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.
May 29th, 2008 at 5:42 am
I just wanted to thank you for sharing your experiences with L. We just met our daughter in China in March, she was 19 months old then, and she was a very, very sad and stressed little girl when she was “handed over.” While I was in China I even looked up your blog because I remembered how much L had cried initially. And I was a little jealous when it seemed L at least smiled 2 days later! Our little one finally cracked a grin after a very long week. But she would have absolutely nothing to do with my husband (even when we came home from China) and I again thought of what you wrote about L and Mr. A. I took your tip to heart and when I realized that “forced” time with Dad was backfiring, we just spent lots of time together, all of us. So thanks for sharing, it helped me tremendously. And our daughter is amazing and doing fabulously, by the way.
May 29th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
We had our own trauma which has returned our DD to her previously exceedingly clingy state. Poor thing cracked her front tooth and then had to go to the dentist to get it removed. It was traumatic for all of us but much more for her of course. The only bright side?? if it’s possible to find one is that she is mostly okay with her mama (me) now and will cling to me, not just her dad.
May 29th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
I find these posts really helpful as we contemplate a third child whomight be something other than a newborn. Thanks!
May 29th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Thanks for sharing this. It is constant balance and rhythm, isn’t it? Right now, lbg’s anxiety seems to center around nap time, and the fear that I may disappear if she goes to sleep-kind of reasonable, given her experience. She holds my hand to fall asleep-in a vise grip. And the screams are blood curdling if she wakes without me there. ~lmc
May 29th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
My daughter is having some of these same experiences. When my spouse works a lot or travels overnight, she expresses a lot of anxiety. We noticed it was worse when my spouse returned in the middle of the night and showed up to answer her cries.
May 29th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Thanks for sharing this. I have been thinking lately about how most kids are afraid of losing their parents, even when they are really young. That’s really normal, I think. But the kids who came to us through adoption have a different kind of experience. This is not just an abstract fear for them. They have a deep, bodily and even intellectual understanding that this can happen.
Recently my daughter and I were play this game where I said “when you are 14 years old, I’ll be this old, and when you are 37, I’ll be this many years old.” Finally she came up with a old age for herself and asked me how old I’d be then. I said “oh, honey, I don’t know if I’ll still be alive then. She got big tears and said “mama, that what I so afraid of.” It amazes me that she can articulate that.
Mostly I’d say she is doing so, so well and I think our attachment is healthy. But still, she has some profound fears.
June 3rd, 2008 at 5:56 pm
Both my children were adopted as older children, and both had alcoholic, neglectful birthmothers. When I go away, they get anxious. My daughter was very upset when I was in Kazakhstan last year adopting my son. It’s just a trauma that takes time to heal, and may never fully heal.
When your daughter is a little older, it should become easier when she’s separated from her daddy. You can talk to her and help her understand better.
Dee
July 13th, 2008 at 12:52 am
[...] While I was very sure that L showed good signs of attachment, there were little things that would niggle at the back of my brain. I have seen certain behaviors and reactions from her that were unusual, very intensely when we first met and less often but still occasionally now. But they weren’t attachment and I didn’t have any other framework to use to identify them. But I knew it was *something*. [...]