This is Reassuring, and Interesting

Many children 'hear voices'; most aren't bothered

By Anne Harding Anne Harding – Tue Jan 26, 5:22 pm ET

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Nearly 1 in 10 seven- to eight-year-olds hears voices that aren't really there, according to a new study. But most children who hear voices don't find them troubling or disruptive to their thinking, the study team found. "These voices in general have a limited impact in daily life," Agna A. Bartels-Velthuis of University Medical Center Groningen in The Netherlands wrote in an email to Reuters Health. And parents whose children hear voices should not be overly concerned, she added. "In most cases the voices will just disappear. I would advise them to reassure their child and to watch him or her closely." Up to 16 percent of mentally healthy children and teens may hear voices, the researchers note in the British Journal of Psychiatry. While hearing voices can signal a heightened risk of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders in later life, they add, the "great majority" of young people who have these experiences never become mentally ill.

[...]

Children's brains are amazing places.

Follow-Up

I really appreciate all the comments in the last post. 27 now. I think it's my record here! This post went up on Racialicious today as well, and it's reaching a wide audience, which is what I'd hoped for.

I also want to let any new readers know that if you're frustrated by the comment registration policy, I'm sorry. If you really need to get in touch with me, try email. But I like having the registration policy in place because it means I never have to deal with comment spam or drive-by flaming, and I have limited time to manage my blog. Google registration also keeps comments centered on a regular group of people -- other adoption bloggers -- that have been reading me for years, as I've been reading them for years.

As for a comment policy, I don't have one. If you take the time to type up a negative comment, I'll probably leave it. I will note that I don't hate transracial adoption. I'm a transracial adoptive parent; I have a hopefully-healthy-rather-than-narcissistic love for myself. Also, I reserve the right to judge pretty much everything and everyone. I usually define the word "judge" to mean "think critically". I'm aware that many other people have different definitions of the word "judging", such as "saying anything I don't like" or "being a jerk".

I'm probably not going to revisit the topic for a bit, unless I become aware of an important immigration action item (I'm hoping that a proposal will come up soon to at the very least double the number of Haitian visas).


Again, I really appreciate the comments.  And if you want to stick around, great! Just warning you that most of what I post about regularly is more day-to-day mommyblogging type of stuff.

The Dangerous Desire to Adopt Haitian Babies

I'm a foster care adoptive parent. I can't speak for all of us, since we're a diverse bunch. Some of us have also adopted internationally and support international adoption strongly. Others despise the institution, and are angry about what the perceived hypocrisy of parents who walk past the foster kids in their own cities and states so that they can adopt from a far-away country. I'm somewhere in the middle, but definitely leaning more towards the anti side, especially after this week.

This week, I've been deeply disturbed at the swelling public desire to adopt Haitians. Haitian orphan babies. The very name is problematic. In our imagination, an orphan has no family, but the vast majority of "orphans" all over the world have living parents, and almost every single one has living extended relatives. And the children that need family care are, overwhelmingly, older children.

Quite a few other parents I know are really pissed off about it. If you want to adopt, why not consider adopting from foster care? Why Haitian babies? I can guess at some of the answers. Most of them will not be very flattering.

There's a certain group of white adoptive international parents that dominate much of the discourse around adoption in this country. The most organized of these are evangelical Christians, but many of them are secular in their beliefs on adoption. They're across the political spectrum, ultraconservative to ultraliberal, though if I had to hazard a guess, most of them are center-right in politics. I believe these people are, basically, a force for evil. If I put it in any nicer words, that would be a lie. Examining their belief system, and their potential political influence on the recovery efforts in Haiti, is a pretty terrifying process.

I was first made aware of the Rumor Queen website several years ago. I was doing some research on Chinese adoption for a blog post. They're a large community of parents adopting from China, and the site is known for posting a lot of useful data about wait times. A few years ago controversy happened in the forum when some Chinese-American parents were accused by white parents of "jumping the line". There is, in fact, an expedited program for some Chinese-Americans; it's quite restrictive and any Chinese-American greater than second-generation does not qualify. The fact that some of these Chinese-Americans were possibly be more worthy of Chinese babies because of factors like "language" and "culture" and "race" apparently enraged some of the white parents. I read about it second hand from a couple of really angry, hurt Chinese-American families. This episode should give you a taste of the quality of discourse at this and similar websites. There are dissident voices, but the environments are most often dominated by white parents who refuse to consider any of the complex ethical issues surrounding transracial, transcultural, international adoption. They're saving children. How can you argue with that, right?

These online communities are often very hostile places for adoptive parents of color. They're even more hostile, of course, to adoptees and birth/first parents who want to discuss more complicated perspectives of adoption.

I stumbled on Rumor Queen again recently and was shocked to see what was going on. The whole site has gone gaga over adopting Haitian babies. It began with concerns about Haitian children, and is evolving into a coordinated plan of action to put pressure on political representatives for a Haitian babylift.

Also, I’m hearing about plans to bring more children (as in, thousands) into the U.S. all at once on airplanes. There are some precedents for this, there was Operation Peter Pan / Pedro Pan in Cuba in the 60’s, and then there was Operation Babylift in Vietnam in the 70’s. IIRC they did something similar in Korea in the 50’s, but I’m not sure it was given a name. At any rate, there is precedent for allowing a whole bunch of orphans into the U.S. who do not already have parents waiting for them. The U.S. government has not yet given the green light on this, and I’m unclear at this point who exactly gets the final word on it. If anyone out there has more information about it, please share. If it can be done in a way that ensures they are only bringing true orphans over then I’m all for it and would get behind it in a letter writing campaign. However, I would want someone overseeing the effort who can make sure things are done ethically. Someone with the ability and the clout to insist upon it.

The concern that "things are done ethically"... that's a nice thought. The comments dispense with that window dressing. They're full of demands that we have to get the kids out now, now, now, before they die, die, die. The practical reality is that after a horrific disaster of the magnitude of the Haiti quake, it's completely impossible to determine whether any abandoned child is a "true orphan". It's a process that is going to take months and even years.

This post from a more informed international adoptive parent blogger is a more reality-based examination of the issue. Adoptee bloggers who also study adoption academically -- among them Harlow's Monkey and A Birth Project -- are deeply concerned about the parallels to massive child extraction events like Operation Babylift. These were not shining humanitarian moments. Many of the adopted children found out later that they had parents and siblings left behind who wanted them, or even relatives in the United States who were searching for them.

