of helping her make a box. I was virtually certain Dora would play the “I need a Valentine box but my mom won’t help me” card. Who knows how she actually presented it to the neighbor. There was a time when it would bother me, but that time has passed. I finally have accepted the fact that is it totally unrealistic to expect the average neighbor or community member to understand the real dynamics when they spend four days with a child who puts on her best face and stuffs all the real negative feelings down deep. I’ve seen the honeymooning Dora, and she’s very good at her shtick.
My husband picked Dora up at the neighbors last night while I went out to do horse chores. Upon my return, I heard Dora crying. I asked what the matter was, and she said, “NOTHING!” So I said, “OK. I’m here if you want to talk, but I’m not begging you to do so.” It turns out Dora was crying over having to leave the honeymoon ideal of the neighbor’s home, only to return to this Land of Accountability and Realism. I offered to rock her but acknowledged that I was the problem for her. She opted to deal with it alone.
This morning, I asked her to describe to me why she was crying. She said, “For some reason, when I go to another house they are nice to me and I want to live with them!” I asked her if she thought she just had the bad fortune of landing in “mean houses” or perhaps might her behavior have something to do with it? Additionally, I asked her if she thought things would get difficult at the neighbor’s home if she stayed there long enough. She said, “Yes, I would get mad.” I reminded her of my husband’s comment that, “Wherever you go, there you are!”
Dora is not happy about how her life is unfolding but she is still not willing to be the one to fix anything. When I asked her if she had any interest in working on it, she immediately said “NO.” So there you have it. Onward ho!
Oh joy, oh happy day. Sorry you’re dealing with this after your surgery.
Yes, oh joy to have to deal with this on top of feeling unwell.
On the other hand, you could opt to leave it undealt with. Then Dora would have a life time of honeymooning and crashing to look forward to.
I believe that this kind of kid gets used to honeymooning and crashing and that becomes their comfort zone. It is so darned uncomfortable to be real that they take the familiar way out and stay in their destructive cycle. I’ve been dealing with this cycle for over ten years with no improvement in accountability. I’m at the point where I don’t even look for improvement anymore. I just hope that somewhere down the road something will click with her and she will try a little harder.
Yes, it seems children with attachment issues make PERFECT houseguests !! We have received many comments about the politeness, thoughtfulness, neatness and all-around WONDERFUL-NESS of our daughter at others’ homes. (Once a friend saw her dark underbelly when she had a raging episode with me at their house. Eyes widened in surprise all around.) She seems to credit our bizarre interest in accountability and realism as the cause of much unnecessary pain in her life. — Rachel
It truly is amazing how RAD kids can be total opposites once they are in a new situation compared to how they are at home. My sister does the same thing and continuously blames my parents for the pain in her life. The interesting aspect is, though, that like most RAD kids she’ll be really nice to a “new” friend but once she feels that she has lost control and that there will have to be give and take in that new relationship she destroys it.
Nancy, Please understand the spirit this is asked in~with incredulity and yet gently: Was it worth it having Dora in “Disneyland Respite” for the four days of school she was able to attend. To me, it seems like a VERY HIGH price to pay. I would be paying for weeks, and with one of mine, months.
patricia
Also said gently, I agree with Creampuff. There are a few situations I would consider as emergencies, and realize I had no choice. Amputation comes to mind. Natural disaster blocking the roads maybe. But quite honestly it just never seems worth the price we have to pay, both in snarky behavior and in lost ground.
But then on the other side of that, you wear yourself pretty thin, and wonder if it is worth the price. Some days I am very hopeful and see lots of great stuff, but it is discouraging how fast you can slip back to square one.
I guess I’m not quite sure what you wanted from her here. Did you want her to behave badly at the neighbors or to be surly and negative and give them a taste of what you say has been her consistently unpleasant behavior? Have you asked her why she didn’t have you help her with the Valentine’s box? Did you ask the neighbors how they came to help her with it? If she was home sick from school for a week and knew that you would be going to have surgery and would be gone for four days, isn’t it possible that she simply didn’t feel up to doing the Valentine’s box or forgot about it or, since you apparently aren’t getting along with her, didn’t think you’d want to help her? There again, if you knew her class was making Valentine’s boxes, why didn’t you ask her about it? Why the game playing with her? I do get that you’ve had a stressful week and hope you’re doing better. I also wonder, though, what it would be like to be Dora.
Actually, when you think about it, Dora is a smart little cookie. She has already shown an understanding of acceptable social behavior, in that she is polite and pleasant out in public, and genuine in private. Further, she also understands (as evidenced by the infamous Valentine box) that acting needy to get a stranger to help you get/do something you want, is pretty low commitment on the emotional level, whereas asking a parent to help you or give you something, implies that they have some sort of control over you.
