Savannah

Last weekend, we headed down to Savannah to visit my old college buddy Skye. (On our way, we stopped by for a fun-filled visit with a very Shallow Thinker and a Queen.) If you don't count the first night when the twins decided to spend two hours screaming in the middle of the night for no reason, we had a great time. We strolled through the park*, we picnicked, we went to the jazz festival, we walked by the river, we went to the beach--and convinced Yona that sand isn't so terrible--we played in fountains, we explored the playground at Forsyth park, we admired the Spanish moss. It was lovely.













*Dinka opted for the Spiderman crawl on our walk through Forsyth park. He Spiderman crawls anytime he doesn't approve of ground surfacing. He does this over concrete, over grass, and over the metal air conditioning grate in our hallway.

First Trip to the Beach


More to come...

Something Sexy for Your Friday

You folks wanna know what really makes my heart skip a beat? Daguerreotypes. There's nothing hotter than an old, crystal clear daguerreotype. Don't believe me? Check this out.

I should probably mention that before I became a mom...well, I was a museum collections manager. But before I did that...well, I worked in a gallery. But before I did that I was a graduate student in photography. And before I did that I was a photography and art history major. And a religion major. Because it's hard to make up your mind when you have a full scholarship to college and can take as many classes as you want. I took everything.

Daguerreotypes, though. That is my first love. Well, next to medieval illuminated manuscripts. Or not. I can't decide.

Wyoming, Again

Each year, I tell my friend Trey that I might not make it out to Wyoming. And every year I go anyway. A cheap ticket always shows up just in time for fall. It's becoming a thing. I can't help myself. It's beautiful country. This year, Dinke came along as well. Travel has already become old hat to her. We pack bags. We cram ourselves into a train, plane, or automobile, and sometimes all three. We sleep in strange places. You know. The usual.

Naptime

Illustrations of Everyday Life

The following illustrates a few things:

1. Good dental hygeine.

2. I do get around to craft-type things sometimes. (I made my dress.)

3. Unbelievable cuteness.

Normal, Amplified

I was really grateful for this post over at Rage Against the Minivan. I like how she and some of the commenters described certain behaviors of children who were adopted. It's not that the individual behaviors are that different than something you might see with any child. It's that they are somehow amplified. Amplified. It's such a perfect word to describe life with a newly-adopted child. And if her experience is anything like mine, part of the frustration is that almost everyone bends over backwards to normalize your family. They tell you how such-and-such thing is normal because they know such-and-such child who did the same thing. But while I can appreciate the sentiment, it doesn't help. It just leads to stronger feelings of isolation. Feelings that are probably amplified having just moved to a new place.

I don't think many people can really imagine what it's like to live in an orphanage unless they've done it. Prisoners of war, maybe? Convicts in really awful, remote prisons? Anyone who spent time in Guantanamo. The homeless. But even then, you're talking about adults who have already developed some strategies for coping with hardship. What about a baby? I made a joke the other day about the kids' cribs being "baby jail," but for the first year of their lives that's really what they were. I think about that a lot. What it must have been like. As a baby, your most basic, desperate needs are food and touch. Think about how basic those needs really are and imagine being deprived of them. Seeing someone cross the room, knowing they have food, feeling painfully hungry. Imagine hearing voices in the next room and wanting so badly for someone to talk to you, to touch you. What would you do to make that happen? Or would you just give up? When I let myself think about what that would feel like to me, which isn't often, it leaves me with a sense of panic. When I think about my kids being in that situation, it leaves me in tears. Most of us cannot really imagine it. Not really.

We are lucky in that our kids both developed strategies for dealing with their situation. Our daughter learned to be incredibly engaged socially. To smile, to giggle, to perform. Our son learned to deal with it by crying. Loud, long, and hard. It is a cry that cannot be ignored. We are grateful they developed these abilities, because it likely did mean that they got noticed. We saw other kids like ours in the orphanage, but we also saw a handful of listless babies. Babies that had just given up. Those babies were smaller and weaker, and I don't think that's a coincidence. I would have loved any child we had been matched with--don't get me wrong--but I am so thankful that our kids are who they are. It's how they got through, so I could never wish they were any different. And any difficulties we are having are incredibly mild compared to what some adoptive and biological parents go through with their children. Still, dealing with a child who is desperately afraid you are going to leave him is challenging.

For the longest time, we referred to our son as having "separation anxiety." We thought that's all it was, and I guess deep down we wanted to believe everything about him was normal. Because he was making eye contact and looking to us for his needs and comfort, we thought, "He's attached! This is great!" We'd heard of separation anxiety and knew our kid had to be attached to us to be going through it. Like other parents we knew who had adopted infants, we figured it will last a few weeks or so, then we're set. But we hadn't adopted babies. Not really. We'd adopted toddlers. Toddlers who had passed the stage at which primary and secondary attachment usually sets in. Toddlers who are old enough to have preferences, even if they are still incapable of vocalizing them. By now, children have usually chosen someone with whom to form that primary, strongest attachment, and often they've even decided with whom else they prefer to look to for support as well when the primary caregiver isn't around (secondary attachments). Our son had done this. He was strongly attached to one of his nannies, and he clearly had a preference for a couple of others when she was unavailable. All of the know-it-all adoptive parents there at the time said, "That's good. That means he'll easily attach to you!" It turns out that's not really the way it goes. It is easier to transfer attachment in children than it is to start from scratch, and his initial attachment to his nanny indicated he is capable of attachment--he's not autistic, for instance--but having formed one attachment does not mean a child can just easily switch that attachment over to a new caregiver. In fact, in some cases it can cause children to be much more resistant to forming new attachments.