In countries like Haiti that suffer so severely from poverty, citizens have to take the risks of globalization, but reap few of the rewards. Families are split apart as young people go to the cities to work, or to other countries, leaving their children in the care of relatives. Family ties are weakened by poverty, by the constant presence of disease, death and loss, but also paradoxically strengthened as families come up with new ways to endure hardship and stay together. A white middle-class Midwestern mother doesn't understand why a Haitian mother would leave her children at an orphanage, hoping to take them back later. The white mother could understand if she really thought about it on a rational basis. But the lure of the white savior narrative is powerful, and sweeps her up in a rush of emotion: fear, longing, desire. It's because the Haitian mother is a bad mother who doesn't deserve her kids anymore. The innocent baby is not yet contaminated by this evil culture. They deserve something better, cleaner, richer, more tender, whiter.

Here's another comment from that thread.

RumorQueen Says:
January 21st, 2010 at 2:07 pm
And how many children will die while they are building a new infrastructure?

Sometimes you do what you can, not what the ideal would seem to be.

It’s like the guy rescuing starfish on the beach, there are a hundred thousand starfish and a guy is throwing some of them back in the water. Someone tells him there are too many, he can’t possibly make a difference all by himself. And he says, as he throws one in the water “I made a difference to that one”.

There are going to be all kinds of issues these kids will deal with. I’ve gone out of my way so my kids know I did not “rescue” them... but that isn’t going to be able to be said for these kids. Sure, it’s not an ideal situation. But would it be better to let them die?

Analogies simplify complex issues, sometimes in an accurate way, but this analogy is just smoke and mirrors. International adoptive parents are really fond of this starfish metaphor and this is not the first time I've seen it in play. It always boggles my mind. Why is adopting a third-world "orphan" like throwing a starfish back in the ocean? Maybe the poor starfishes needed to be on the beach as part of their mating cycle and the guy is messing with them because he's sadistic. Maybe he has a weird sexual fetish about echinoderm-hurling. Or maybe he's just a dumb-ass. The analogy effectively obscures the issue of motivation, as well as the implication of "saving".

Let me try another analogy. Let's say you live with your child in a house that burns down. You're dazed, confused, and burned. Your neighbor says, "I think I should take care of your child". You say, "Thanks for your offer. But my child really needs me now, and I think they wouldn't sleep well in a strange house. If you could just give us a tent and some food and some bandages so we can camp out while I get better and look into rebuilding, we'll be OK." Your neighbor says, "that's too logistically complicated and I'm concerned about the security situation. I just want your child." You say, "Thanks again for your concern and I'm grateful for any help you can give me. If you're so worried about my child, maybe you could let both of us stay in your guestroom for a while? That way my child could be safe and would sleep well too." Your neighbor says, "No, we have an interdiction-at-sea policy and visa restrictions will not be relaxed. Just give me your child. Actually, nevermind. I don't even need your permission anymore. I'll just take them."

Here's the worst comment on the thread. It was let through without a rejoinder. Mine was blocked.

49. Proud2Adopt Says:
January 22nd, 2010 at 1:03 am EthioChinaadopt – the issue is that if someone is paying $30,000 to adopt a child, they want a baby! Its as simple as that! I’m really tired of hearing about how so many of these kids are just split from their parents. Lets get the 380,000 kids that were ALREADY orphans OUT of the country & into waiting homes, that way the focus of orphanages can be on those children who are NEW orphans or split from parents & families. The reality to me is, I would LOVE to adopt one of these children. No, this isn’t a NEW passion spurred from seeing photos on TV. But hopefully with the dire situation they will waive much of the 25K+ fees for families like mine to adopt one of these children here! Amen!

I admit I wasn't nearly as diplomatic as I could have been. But that's not my strong point. I was way too irritated with these people. In case you're wondering why the maniac above me was referring to $30,000 for a fresh baby, I really don't know. I'm not up-to-date on the latest prices in the international baby market.

The next babylift thread was racist beyond belief. Rumor Queen ran footage of a riot at a food distribution point.

Desperate target Haiti’s orphanages

In a country where it is survival of the fittest, what chance do babies and children in an orphanage have?

The Vietnamese Operation Babylift was driven both by racism and fear of communism. But this framing, on the other hand, is pure 100% unadulterated racism, invoking the most damaging stereotype of black people invented by white imperialists. "Survival of the fittest" implies that Haitians are nothing more than animals. Their children need to be removed immediately or they won't even grow up to be human beings.

I haven't watched a lot of news in the past week -- probably less than 10 minutes of footage a day from sources like CNN -- but in those brief times, I've seen plenty of examples of orderly food distribution. I've seen Haitians rescuing each other. I've read accounts by independent media, small media and even the mainstream media -- "Despite isolated incidents of looting, violence and other criminal activity, the overall security situation remains calm" -- that security fears have been massively overblown.

Rumor Queen attacked me for my blocked comment later on in that thread. I then left a harsher comment (I refrained from profanity but did use the word "strip-mining") and my comment was, of course, also blocked.

Luckily, policy makers aren't listening to these people with full attention anymore. There are competing voices. UNICEF, Save the Children, SOS Children's Villages, pretty much every single large secular children's aid organization, plus some of the religious ones, are advocating a total stop to new international adoptions until quake recovery gets underway and far-flung families begin to come together again. Adoption should be the last resort. I agree with that. I'm somewhat moderate in that I don't see a huge problem with removing children who have already been through most of the process and have already met their adoptive parents. If a bond is already there, there's no point adding another loss. And a lot of the adoption process is true red tape that doesn't serve anyone's interests. But airlifting children who just "appear to be orphans" (as several Catholic leaders in Miami have been demanding) and almost certainly cutting them off from their roots... this is wrong. It's wrong for the children, it's wrong for their relatives, and it's wrong for the country of Haiti.

There was an adoption story I heard on NPR yesterday that really touched me. It's not the typical adoption narrative we've been hearing:

Margalita Belhumer, a Haitian-American who lives in New York City, was visiting Haiti when the quake struck nine days ago. She shaded her eyes from the tropical sun as her 8-year-old daughter, Melissa, squatted at her feet.

"I'm seeking to leave with my daughter. People are dead, place crumbled. She has nowhere to live, so I can't leave without her," Belhumer said.

She said she raised Melissa since the girl was a newborn infant, wrapped in a sheet and left on the sidewalk in front of St. Joseph's Catholic Church. Child abandonment by destitute mothers is not uncommon in Haiti. While Belhumer worked at her job as a security guard in New York, she paid a family to take care of Melissa. Belhumer said she had begun the adoption paperwork before the quake struck.

"I started the adoption process, but I started last month. But I've had her since the first day she was born," she said.

