two steps forward, one step back
Last week was hard.
The week before, Mr. A had to travel a bit for work. He wasn’t home three nights and mornings in a row. This is pretty unusual for us. Mr. A generally gets the girls dressed and feeds them breakfast each morning. He is usually home for dinner, plays with the girls, then puts them to bed each night. Three days of a different routine was not a huge problem that week. Do to some crazy lawsuit or something, Mr. A had to work a lot over the weekend. Then last week, he was away for three more nights.
It didn’t happen overnight, but it became clear that something was going on with L by the second week. She has been exerting her two-year-old will more and more over the last month, but she started to insist that she do EVERYTHING herself. “I DO IT!” was all I heard all day long. And when it was clear that she couldn’t do what she wanted, she started throwing tantrums. I blamed the tantrums on the fact that L is two. And I blamed them and her crankiness on L’s eternal teething (finally, she is cutting three incisors).
The tantrums got worse. We had to leave the library because L wouldn’t stay near us and pitched a fit when I tried to hold her hand. We went shopping with my mom and L planted her feet and screamed at the top of her lungs in the middle of Ann Taylor. Over and over. We had to leave there too.
The worst, though, happened at home. L woke up at around 10pm and screamed for over an hour. She would not calm down or go back to sleep. Mr. A came home from his trip in the middle of that doozy and that only seemed to upset her more. The next morning, with no apparent cause or catalyst, she raged again for over an hour. I finally had to put her in the Ergo carrier because I couldn’t hold her while she was thrashing around. She screamed her voice hoarse until I put her in the car and she fell asleep. These were not your typical two-year-old tantrums.
If I were reading this description on someone else’s blog, I would be thinking “attachment issues! attachment issues!” I think that is probaby a fair assumption. We have been dealing with L’s attachment and trauma issues since she first came into our family. This isn’t even the first time that a change in the family routine or someone traveling led to acting out. It just caught me off guard because L seems so much like a “normal” kid (i.e. kid who hasn’t been traumatized) so much of the time, I forget that sometimes she will react more intensely.
Despite my fears when everything was going south last week, I don’t think L has an attachment disorder. At the same time, L hasn’t survived the trauma in her life unscarred. I think some part of her subconscious remembers losing her cargivers and her first home. Thinking about it now, I am pretty sure that this recent episode shows just how very attached to Mr. A she is now. Even though I told her that daddy was a work, wasn’t coming home for dinner, etc., she isn’t old enough to understand. She didn’t get why he was talking to her on the phone instead of coming home when he normally does.
I also think this travel happened at an incredibly inopportune time: right when L is trying to figure out exactly what she can and can not control in her world. A time when she wants to control everything. She couldn’t make Mr. A’s come home, nor could she rely on the safety net of our routine. To a kid who has lost people before without warning, that is probably a pretty scary feeling. I think Mr. A’s sudden and prolonged disappearance triggered those old feelings for her.
While last week was tough, in the long run, I think getting through the experience will be good for L. Daddy went away for what seemed like a long time, but he came back. She got to act out her feelings, but I’m is still right here with her. When she is out of control, we (I) will give her the boundaries she needs.
Mr. A and I will just keep doing what we do to let her know that she is safe in our family. Already, after a long weekend of family time together, L seems more relaxed and mostly back to her old self.