The problem is that Dora’s genuine emotions are sad and mad, and making herself vulnerable by actually asking someone close to help her is just too hard. I don’t picture you, Nancy, sitting there keeping score of these issues in a mean spirited way, only watching them from close by, and seeing the small things for what they are. In our home, I find that knowing and naming all the little games and undercurrents, doesn’t change daily life one bit. You still feed them, and talk to them, and hug them goodnight.
But somewhere in the back of your mind there is always this urgency. You can see the misery in them, and you know that if hope, and trust, and affection fail to break through, they will be condemned to lives of endless honeymoooning and crashing, and shallow, short lived relationships. If this is a game, it has pretty high stakes.
Very interesting comment, scraps, and although I will address these responses more fully in an upcoming post, I had to share something I heard last night.
Dora talks to herself big time after she goes to bed. She’s refusing to talk to us, and on all accounts she much prefers being solely in charge of her life and her emotions. When she talks to herself, no one challenges her thinking! What I heard last night in her soliloquy (when she didn’t know I could hear her) were statements like this:
The overall tone of her self-to-self conversation was about how she could maintain or reinforce her walls rather than drop them. And therein lies the biggest problem. She’d much rather fight the battle and lose the war.
Nancy,
I appreciate you sharing Dora’s “self-talk”. It helps me understand my son’s behaviours better. I believe this is probably what he says to himself, but in his mind.
patricia
“I need no one and I can choose to live any way I want to.” My daughter’s walls are two feet thick and ten feet tall. The electricity was off in her room due to some recent remodeling work. She chose to sit in the dark to do her homework rather than join the rest of the household in a common area. It must be so lonely to have to rely on yourself to the exclusion of everyone.
Maybe it’s time to consider another approach? I’m happy to point you in a new direction if you’re open to it.
poor babe. That would have had me in tears, listening to her tell herself that she has to toughen up. Especially that she had to toughen up like she did when she went to the babysitter. She is fighting so hard to keep herself from getting hurt again.
Sounds like a bright, strong-willed little girl who’s been hurt badly and is afraid to trust you because she thinks you’re probably going to give her away like her adoptive parents did.
I was bullied badly at school and I remember myself at the same age gearing up to go to school with similar self-talk: “You have to be tough. You just can’t let it matter.” Etc. etc. etc. It’s a self-defense mechanism. Obviously it’s not quite the same thing, but it’s not an unreasonable reaction from someone who’s been hurt that badly. I would have had a very hard time not going into her and saying, “It’s OK. We won’t send you away. We’ll love you no matter how hard you try to push us away and we want to help you.” I hope she’s hearing a good bit of that from you too.
That self-talk stayed with me all night. It’s amazing to see how the same words can have such different meanings to people. I’m reading Dr. Ross Greene’s book “The Explosive Child.”
He says “There’s a big difference between viewing inflexible-explosive behaviors as the result of a brain-based failure to progress developmentally and viewing them as planned, intentional, and purposeful. That’s because your interpretation of a child’s inflexible-explosive behaviors will be closely linked to how you try to change these behaviors. In other words, YOUR INTERPRETATION WILL GUIDE YOUR INTERVENTION.
“If you interpret a child’s behavior as planned, intentional, and purposeful, then labels such as “stubborn”, “manipulative,” “coercive,”bratty,” “attention seeking,” “conrolling,” “resistant,” and “defiant” will sound perfectly reasonable to you, and popular strategies aimed at motivating compliant behavior and “teaching the child who’s boss” will make perfect sense.”
“…I encourage you to put this motivational explanation on the shelf and give some consideration to the alternative explanation: that your child’s behavior is unplanned and unintentional and reflects a physiologically based development delay in the skills of flexibility and frustration tolerance.”
Wow!
I feel like there’s a double standard at work here. Dora’s behavior is described as “snarky”. Yet you obviously accuse her out loud of pity parties. (I often wonder if the “snarky” way I read on these boards of people describing their children’s behavior is conveyed to them as well…Dora’s words tell me yes. Do you also accuse her of playing games? Is she just giving back the behavior that is being modeled for her?
The fact that Dora wouldn’t even say one word to you about the box tells me that there’s serious trouble in this relationship. And as a young child, all the burden for fixing that can’t be placed on her shoulders. It’s too much. Her behavior is telling you that. Are you listening?