If any adoption is expedited, it should be these ones. But these are also the people who are least likely to have the ears of politicians. Everyone wants Haitian babies. Haitian adults, and Haitian families, are another matter. There has been no announcement that more visas will be granted to reunite Haitian-American families.

This report by a US adoptee-rights blogger, based on notes from a USCIS teleconference, has a chilling quote.

Hundreds of adoptive parents, paps, orphanage directors with dozens of children, and even, apparently, loose children gather outside the US Embassy. Many come unannounced demanding entry. Officials have set up and are refining procedures for entry into the compound, interviews, and decision making. (Procedures were discussed in detail, but I"ll hold that for another entry.) They emphasize that the Embassy needs advance notice of petitioners so someone can go outside, locate them, and escort them through the gates. Only adoption cases are being handled. (Haitians with other Embassy business, including those with pending pre-quake visa and immigration applications are being turned away for now.)

Talk of adopting orphaned Haitian babies seems to be swirling all over. And though I'm concentrating my ire on a certain class of white adoptive parents, I'll have to note, not everyone full of this dangerous desire is white.

"I wanna just go down there and get some of those babies," Latifah said on the Today Show Thursday. "If you got a hook up, please get me a couple of Haitian kids. It's time. I'm ready."

As someone who has adopted before, here's some questions I'd ask of anybody in the U.S., of any race, who is really serious about this.

- Do you know what a homestudy is? Are you ready to pass one?
- Do you realize it will be almost impossible to adopt a baby, hard to adopt a toddler, and that the vast majority of children who really need to be adopted are older children?
- Do you know what attachment disorder is? Children with inconsistent caregiving in early years often develop this to some degree. They may experience the expression of love as a terrifying loss of self. They may do anything in their power to make you stop loving them, including physically attacking you, your pets or your other children. There is no known 100% effective therapy for this.
- Do you understand the effects of various prenatal exposures? Do you understand and accept that your child may grow up with irreparable brain damage?
- Are you ready to establish routine visits to one, two, three, all of these and more: therapist, psychiatrist, physical therapist, neurologist?
- Are you prepared that your child may resent you or hate you for taking them away from everything and everyone they've known and loved? And that even if you've explained to them that they're never going back, they may still try to push you away, because in the back of their minds, if they're bad enough, you'll send them away, and they'll go back to everything and everyone they've known and loved?
- Are you prepared to have a child so terrified from trauma that they act as if they were half their developmental age? That they wake you up screaming every night at 3 in the morning? That they rage uncontrollably if you don't stay by their side every waking minute?
- Are you prepared for your friends and family to perhaps shrink away from you because they don't understand why your child acts the way they act -- maybe it's because you don't love them enough, or you don't spank them enough -- you're doing it all wrong and it's all your fault.

If you can answer "yes" to all of these, congratulations. You might be ready to adopt from foster care. To adopt from Haiti, answer all the above questions, add the effects of malnutrition, add a language barrier, and multiply the child's trauma by a factor of ten. And subtract a lot of money. Unlike foster care adoptions, which are basically free, you're going to have to pay legal fees. Maybe even $30,000. And children from foster care will have permanent Medicaid, no matter your income level, but if you adopt internationally, it's up to you to find a way to pay for all those psychiatrist visits you'll almost certainly be needing later on.

Here are some additional questions:

- Are you aware of transracial adoption issues? If you're a black American, are you aware that transcultural issues can be just as intense as transracial ones?
- Do you have a connection to a Haitian-American community? Do you speak Kreyol or French?
- Your child will likely be Catholic and think of themselves as Catholic. Are you? If not, how will you handle the difference?
- The ethical thing to do is to try to establish contact with your child's relatives in Haiti. Are you prepared for the fact that you, as a rich American (no matter what your income level) will then be regarded as a financial benefactor/patron? If you've grown up in the US and absorbed our surface-egalitarian values, you will be unaccustomed to this kind of role, and extremely bad at it. If you refuse to make contact because of this issue, or because of fear that your child will love you better if you cut them off from their roots, then... well... you suck. I'll leave it at that.

You'd better be sure you can handle it. If you can't, your child will pay the highest cost. If the adoption falls through, your child may end up in foster care, possibly so scarred that they'll never get another chance at a family.

I've said a lot of harsh things in this post. But I also want to note that this desire can also be understood in a positive way. Children inspire love. I believe in certain universal values, and across every culture and all of history, people love children and want to take care of them. An equally universal trait, unfortunately, is the desire to exploit children. Children don't speak fully for themselves, so we speak for them. It's necessary, but it's also dangerous. Exploiting a child can be as blatant as child sexual abuse, or sweatshop labor... and it can be as subtle as wanting our children to validate us as parents. Wanting them to love us, and being angry when they don't show us love.

We're getting into grounds of philosophy and religion here, but I don't think a completely pure love is truly possible on this earth, because love needs knowledge, and pure knowledge is impossible. We try, but we don't know fully what's best for the other person, so we make guesses, and our guesses are based on imperfect knowledge. And so exploitation creeps in.

My religion talks a lot about the impossibility of individual purity and makes the acknowledgment of imperfection absolutely necessary. I think many other belief systems address the same issue in different ways. For example, in Christianity, Jesus Christ represents a pure kind of love, and other kinds of love exist in relation to that standard. The answer is not to stop loving, or to stop trying to understand, but to realize that our love is always endangered by selfishness. If we ever think our love is pure, we need to stop thinking along that track, take a step back and think again. Don't stop loving, just stop thinking that your love is infallible and all-knowing.

I'll close with a few reality-based ways to help Haitian children in Haitian families:

- Donate to SOS Children's Villages, Save the Children or UNICEF.
- Sign this AIUSA petition to request an end to interdiction-at-sea policy
- Contact your representative. Ask them to support an increase in refugee visas for Haitians and expedited family reunification visas for Haitian-Americans. Ask them to support the airlift of Haitian children unaccompanied by family ONLY for the purposes of temporary medical hosting and NOT for the purposes of adoption.
- If you live close to a Haitian-American community, contact their organizations and ask if there is anything you can do to support community efforts.

I may add more later as I become aware.

Follow-Up and Miscellaneous

From the therapist (I love quoting emails, it's so easy).

