It's just different

Every time we are asked, "What is the most challenging thing about adding Grace to your family?" We are quick to say, "her medical issues". Medical issues are a challenge to be sure. But, there are other things too and it's mostly because parenting Grace is, well, different.

In some ways it's easier because it's not our first rodeo as parents. In some ways it's noticeably harder because by this age both of our older kids were speaking well and communicated easily and it's not so much that way with Grace. It is, however, in every way different. Not better, not worse, just different.

For you parent's out there you might wonder - how can it be so different? For you adoptive parents out there you might be fist pumping the air and saying "testify my sister!" For you soon-to-be or might-want-to-be adoptive parents out there…sit down and buckle up.

When you plan to adopt one of the requirements is education. Lots of it, because the experts know it's just different bringing a child into your home that you have not conceived, bonded with for 9 months in utero, and then fed one way or another after giving birth. Of course it's different. All of the things from holding to feeding to burping to being there at the birth are forming attachments and bonds from day one. You don't even really have to try that hard to bond with a child you give birth to or at the very least, adopt from the moment they are born if that is your story. Those first months caring for an infant by design are constantly bonding moments. So, we who adopt "older children" who have grown through the infancy stage having been cared for by a variety of people (who for one reason or another have "left" them); and have had experiences, that experts say, mold their foundational outlook on life and shape their feelings of security and trust, are strongly advised to parent these precious ones, differently - especially if our child has ever been in institutionalized care (aka orphanage). We have spent ours upon hours of education, information overload, have had discussions with said experts until we are convinced we absolutely know how to do this; and at the same time, are pretty sure that we are going to mess this child up despite how hard we try. Am I speaking to anybody?

For example, after 7 months home with us Grace still sleeps in a crib in our bedroom. Neither of our older kids slept with us that long. Maddie lasted 4 months, and we kicked Jake out after 4 days (he grunted and made goat noises in his sleep - you understand…). Why is she still there? Aren't we bonded *enough*? Why are we being such indulgent parents and coddling her? The thing is that when she awakens whether it's daytime or night time, the first thing she does is look and make sure she isn't alone. If she is alone she panics. I don't mean she cries a little to let us know she's awake and unhappy - I mean she.full.on.panics. Every day she naps for 50-60 minutes and wakes up and panics. The second she sees me come in the room she dives back down to her pillow in relief, drenched in tears after all 30 seconds of screaming (because I rush there from wherever I am in the house), and most often falls back to sleep clutching onto my finger for dear life. Sometimes I can slip away and she sleeps longer, sometimes she doesn't, but what is constant, is that it's obviously important to her *right now* that we are close. It's important to her that she doesn't feel alone, even though she's never really alone. It's important to me and to us that she learns that she is safe, and secure, and that we won't ever leave her. I don't know why she panics. I speculate on reasons why she panics, and they are good reasons! I don't know how many times she was ever alone in a room because she lived in a foster home with 20 other kids. She slept in a room with 2-3 other kids. She had never slept in a room alone in her entire life until she came home. So we are teaching her that even if she wakes up alone, we are close and we are coming. We will always always come. Someone is always in the room with her when she falls asleep. Always. That's what she needs right now.

The week prior to our meeting Grace she was in a hospital because she had pneumonia again. She was in a hospital a month before that. Two months before that, and a few months before that. She was in a hospital more times in 19 months than my entire family combined. I have no doubt that when her nanny was with her she felt safe. However, the last time she was hospitalized right before we came for her, she was in the ICU and in China nobody and no nanny can go there with a patient. So, while she wasn't technically alone - she may as well have been since no mama…no nanny…no consistent care-taker, no "loved one" was with her all the time. When we met Grace her diaper rash was like nothing I had ever seen in my life, and I've changed a lot of diapers. Her flesh was actually shredding, red, raw. It looked as if someone had set her down on hot coals. Of course I contacted New Day and they had tried to heal it as best they could in only the 36 hours she was there after being released from the hospital but it was so bad there wasn't much anyone could do quickly to heal what had taken a week to harm. Therefore, I don't think the overall care in the hospital ICU was top notch to say the least - but, they must have done well with her pneumonia since she was well enough to travel, and I'm thankful for that. My point is, I wonder if she laid there with no nanny, nurses in masks, strangers, scared in a dirty diaper which could not have been changed often. I wonder if she cried and cried, and then gave up believing it was pointless. You see, when you adopt a little one you don't get to know all of their "stuff". We are so blessed to know a lot because of her 11 months at New Day, but don't know much at all about the first 7 months of her life except she was very sick and had surgeries at 3 weeks old. She has spent weeks in hospitals throughout her life. Weeks with no mother, no consistent family to help her or comfort her. Just because she has a forever family now doesn't erase that from her history. We know that she has experienced several hugely traumatic life events, some with us - and some without us. Abandonment at only days old, surgery at weeks old, in and out of hospitals, institutionalized care (orphanage), removal from orphanage and caregivers, a cross-country move to New Day, subsequent hospitalizations and procedures, adoption (while wonderful, from her perspective is another major life change and the grieving of being removed from all of her New Day family was obvious), heart surgery… She fits the profile exactly that I found when gathering research from an adoption counseling site.

