Christmas Morning On My Own Thinking about Problems

I'm spending this morning by myself, doing almost nothing, which is a pretty relaxing break. Later, we're going to meet up again at my mom's house to open most of our presents. Sunny and Guy drove to Sunny's sister's house. 

Guy just called to tell me that Sunny's little cousin is reenacting scenes from Scarface with her new Nerf gun.  Every time I hear another story like that it just boggles my mind. His cousin is 8 years old and she's watching Scarface and Saw and playing Grand Theft Auto.  It's lucky she's smart, sophisticated and has a great sense of humor, so I think she's able to keep a critical distance from all the mind-numbing media ultraviolence.

I tried to buy her an extra present for today -- a Tiana doll, since I know she would love one -- but of course all the stores around here were totally sold out of them. I'm about to order one online.

Now that I have some space to think, I'm calming down about the information I received a few days ago.  The "Merry Christmas, your son and his brother are meth-exposed!" message. I appreciate the kind comments on my last post.

I'm worried about the stigma on Sunny's behalf.  He already faces stigma for being adopted from foster care. We're open about that, because he's open about that. It's a trade-off between stigma and shame. If you don't hide something, people will pre-judge you negatively. But if you hide it, or are encouraged to hide it, you'll grow to be ashamed of something you shouldn't be ashamed of.

I feel I can be open in real life about his ADHD. It's such a commonly discussed topic. I can easily put it in a non-adoption context, since I grew up having a cousin with ADHD.  I'm going to go on telling people Sunny has ADHD.  The alternative is to say "We think he has prenatal meth exposure, which led to brain development issues including a set of behaviors which happens to include many of the same behaviors as ADHD".

But it's really not genetic ADHD. We already know that ADHD meds don't work on him well, or upset him emotionally to the point where he can't take them.  Many of his behaviors are nowhere near as severe as my cousin's were.

The scariest behavior that Sunny has -- and this scares me even more than the rages sometimes -- is his inability to be alone.  He cannot even put on his pajamas alone by himself.  He'll run out naked into the hallway putting on his pajamas so that he won't be alone by himself in the bedroom even for half a minute. It's not about attachment -- if we're not there, another adult or child  will do for an audience -- and I doubt it has anything to do with a particular past traumatic event.  He just cannot be alone with his thoughts.

We quickly realized that time-outs were pointless for Sunny, and I wish we had never tried them at all.  The idea behind a time-out is to calm yourself down, but they had the opposite effect on Sunny.  When he had time-outs, he would hurl himself against the door, beg, plead, sob, scream himself hoarse, "MOM DAD PLEASE SAY SOMETHING".

I think that being in that rage and panic state is actually much more comfortable for Sunny than being alone with his thoughts. Rages, in part, are a defensive reaction against being alone.  If he rages and panics, people will pay attention to him, and he won't be alone.  Because he can't stand to be alone, he finds it hard to calm himself down.  Usually, when people get mad, they storm off, which is often a smart tactic. Storming off means removing yourself from the presence of the person who is enraging you, and giving yourself a space to calm down, hopefully to come back later for a cooler discussion.  But when Sunny storms off, he hits the wall of being alone, snaps back like a rubber band, turns 180 degrees and comes back into the enraging presence, still enraged.  When he storms off, his storm-right-back line is about 20 feet indoors, 40 feet outdoors.

I think that his fear of being alone is very deep-seated, possibly related to the meth exposure, and I'm scared of what will happen to him as an adult if it never gets better.

1) people may be scared of him or avoid him because he won't seem to respect their physical boundaries in emotional situations.  If they draw away, he'll go into panic mode and follow them out of fear of being alone.
2) If he happens to fall in with anyone particularly manipulative -- perhaps a friend, group of friends, business partner, lover -- and they realize this tendency, they'll have him under their thumb.
3) He would be especially vulnerable to a cult or destructive religious group, which tend to create highly social environments in which people never have to be alone.

Balancing that out is the fact that he's very strong-willed and increasingly self-aware.  He isn't that vulnerable to peer pressure right now -- he's too strong-willed and argumentative -- and hopefully that will keep up as approaches the difficult teen years. So far, he's still very popular, but he's starting to get a reputation at school as a "crybaby", someone who can't control their emotions, someone who pushes when he's mad... I'm worried that if this escalates and kids are going to start leaving him alone, which would trigger a vicious cycle of panic, fear and more avoidance.  He's already become very sensitive about people thinking he's a crybaby.

Luckily, the kids at the school are very diverse, and some kids in his class have similar problem behaviors and some have different problem behaviors. He doesn't stand out as the only one, and the classroom has a strong focus on inclusion.

I wonder if a neurologist can address this in any way.  Maybe not.  Maybe we'll just have to keep working on giving him a lot of different tools that will help him handle the different symptoms of this base issue, because it's never going to go away or get better.

Also scary is the thought that when we get BB, he's going to go through the same things as Sunny.  His foster mom keeps trying to get the developmental infant people to examine BB, but they won't return her calls. Another effect of the budget crisis.


I'm definitely not going to talk to NN about this.  According to everything NN says, her daughter was practically a saint, and she died simply of a hard childbirth and a heart condition. I know she didn't really have a "heart condition". But why say anything to the contrary? NN will talk about the best parts of her daughter's life to Sunny, and the best parts are just as true as the worst parts, and if I died, that's the way I'd like to be remembered too. I don't want to talk about the meth exposure in front of NN, or anyone who isn't a professional or somehow involved in real life, because it's a huge issue with privacy.

At some point when he gets older I'll have to talk to Sunny about it.  That's not something I'm looking forward to either.  That means we have to move beyond "Your Mommy _ was very sick, which is why she couldn't take care of you, even though she wanted to" and into some of the uncomfortable details.

I feel like I worked through a lot of my stress just typing this up.

I'm going to move on and have a great Christmas Day.  I love watching Sunny open his presents, pumping his fist and syelling "YESS!"

I'm also heading somewhere warmer now.  The heating in our house failed for an unknown reason yesterday, and the probability of getting anyone to fix it this weekend is pretty low!  Luckily, we live in Georgia, not somewhere terrifying like New York or Michigan. So losing heating is an irritating inconvenience, not an emergency.