Thanks again for the update.  I wanted to address the issue with visiting your cousin in greater detail than I was able to last night.  First of all, I think it was extremely savvy of you to figure out the emotional connection for [Sunny] between visits with your cousin and his biological mother.  It sounds like you hit the nail on the head and were able to deescalate the situation quickly as a result.  As I mentioned, [Sunny] and I discussed grief and bereavement and read a story about losing a loved one through death.  He seemed interested in the story as he sat quietly throughout, which is unusual for him.  He struggled to talk about the story afterward, likely due to the discomfort he experiences in facing his emotions head on.  We have been and will continue to work on this as I think it is the heart of the issue for him.  To answer your question regarding whether or not he should be allowed to continue with visitation, my answer is most certainly.  It is important to show him he can visit your cousin and say goodbye to her and that the goodbye will not be forever.  I would also encourage you to verbalize this to him (i.e., let him know when you will be coming back) and acknowledge and label his feelings for him (i.e., sad, scared, etc.).  This last part will be extremely important in whatever you are doing as it seems [Sunny] may not always know what he is feeling so the more help he can get with the identification of feelings the better.  Please let me know if you have questions.

I've tried reading books about loss with him before, but it's very difficult.  When we read Everett Anderson's Goodbye, he was crying bitterly by the end of it, and told me he never wanted to read it again because it was too sad.  It's nice to finally have some professional backup and guidance.

However, it's not entirely true I was able to "deescalate the situation quickly".  It took about 30 grinding minutes and felt like an eternity.

To a commenter who asked what medication Sunny is taking: it's a popular atypical antipsychotic that also begins with the letter A. If you look up any reference on that drug class it'll be right there.  That's the only med he's on.  I don't have him on any of the strictly ADHD drugs.  His foster mother tried Adderall at one point, but said it made him "act mean", even though it did improve his ability to concentrate.  Given his generally good academics, and the fact that I don't think he has standard ADHD, I don't want to give him any med that will change his personality, as long as he can get along OK in school with the support of his 504 plan.

Thanks to everyone else who's commented!

Later today, I'm going to start working on a blog post on the media around Haitian "orphan" adoption.  I need to get back to some controversial posts after a long string of just-about-family ones.

A Lightbulb Moment

We visited my cousin a week and a half ago at her psychiatric clinic.  I think I did mention the visit in a previous blog post.  I never had any qualms about the clinic environment, because it's a pretty nice, high-end type of place.  It's bright, airy, the staff are casual and friendly, and I've never heard anyone screaming.  When we go over there Sunny usually plays games with my cousin and anyone else who happens to be hanging out in the lounge area.

Last time, Sunny had some very bad behavior after we left.  We had to spend about ten minutes in the parking lot and back porch.  I always refuse to get into the car with Sunny once he passes a certain point of emotional turmoil.  It's because I don't want him throwing stuff at me while I'm driving (if he gets worked up while I'm driving, I immediately pull over).

Tonight, when we went to visit, I prepped him extensively.  I reminded him that my cousin might not feel well.  "If she has a headache, we have to turn around and go home." I reminded him that the clinic might have an outing, and we might have to leave early.  I told him to try and keep calm when it was time for us to leave.  I gave him all sorts of reminders covering various contingencies.  I was a little nervous of taking him anyway, given the rough week we just had, but he seemed to have recovered, and he'd been begging all weekend to visit my cousin.

So we showed up at 5pm, in the middle of visiting hours.  Luckily, my cousin was feeling well enough for a visit.  She always lights up when she sees Sunny.  He really is a little ray of sunshine (except when he's a thunderclap of doom, of course, but mostly, he's a little ray of sunshine).

We had dinner together, although she didn't feel quite well enough to eat.  She's on a lot of medications that do unpredictable things to her appetite.  He was so happy to see her.  He even repeated, unprompted, what I'd told him earlier: "if we come visit and you have a headache, it's OK.  We'll just come back when you feel better."

Sunny had a fantastic time playing Pictionary with my cousin and three other patients.  I told him we were going to leave at 6:30 and gave him plenty of reminders.  The game wrapped up naturally around 6:30, then we said our goodbyes, signed out, and walked out the back.  Again, out in the parking lot, Sunny started breaking down and picked an excuse to fight with me.  He wouldn't do his deep breathing exercise when I asked him to calm down.  He just got more and more worked up.

"All you ever do is mean things to me."
"I say I'm sorry a million times, but you don't listen to me."
"You just want me to freeze to death" (but this time I had moved back into the heated back porch and I was preparing myself for the breakdown)
"You never listen to me."
"You don't care about me."
"You're mean."
"You're a total idiot."
"You don't listen to me, you don't care about me, I hate you, you hurt me and you never say I'm sorry, you don't listen to me when I say I'm sorry, you're never nice to me, you're mean to me..."

At one point one of the staff came to the back porch and asked if we were having trouble with the door.  I just gave her a forced smile and told her we were going to be on the porch for a little bit because my son was having a tantrum, but he'd get over it.  I'm past the point of being embarrassed when things like this happen.  The only thing I ever worry about is people calling the police or child protective services.  I wasn't too worried about that here.  It's a psychiatric clinic, after all.

He screamed and cried and accused me for a while.  He started pushing and grabbing at me.  Finally, I had to put him in a light basket hold.  His fit wasn't as bad as it could have been.  He wasn't screaming curse words or trying to hit me in the face.  In his worst fits, I can't use a basket hold at all, since I have to restrain him so that he's incapable of head-butting.

Finally, he moved to the inevitable stage: from blaming others to blaming himself.  This is the only point where I talk.  I can't argue with him when he's blaming me.  He just doesn't listen.  But I can argue when he's blaming himself.

"I hate myself for doing stupid things all the time."
- "You shouldn't hate yourself and you don't make bad choices all the time, just some of the time.  You should say 'I'm nice'.  You should say 'I love myself'."
"I'm nice I'm nice I'm nice I'm nice.  IT DOESN'T HELP."

At this point a lightbulb went off in my head.

-"Does saying goodbye to [my cousin] remind you of having to say goodbye to anyone else?"
"Yes! It reminds me of the time I said goodbye to Mommy ___ and it was my last visit ever and I never saw her again and then she died and I'll never see her again ever.  It makes me feel JUST THE SAME."

Oh... my... God...

Sunny loves her deeply.  She suffers from a mysterious disease that adults can never really explain to him well.  Communication and access to her is completely out of his control.  Visitation takes place at a supervised institutional setting.  Of course it's exactly like saying goodbye to his biological mother.

One day, his worker and his foster mom told Sunny that there wouldn't be any more visits with Mommy __.  Termination of parental rights had been completed.  But there would be one last visit.  So they took him to the official visitation room and let him play together with Mommy __ for a few hours, and then he had to say goodbye, a goodbye on the last visit ever.   It brings tears to my eyes thinking about what he must have felt.