"Children who have been exposed to loss, chronic stress, multiple incidences of stressful events, or a significantly stressful one-time events are more prone to sleep disturbances and difficulties. Literature describes the sleep-wake cycle as one of the systems that is vulnerable and easily impacted by stress or trauma. Even in the best orphanages, institutional life can be a “chronic stress” because of the infant-caregiver ratio. The impact that multiple losses, (for example – birth parent to orphanage to foster home, to adoptive family), can have on children can be traumatic. Even for those children who don’t have lasting sleep problems, many children have difficulty in the first few weeks because they are adjusting to a new time zone and experiencing a major and sometimes shocking change.

Adoptive parents are right to worry about how to handle sleep issues. There are dozens of books out there touting sleep-problem “remedies” and many of them are very effective for secure, well-adjusted children when the time is right, but using “cry it out” or even “controlled-crying” methods, like the well-known “Ferber Method”, are inappropriate for children who have suffered trauma or loss and are in the first year of placement with a new family. To let a child like this cry can tap into fears of abandonment or past loss, triggering feelings of sheer helplessness and rage. It can be emotionally exhausting for a newly adopted child to “keep it together” during the day. Even children who appear to be doing well all day – happy, alert, eating well, etc. , may let their defenses and coping mechanisms down at night, resulting in sleep problems and an unusually high need for comfort from a parent." There is a wealth of information on this site and I've found it to be particularly reassuring because the veteran parent in me screams: "You have to teach her independence! You have to teach her that it's safe to sleep in her own room". The realist in me screams: "She sleeps well next to you! She's instantly comforted just feeling your closeness. It's easier and you'll sleep better if all you have to do is reach out to her." The parent of teenagers in me screams: "Have you learned nothing? She is growing up fast enough!! Don't waste these months of her sleeping closeby because before you know it, she won't need you in this way and it will be a sweet memory all too soon. It's only a season, this too shall pass!!" Oh the voices... Ain't it the truth? You parents out there know what I'm saying. You who have blinked, as we have, and realized that our little ones now walk the halls of a high school and are talking about college plans would give almost anything for them to just want to snuggle up to you even for a second. You would give almost anything to go back to the days when holding your hand was both a comfort and a necessity. Bonus round parenting reminds me how fast this time goes and I'm savoring it. Every single last drop. Sure, there are moments when I wish for her to be "instantly secure". There are moments when I wish for her to be free of any sign of "adoptive child behavior" because it would be easier on her  me. But the investment we are making into her foundation of trust, and security, and reassuring her again and again that we will always be a family are more important than our convenience; it's more important than a schedule and a routine. It's more important than a "comfortable" lifestyle. That will all come in time, and I'm in no rush. I was the parent who once felt the pressure of getting my baby to sleep through the night so that I could tell my friends that we had achieved that "highly sought after award of parenting" and relieve the tired look from my eyes. Grace has slept through the night since we got her. From time to time she wakes up and settles back down and I'm grateful that she sleeps so well, because I don't rebound from lack of sleep like I did in my early twenties, that's for sure, so it is easier for her to be so close when she does wake up. What she needs most is the reassurance that she's never again going to be alone. She never again is going to wake up one day and be taken from the people she loves and thrust into the arms of strangers.  Do those things consciously go through her mind? Probably not. Does she have a chronic instinct to fear being alone? It appears that way. The truth is, we may never know because as she's growing and learning to communicate she's not going to one day spill all of her feelings in a long monologue of explosive communication to account for her first 2 years of life. So we guess, we research, we pay attention to her behaviors and her patterns, and we love her fiercely through all of it. I daily have to look at her and wonder, "is this a toddler behavior or an adoption survivor behavior or both? Are you testing me to see if I will respond to your needs and how fast? What is it that you are trying to test me on today?" We beg God for wisdom to know the difference and parent her the best we can. So it's different. We celebrate moments when we see progress. Moments outsiders would see as common, we see as extraordinary healing.  I notice moments when she chooses to follow us into another room vs. laying on the floor and panicking that we have walked away from her. I give thanks for moments when she leaves a room where we are and goes to play independently. Those are particularly huge. There were times when we used to have to be touching her for her to feel safe enough to fall asleep, and now we can sit in a chair close by and she is content with that. It's about all of the baby steps. Her little tiny size-almost-3 baby steps. I have no fear that she is going to be still in a crib next to my side of the bed when she starts kindergarten. I do think she might be the type that for whom we weave an exciting story of a tiny Chinese girl who embarks on the brave adventure of sleeping in her *own* room like a big girl, filled with rewards of stickers and fabulous prizes and incentives for making such an important step. She just might be *that* kid who needs to be outwitted and feel as though she's making up her own mind rather than be forced into submission. Lord have mercy.  (I'm convinced that she is a firstborn in her birth family) So there it is. There's one example of how it's just different. It's beautifully complicated and wonderfully exhausting. It's think outside the box parenting, it's removing comparisons and expectations of a tiny person who has endured so much more trauma than a two year old ever should. We will get to each of us sleeping in our own rooms someday. We will have bedtimes where we take her to her room, say prayers and leave the room while she's awake, but not today. Maybe not next month or the month after that, and one day I'll look back on these days and remember how sweet it was that all she needed to feel safe was to hold my finger and know I was close. And I'll miss it.