For what it is worth, Dora has had lots and lots of opportunities thus far to grasp and embrace what is being offered… and what is being offered is security, stability, love and nurturing. She’s holding out for reasons of her own, and she can and will readily state those reasons. You know … you can lead a horse (or zebra) to water but … you can’t make them drink. I am more than available to Dora any time she wants to talk, process, cry, rock, whatever … as long as she is willing to put forth just the tiniest effort to make it a reciprocal interaction. Do I want to be strictly a default warm body to be “used” when she needs a fix? No, and I can’t imagine she can engage in too many healthy relationships in the future where 98.6 bodies are virtually interchangeable. When she first arrived and for several months, we expected absolutely nothing in return. Our expectations of effort on her part are really very, very minimal. What we are seeing is effort alright … effort to maintain her walls and her distance. Me doing more work on this right now than she is will only delay her need to address it herself.
She’s a very, very bright girl and very aware of some of her behaviors and she has had countless opportunities to make slow, incremental changes with lots of support. Thus far, she’s not interested. She has her reasons for not being interested, and I am not at liberty to share them here, so I guess my readers will have to go on not getting the whole picture.
Bluestocking mentioned having similar talks with herself as a child. I had the same reaction, having been bullied nonstop from 5th grade through 8th grade. I didn’t want to worry my parents with what was happening, but I certainly remember telling myself over and over “be tough. They can’t hurt you if you are tough enough.”
OK, obviously we don’t have all the facts and it wouldn’t be right for you to violate this child’s privacy by giving them. On the other hand, what you have described sounds like a poor relationship heading further downstream and a nine-year-old child who you have accused of “not doing the work on her life.” Maybe I simply don’t understand your jargon. I don’t know what your meaning is there or what you think is a minimal requirement. She does sound like an unhappy kid who has been living with a foster family for six months after being dumped by her adoptive parents because they weren’t willing to keep doing what was necessary to help what is probably a difficult child who acted out in ways they couldn’t manage. In those circumstances, most normal people would find it hard to trust, particularly if they knew from experience that their world could be yanked out from under them at any time.
Agree with bluestocking. Dora’s world is still not on a firm footing, as far as what you have posted here. Unless you have started adoption proceedings, as far as she knows she could be moved to another strange home tomorrow. How can she consider investing herself in a situation that is so precarious?
Legal proceedings have begun, making her placement permanent.
Yeah. That’s exactly my point, which Feniyimom expressed more succinctly and better than I did. Unless you have told this child explicitly that you are willing to keep her and love her, even when you don’t like her behavior, will work with her and won’t give up on her, regardless of how difficult she chooses to be, how the heck is she supposed to build that trusting relationship you want her to build with you? She apparently calls you “Mom,” which sounds like one positive sign. Are you her “forever mom?” I think asking a kid to “claim you” without that guarantee of permanence is demanding far too much of a child, particularly a traumatized child. Adults need to take the first step. If you’ve given her those assurances and are now insisting that she start opening up to you, that’s great, but it’s not really clear from what you’ve written.
I have watched this conversation with interest, wondering how a couple of the participants fall into the adoption realm. Are you adoptive parents? Adoptees? Just curious, because in our home, and in our experience, legal proceedings matter not one whit to a child who has been moved from care giver to care giver. Neither does the use of the name “Mom”. It means less than nothing to a child who has had multiple placements. Attaching significance to these things is something a normal healthy child or adult would do, but not an unattached one. When I was new to this, and uninitiated, I made the mistake of thinking these things would matter. I have since learned better, so focus my energies elsewhere. Remember, Dora has already been legally adopted by one family, and called at least one other woman Mom. If anything, these could actually be irritants to her emotionally, rather than reassurances.
Adoptive mom, here, nobody, just for the record.
I guess I’m wondering why legal proceedings have started. Sounds to me like you’re headed into Amy-ville and I recall you explicitly saying back when Dora came along that you refused to go there again.
My2rubies,
Just curious, so feel free not to answer. How old was your child or children when they came home, and do they have a RAD diagnosis?
Also just wanted to say that I looked up some of the folks you have quoted in your previous comments, and found some excellent information and encouragement. Not from this post…one from awhile back. Thanks for sharing.
From my own experience, like what Nancy is going through, no matter what title a person gives to the process of bringing a child into the family, whether it be signing the adoption papers, changing the last name, or anything in the like, when you give and give and give and get nothing in return it almost feels like your heart can’t beat as strongly. It’s not that you, as a parent or a sibling, are asking for them to attach without precautions, because that will never really happen, I think, if I’m understanding you correct Nancy, that we’re just asking for some trust and acknowledgement.
Nancy, Dora sounds far more ambivalent to me than you seem to think. If her psychological walls were totally impermeable and impregnable, she wouldn’t feel the need to keep giving herself a pep talk to keep them up. I wouldn’t be so pessimistic; maybe she’ll eventually feel secure enough to let them down or at least show you a crack or two in them. Good luck!