Sunny's rage towards me, and towards himself, completely vanished at that point.  He just cried and cried.  We talked a bit more about missing Mommy ___.  I told him that whenever you feel sad, it makes you feel better to tell another person why you feel sad.  And even if there's no one else around, you can tell yourself why you feel sad, and that will make you feel a little better.  Not all the way better, but a little better.  And of course he misses Mommy ___ and it was a terribly sad thing to have to say goodbye to her like that. 

It was 7:00.  We starting driving home.  I reminded him that he could talk about missing Mommy ___ anytime, and he could also call Nana N and talk to her about it, because Nana N missed her just the same as he did.  We did call his Nana N when we got back home, but he didn't feel like talking about it by then, even though I gave him a little reminder.


He was his normal happy self for the rest of the night and went to sleep right at his bedtime.

The difficult part for me is that I can't talk to my cousin about all this.  Her mental state is too fragile.  I'm going to take Sunny to visit her again next week but this time I'll bring someone else as well (Guy or Nana) and make sure we're totally prepared.  I think visiting and then breaking down afterwards is going to suck, but ultimately it's good for him to see that he can say goodbye, but my cousin is still going to be there next week.  I think it would be worse if I didn't take him on visits at all.

If she ever kills herself, I'm going to kill her!


Sunny is dangerously full of need and full of love.

No Hell Week Part II Post! Purgatory, at the Most.

We made it.  Whew.

Tuesday was the worst. I outlined the basics in the email to the therapist that I posted on Wednesday.  Sunny was in a terrible state.  He seemed full of hate.  It was like the hate came from outside and took him over.  He took the hate out on us, but I could tell, more than anything else, he hated himself for being that way.  When he told me in the car about the voices in his head that said "I hate you", it made me feel so sad for him.

We started him back on his old med that night.  Wednesday was a little better, but he still got called him from school for acting out.  We had a school meeting about him on Thursday -- we kept him out of school that day -- then let him go back for a half day on Friday.  He made it.

Thank goodness I can trust the people at his school. They're treating this like a "lost week".  They're full of sympathy for him.  There won't be any lasting consequences.  At another kind of school, they might have been talking expulsion or a move to a special education classroom.

By Friday, he was begging to go back to school! He was missing his "Math Message".  I don't know exactly what that is, but he sure does love it.

He had a sleepover with Nana on Saturday night.  Guy and I took a much-needed date night and saw The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, then went to Loca Luna for tapas.  We didn't go to bed until midnight and slept in until 10AM.  Then we met Sunny and Nana and another friend of ours for dim sum.  Overall, this has been a pretty good weekend.  The smile is back on Sunny's face.

The situation in Haiti, of course, has been weighing on my mind.  I emailed a Haitian friend I met through the Obama campaign and asked him how his relatives were doing and if we could do anything else besides donating (which we've already done). 

This man worked harder than anyone else on the campaign, and he couldn't even vote.  He must have registered hundreds of new voters.  When our small group went on a weekend vanpool together, he drove the whole time.  And he knocked on twice as many doors as any of us, with a bigger smile on his face, in the blazing summer heat... all while wearing a three-piece suit.  I really admire him and I feel terrible for what he and his family (a wife and six very sweet kids) must be going through now.

Sunny's therapist talked to him a little bit about the voices.  She told him that when he heard voices inside his head saying mean things about him, like "I hate you", he could tell himself positive things, like "I'm nice".

So we're back to square one with his medication.  I guess we'll try taking him off again next year.  I don't want him to go through the rest of his childhood on meds, but I can't risk 1) his  school and 2) our sanity.  Thinking about my younger cousin and his life, the thing he really regrets most bitterly is how he was warehoused in special ed because of his behavior, and never even learned to write until middle school.  He made me promise that I would never do that to Sunny.

Quick Links to Help Haiti

These are some of the organizations that can move the quickest.

• Red Cross: American Red Cross Pledges Initial $1 Million to Haiti Relief - Send a $10 Donation by Texting ‘Haiti’ to 90999
• MADRE: Emergency in Haiti! Please send humanitarian aid
• CARE: CARE Deploys Additional Emergency Team Members to Haiti
• MSF/Doctors without Borders: Haiti: MSF Teams Set up Clinics to Treat Injured After Facilities Are Damaged

Hell Week Part I

Hello [therapist],

Unfortunately, we have had a very bad week so far. On Monday, [Sunny]'s behavior in school was bad and we got a note from his teacher. Tuesday, [Guy] had to pick him up from school early because he was pushing other kids in line, and then had a tantrum and threw things when the teacher confronted him. They told [Guy] he was "out of control". They are having a meeting Thursday morning.

Yesterday, his gym teacher also said he behaved badly and was almost asked to leave the class. I also had to restrain [Sunny] numerous times yesterday. Once in the morning and once after school and twice after gym class. He would get very, very oppositional and when he was asked to do something say "I don't have to!" or "I hate you!" or "you're ruining my life by not letting me (watch TV/do XYZ)". We eventually got the routine done: dinner and reading and bedtime. [Guy] is especially stressed out.

[Sunny] is grounded (he can play outside but not go into anyone's house) and also has no TV privilege until he can have at least one good day at school.

One thing I have been worried about is that in the last week or so [Sunny] has seemed to hear voices when no one is talking. Sometimes I won't say anything, but he will ask "what?". This seems to have increased. I talked with him about it last week, and asked him if he was hearing voices that weren't really there. I didn't make a big deal out of it (he's kind of a hypochondriac so that would encourage him to get carried away). He said he does hear those voices sometimes and they say things like "I hate you".

He told me in the car yesterday that he was hearing those voices, that they were bothering him, and that "maybe he should see a doctor". Again, I didn't make a big deal out of it, I just asked him some questions about them. He knows they are not real. They don't come from the front or the back, they come from the inside of his head. I'm very concerned because I don't think he would say he wants to see a doctor unless he was really hearing them. He's not a big fan of going to the doctor, because that almost always involves getting a shot (though he loves going to the dentist because they have video games in the waiting room).

With all of this going on, I made the decision to put him back on medication. I just read that [the atypical antipsychotic] takes a long time to fully clear out of the system. So his good behavior last week, off the med, was not really indicative. He had a pill last night. This morning he did OK.

Response:

I am sorry to hear it has been such a rough week. I would agree with your decision to put [Sunny] back on the medication. I would also speak with his psychiatrist about this. You are correct that it takes time to clear the system of [med] which is likely why he did so well when he was initially taken off of it. In terms of the voices, auditory hallucinations actually seem as if they are coming from outside the body. In other words, it seems as if someone who is not present is talking to you. More than likely, [Sunny] is experiencing self-deprecating thoughts he is unable to control which translates (in his mind) to a voice of another. This is likely to abate once the medication becomes effective in his system. I would encourage you to monitor it to see if it changes over the next few days. Thanks again for the update. Don't hesitate to contact me with any additional questions or concerns.

Music Video Night with Sunny

Sunny's been a bit grumpy today, but no fits.  We had a fun time tonight watching videos on the computer.  He made me play that TI & Justin Timberlake song, "Dead and Gone", over again several times (I played the clean version, of course).  It was a huge hit on the radio here, and Sunny loves the song.



The video is rather pedestrian.  Plus, Justin Timberlake looks like he has some kind of fungus growing on his upper lip.  I don't know much about him, but I've heard he's supposed to be a sex symbol, which amazes me.

Sunny asked me what the song was about.  I asked him what he thought the song was about.

- "What does it tell your imagination?" 
- "I think it's someone singing about how his father just died.  And he doesn't have any other family so he's all alone with no one to take care of him.  So he gets in a car and he keeps driving.  He's going to drive all the way to another country to find a new family to take care of him."

What an interesting story!

We watched a bunch of other music videos.  I usually hate 80s nostalgia, but I have to say, they made some fun videos back then.  Take Golden Earring "Twilight Zone":



Sunny: "THEY'RE MAKING HIM CRAZY!  THAT'S CRAZY! AAAAGGHHH!"

We wrapped it up with the Sledgehammer video.
 

That got him so excited, he broke out into spontaneous breakdancing at the end.

I didn't show him the craziest 80s video of all: the original version of "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.  It was censored for being really, really, really gay, and never shown on MTV. It starts off with a bunch of people waving condom-covered bananas around, and just goes downhill (or uphill?) from there. Not many Americans have seen it. It's pretty awesome.

Sick, Cold Weekend

Ugh.  I stayed in bed from 5pm Friday until 5pm Saturday.  My sinuses hurt, I felt achey all over and my neck had stabbing pains.  I feel a bit better today.  My health has not been good, in general, for this last week.  I think it's the cold weather.  I really want to get back to my exercise schedule.

Sunny's behavior deteriorated a bit.  Friday, all the schools were closed because we got a quarter inch of snow.  I'm sure everyone up north thinks that's hilarious.  He had two fits that day.

Yesterday, since I was sick in bed and my husband had to work, Guy dropped him off at Nana's.  My mom often jokes with me -- "I don't see what your problem is, he's always fine with me!"  We both share a dark sense of humor, so I know she really doesn't mean it. She's great with him, since she has a very strong personality and the ability to maintain calm.  But sometimes, yes, it does irritate me a bit that Sunny reserves the worst of his behavior for me...

He was helping his Nana take off the Christmas tree ornaments and accidentally-on-purpose broke one because he didn't feel like helping right then.  Whenever he breaks something or hurts someone on accident, he gets very perturbed, and he has to be assured that his apology is accepted and everything is OK.  Otherwise, he flips out.  I've had lots of talks about this with him.  When he does something wrong, either on accident or purpose, he is supposed to think about other people's feelings first.  They key in these situations is to speak to him very calmly, but tell him to think about what the other person feels and what he can do about it.

Anyway, after breaking the ornament he started crying and screaming.  My mother told him to go to the other room to calm down (first mistake).  I've grown to realize that telling Sunny to go away and be by himself is like telling him "I hate you and I hope you die".  When he screamed even louder, she actually lost her temper for a minute and said "For Heaven's sake, shut up!"  I arrived shortly afterwards and Sunny was screaming about how Nana hurt his feelings and told him to shut up and "spoke to me in a harsh voice".

I took him to the bedroom and had to hold him down for a while when he got more disturbed and began lashing out.  Then we had a long talk and I made sure he didn't leave the bedroom with me until he took responsibility and started seeing things in a more realistic light.  What we discussed:

- if an adult in your family asks you to do something reasonable, you have to do it.  No matter if you think their voice is harsh.
- saying "my feelings are hurt" is not a magic phrase that allows you to avoid responsibility for your actions.
- you have to think about the feelings of other people as well as your own.  For example, Nana's feelings were hurt when her Christmas ornament was broken.  That didn't mean she's mad at you, it just means her feelings are hurt.
- three-stage apologies!  I remind him of this almost every day.  Saying "sorry" is worthless unless you then take responsibility and third, see what you can do to make up for it.

I have to hope that eventually he'll start to internalize some of these messages.  He was remorseful afterwards and apologized to his Nana, and she gave him a big hug.

I'm not happy about his behavior deteriorating, but on the positive side, he's really no worse than he was on medication.

I'm still working on getting a neurologist appointment.  I think I have a line on a neurologist in a town not too far outside the Atlanta perimeter.  It's always a chore finding decent providers.  I think doctors that take Medicaid are 1) more altruistic than normal and/or 2) really crappy and substandard.  Our pediatrician falls in the "altruistic" category.  The office is a bit disorganized, but based on the hours they keep and their stated mission, they're doing it for all the right reasons, and I love the service we've gotten from them in the last year and a half.

Generally, though, based on reviews of doctors I find on the internet, the badly reviewed ones take Medicaid, and the well reviewed ones don't.  To find a good one that takes Medicaid I have to cast a pretty wide net.  Luckily, we live in a populated region.  If we lived out in the country, we'd be screwed.

I had a long talk with Sunny and BB's foster mom the other day.  At 18 months, she estimates he's about 4-5 months behind, but making steady progress.  She thinks he'll catch up.  I trust her opinion since she's taken care of a ton of babies with all kinds of special needs.  BB is starting to say words!  He says "Nigh-nigh" when he goes to bed.  He can also understand simple commands like "pick up your bottle". She thinks his brain is developing faster than his motor system, so he could speak more if he had better control of his mouth.

I'm starting to think about childcare when BB comes to us.  Our choices are basically daycare versus a live-in nanny.  We can't afford a regular professional nanny, live-in or live-out, but we could get someone from the refugee community to come and live with us in the basement studio... that sounds kind of exploitative, but the weird thing is, we have certain connections that if we DON'T do this, my mother and some other people who work with the refugee community would be kind of peeved.  The idea would be, "if you can afford to give someone a job, so that they don't have to work in the chicken processing factory, you're obligated to give them that job."

Going that route would be complicated, ethically.  If we could get someone who was a night student, or had a small child they could live with here, so I wouldn't be causing another mother to have to get her own childcare, I would feel OK about it.  On another level, I'd want to make sure it was someone whose approach to childcare I agreed with... a professional nanny (we couldn't afford one anyway) has all sorts of references and certifications and things, and we'd be kind of flying blind without that.

Then there's daycare. That would cost anywhere from 400-1000 a month.  It has a lot of disadvantages but BB would be around a lot of kids, and he's already showing that he's very social, much like Sunny.  It's important for him to bond with us when gets here but he's also going to need a LOT of stimulation from other kids, and maybe daycare would be the best way to get that.

So Far, So Good

The email from his teacher today:

[Sunny] had a pretty good day today.  He was excited and anxious to share things with the rest of the class.  We did have to refocus him a number of times - but I think part of that was the excitement of being back.  [Sunny] did not get angry or overly frustrated today over anything. 
He did say that his throat was bothering him and asked to go home frequently in the morning (but then appeared to be doing fine in between times so we were hesitant to send him to the office).

Just the usual ADHD and hypochondria, that's all.  So far, so good.  We're hoping he can keep it up through the week.

ETA: Hypochondria and ADHD aren't a bad combination, because the ADHD really lessens the effect of the hypochondria.  If he didn't have such a short attention span, he might obsess endlessly over his imagined symptoms.  As it is, he forgets about his terrible potential illnesses as soon as he sees something shiny, and they're pretty easy to manage.

- "Mom, I have a bump on my wrist!" "Mom, look at this bruise!" "Mom, my head hurts!"

- "Oh no! I'm sorry you're feeling bad. I'd better take you to bed so you can lie down for a bit."

- "Actually... I'm feeling better! Don't worry! I'll be OK! I'm going outside to play on my pogo stick now!"

Tonight, he was complaining that there was something blocking his nose, and if he took it out, new stuff would block up his nose.  Guy told him, "that's called 'boogers', and they're a lifelong condition.  I've been suffering from them all my life."

The Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Sunny is down to 25% of the dosage of his old med.  Today, he's going off it completely.  It's also the first day of school.

New Year's Eve, he had a monster fit. It was probably one of the more unpleasant New Year's Eves I've ever had in my entire life.  But since then, now that the new med and the old med are working out of his system, he seems to have improved his outlook.  He isn't putting on his "pick a fight" face. He seems happier and less angry.

The other night, when he I told him we couldn't visit my cousin at the clinic until Wednesday, he burst into tears.  He really misses her and worries about her. But after we hugged him and comforted him, he stopped crying, instead of escalating to screaming.

Later that night, Guy and Sunny were playing Yahtzee together. Sunny was throwing around the dice too wildly and Guy warned him to stop.  On his last throw one die flew off into a corner of the room.  Guy told him to go look for it and explained (in a calm voice) that the consequence if he didn't find the die was that they wouldn't be able to play Yahtzee anymore.  Sunny complained a bit but kept looking for the die.  Eventually, they found it.

Later, Guy told me, "Something really weird is happening.  I was bracing myself because I thought I knew exactly what was going to happen.  Sunny would throw the rest of the dice at me and scream that I was ruining his day. Then you were going to have to step in, and hold him down, and he would try to bite and hit you while calling us "&%$#@ *^%$ ^&$#@!" until he got hoarse. Meanwhile I'd be down in the basement office pounding my head against the wall and threatening to kill myself.  But then... none of that happened. What's going on?"

We're both cautiously optimistic.  I think the old med had both a negative and positive effect on Sunny.  Perhaps the positive used to outweigh the negative, but now it's the other way around, so taking him off is going to be the best thing.  We've had a six-month honeymoon, then a year of intermittent raging.  Maybe we're ready to move to a new stage now?  Or, he might have gotten tired of being angry on his own.

The real test is how he does in school this week. Towards the end of the year, his behavior was getting worse. We had a special conference to discuss problems with pushing other kids, throwing, and one incident where he slapped a crayon out of his teacher's hands.  Whereas his angry, physical episodes had been only 1-2 a day at the beginning of the second grade, they'd increased to 3-4 by the end of the year.  That was one of the reasons we considered the disastrous med change in the first place.  But maybe he'll be able to manage his behavior the same, or better, with no meds at all.  I guess I'll find out soon.

We're also lowering our expectations for him a little bit in the area of being alone. We're not expecting him to play "alone" at all, even for 10-15 minutes. We switch off so that one of us is always doing something with him, or else letting him play chess and board games on the computer.  He'd prefer to play the more high stimulation games at places like Lego.com, but the chess game is a good compromise.  They don't wind him up and make him as agitated as the other games.

Science Question

Sunny asked me a great science question today.

"Mom, is a speeding bullet faster than the speed of light?"

"Nope. Nothing is faster than the speed of light.  Light is the fastest thing possible."

"But what if you shot a lightbulb out of a gun?"

"Umm... the light wouldn't go any faster." (I had to think for a second there)

A Naked Picture for the New Year

That's me, around this time of year, having a nice tubby!

Happy New Year!

Med Change Failure

It's been 11 days since the med change.  The psychiatrist gave us a schedule which included a quick ramping up of the new med (the anticonvulsive) and a slow ramping down of the old med (the atypical antipsychotic). For the last 3.5 days we've been at 100% new med 50% old med.  It is NOT working.

- Sunny started having abdominal pains where he says "my waist hurts!"  It was probably gas and intestinal discomfort.  We started giving him some fiber pills and that seemed to help a lot.  We were hoping this symptom was just a temporary one that would go away when his body became adjusted to the new levels.

- He used to bedwet 1-2 times a week, now it's almost every night.  He's also been spot-wetting during the day, which used to be a fairly rare occurrence.

 - He became much more irritable and oppositional.  These last few days, it's been at least a fit every day, sometimes two. He jumps more quickly to accusing us of wanting to hurt him.  For example, when I said he had to wait until after dinner to eat a chocolate-covered pretzel, immediately, it was because I "never wanted him to have nice things, ever".

- This morning Sunny had hives all over his face and chest.  He was miserable. I gave him a benadryl. A rash is one of the rarer side effects of the anticonvulsive.

The rash sealed this. We're taking him off the new med right away. Not even one pill more. I just called and left a message with the psychiatrist.

Our only question now is whether to try and take him off the old med entirely now that we're at the halfway point. That way we could check his baseline. I have a feeling that he really needs his old med in order to regulate his emotions, and that if we raised his levels, he'd be able to regulate them even better. But then he might start drooling and ticcing because of the side effect profile.

UPDATE: The psychiatrist was out for the holidays but he just called me back shortly after I left a message on his answering service. He said we should stop the new med entirely and could go right back to the full dosage of the old med.  We'll make an appointment in a month, which should be enough time for the new med to clear his body entirely.

Fastfeet calling Coolfeet

I bought Sunny a set of fairly powerful walkie-talkies.  It's proven to be one of his favorites among the many presents he got today.  My cousin told him he needed a "handle", so he quickly decided to call himself "Fastfeet". I'm "Coolfeet". Dad is "Homebase". 

Sunny had a great time today running around outside, with my cousin's friend, testing the range of the radios, sending back various reports and yelling stuff like "THIS IS FASTFEET REPORTING ON POLICE CAR ACTIVITY".  We're still working on explaining that yelling very loudly into the walkie-talkie does not result in higher comprehension.

It's a great tech toy.  Aside from filing reports, he also uses it to pretend that he's fighting off alien invaders.  He does this from the next room, so we could really hear him without the walkie-talkie, but the walkie-talkie makes everything ten times as exciting and dramatic.

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.

Happy Holidays! And a mini-update.

I have a lot of stuff to catch up on. 

Summing up: my cousin had another really bad breakdown, which we think is exacerbated by involvement in a particular local 12-step group that has mutated into something secretive, hierarchical and cultlike. Then we had an extended-family dispute over Thanksgiving that was very depressing to me, but I'm not going to talk about it any more.

I received some documentation on BB that states he was meth-exposed, which I half expected.  I did not expect that learning about BB's medical issues would give me so much insight into Sunny's issues. Really, it's like a lightbulb went off in my head. We don't have much medical info on Sunny beyond basic hospital stuff, because he didn't come into foster care until he was almost three.  But by all accounts, he had almost exactly the same issues as an infant that BB is having now.

On advice from Tubaville, I'm going to make an appointment with a neurologist ASAP.  This makes me really sad for Sunny. Much of his behavior must come from the fact that his brain was literally damaged by  destructive chemicals. Again, it's a possibility that was always in the back of mind, but I never really brought it to the front.  It's up there in the front right now, for sure. And unlike ADHD, which I feel confident about discussing widely, meth-exposure has a greater stigma, and so that raises huge privacy issues for me.  If this blog goes private for a while, that will probably be the reason why. On the other hand, this is really, incredibly important stuff for other parents to know about, and we stay ignorant when we don't listen AND talk... it's hard to say.

We're also halfway through a med change for Sunny.  We're switching from an atypical antipsychotic to an anticonvulsive. It's supposed to have less potential side effects, but Sunny has already been complaining of stomach pain, which is really worrying me. We're going to keep it up because so far the pains have been intermittent, haven't affected his appetite at all and there's a chance they'll go away as his body adjusts to the new medication.  He has a new diagnosis -- IED -- and if you know what that stands for, it's sort of a baloney diagnosis, but then again I take all these diagnoses with a grain of salt.

I'm mostly keeping up with my fitness plan. I'm getting burned out on Debbie Siebers but I still do Burn It Up a couple times a week and I'm exercising at least 5 days a week. 

So far Christmas is going OK.  I IMed my dad in Hawaii the other day and wished him a Mele Kalikimaka (Hawaiian for Merry Christmas).  I expected him to IM back something like "I don't believe in that garbage" or "you will burn in hellfire forever".  Instead, he wished me a Mele Kalikimaka right back!  He really has mellowed a lot in his old age.  Maybe one day he'll even buy me a present on Christmas, or let me buy one for him.

We're going to have a small Christmas, and my cousin is getting a day pass from her clinic to join us.  Sunny has been tracking Santa and making calculations about the chimney size.  I'm a bit stressed but staying in good spirits.

I'd also like to congratulate Thorn, who has a special visitor this season.

ARGH!

Non-adoption family drama is peaking. I'm extremely angry and upset about certain developments involving certain family members. I'll have to wait until things settle down a bit before posting a blog update, because I need some distance.

Search and Reunion - Thoughts on the Future

I just finished reading through this post at AdoptionTalk: "Find My Family" as Sensationalist Trash or Springboard for Discussion. It's about a new reality show that covers adoption search and reunion. The post discusses the potential reaction of children and what age would be most appropriate.

I had a lot of contradictory feelings when imagining whether Sunny should watch such a show at his current age.  It's somewhat remote from his experience and it might not affect him at all.  He knows his maternal bio family.  He lived with his mother.  He doesn't need to search or reunite, because we already have a relationship with them.  But his mother passed away... and because of that, watching other adoptees reunite might feel like a punch in the stomach and a reminder of what's been taken from him.  He's never going to see his mother again, at least walking this earth.  I know this hurts him.

Sunny talks about it, but not often.  We read a great book together once -- Everett Anderson's Goodbye -- a story about a son grieving for his dead father.  It made him cry, and he told me he never wanted to read the book again because he didn't want to cry like that again.  Every so often, he'll say "I miss Mommy __" or "I'll never get to see Mommy __ again."  I'll just pat him on the back and say "I know you do," and talk about maybe visiting her grave the next time we visit, if he's up for it.

On the other hand, in the future, it might be useful for him to know about other kinds of adoptee narratives.  Maybe the stories would fascinate him.  Maybe they would bore him, since they tend to lack dinosaurs, robots or explosions. 

Maybe these stories would make him think about his biological father... that's an area where I'm waiting (an active kind of waiting) for him to take the lead.  I know, from talking to more maternal relatives, that his father is not quite as unsafe as the record indicated. I'm not going to pick up the phone and call him out of the blue, but I'll remind Sunny when he gets older that we can set up contact with his father.

We're not at that stage yet.  We recently cleared a pretty important stage... he understands that his maternal uncle is his uncle and not his father, that his uncle is white and his father is black.  I think he really knew this, but he didn't want to know it, so he obfuscated.  He needed a lot of very gentle reminders.  About a year's worth.  Getting to see and play with his uncle on our latest visit finally clinched it. 

I don't think I'll be watching those shows myself.  I hate to say it, but the thought makes me too sad. I can take a little bit of these stories, but not in concentrated multimedia doses.  I would find myself thinking about my own lost relatives... the grandparents that died before I was born, whose deaths were inextricably linked to my father's adoption. 

I also think the cultural practice of closed adoption with sealed records is deeply unnatural, a historical anomaly, and will hopefully disappear soon.  In the future, we'll all have DNA fingerprints on file electronically (for good and for evil) and finding a relative will become just as easy as Googling... you'll just lick your iPhone or something and a list of everyone who shares your DNA will pop up.