Though our son learned fairly quickly that he could come to us for food, hugs, play, etc., he remains very unsettled in our relationship and has not formed attachments with anyone else. He is also easily distressed by visitors. He panics when Xander or I leave the room or sometimes just get up to walk to the other side of it, but if there's someone else there when I leave then he really loses it. We're talking intense screaming accompanied by desperate physical gestures and reaching and full-body sobs that sometimes persist long after we've returned. He'll look at us minutes later and, as if remembering something traumatic, start sobbing again and frantically cling to us. Sometimes even when we're holding him we're not holding him hard enough. We get the impression he'd much prefer to just climb inside our chests and nest there for awhile. I've seen and worked with children experiencing separation anxiety. This is not separation anxiety. Nothing I've read about separation anxiety sounds remotely like what happens here.

Our friends and family want very much to normalize our situation, to make us feel better, to show that they think of us just like any other family. People come over for a little while and see a meltdown or two and say, "Oh, that's normal. Every child does that." It's only the few people who have been around long enough to see multiple events--or adoptive parents who have been through it themselves--that are able to have some real understanding of what we're going through and what it means. (Not even all social workers have experience in this area, so it's really important when you are going through this to find a social worker who has dealt specifically with toddler or older child adoption and attachment issues.) People's desire to normalize our family has at times made us feel more isolated, which makes the problem seem amplified. We're struggling with this issue, and even though we know it won't last forever and that time will heal, it's still a very real daily concern for us. Not being able to talk about it and be heard has been difficult. Not being able to get understanding or advice from friends and family has also been frustrating. This isn't the kind of problem you can easily bitch to your girlfriends about and expect someone else to have been through the same thing. A lot of what's out there just doesn't apply to us. People will say our child is just crying to "get attention" or manipulate us and that we shouldn't respond because we'll just encourage that behavior. A lot of the literature that talks about separation anxiety or crying of any kind, particularly with twins, will suggest that one should just ignore these sorts of "tantrums" and only respond to the non-crying child. The truth is that when your child has spent the first year of his or her life having his basic needs ignored, when your child has experienced the breaking of both primary and secondary attachments, the usual advice does not apply. It doesn't matter how good their orphanage was compared to other orphanages. In this case, it wouldn't necessarily even matter if they'd been in foster care. Adoption might be a better alternative to children remaining in institutions or foster care, but it's still a brutal experience for the child.

My husband came up with a great analogy for what our son is going through. He said to think about what it feels like--or might feel like--when you find out your spouse or partner has been unfaithful to you. Maybe you would stick together, maybe you would heal the relationship, but there would still be this persistent feeling of mistrust. If you broke up and started another relationship, that mistrust would likely be transferred to some degree as well. When your spouse or partner didn't call or come home on time, when anything seemed out of sorts, it might trigger feelings of worry or panic that no amount of talking or reasoning could calm. You would be conditioned to be distrustful of relationships, and nothing but time spent in a constant, caring relationship could cure that. Your spouse ignoring your pleas for attention when you are feeling insecure in the relationship would only lead to further anxiety and distrust. Another analogy I read was how an adult might feel if a close relative or friend were suddenly killed in a car accident. This can lead to severe grief and a sometimes long-lasting fear that other loved ones might be in danger. This is where we are with our son. Nothing but time and lots and lots of attention is going to fix this problem. The usual rules do not apply to us, because we are not dealing with a relationship that has existed since birth. We've actually had to teach our children to hug and cuddle and rest their heads on our shoulders. No one who is not an adoptive parent can understand that.

The single most important activity for encouraging attachment is physical contact. Period. It's why even though we don't co-sleep, I can't blame parents for wanting to increase the amount of time they are engaged in physical contact with their children. The importance of touch doesn't mean we should never leave the room to get water or go to the bathroom because we'll make our kid cry, but it does mean we shouldn't feel the slightest bit worried about picking him up again as soon as we can. The question of whether or not his distress is authentic is beside the point. In fact, parents whose older children are struggling with attachment and behavior issues are often instructed to engage in exercises with their children that revolve around close physical contact...even with teenagers. As our social worker said, you can't spoil an adopted child by giving them too much affection. You're just giving them what they deserved from the very beginning.

Things are getting a lot better. The panic is lessening to some degree and occurring less frequently. As I've mentioned before, both kids are sleeping well at night and (mostly) taking solid naps. I'm hesitant to even talk about any difficulties simply because we are overall so, so fortunate. I don't want people to get the idea that my kid is messed up, because he's really amazing and sweet and insanely cute and we are so, so crazy about him. I also hate to reinforce the stereotype that children who were adopted have "all sorts of problems." The kids catch up. Things settle down. They learn to trust. Our children are healthy and smart and engaged, and I know so many adoptive and biological parents who are struggling with much more serious issues at home. All things considered, what we're dealing with isn't all that bad. It's normal, amplified. We just have to figure out how to get through it in the meantime, which is why there are several bottles of wine and a large bag of M&Ms in the house at all times.

One of Those Moments

This is definitely one of those times when a picture is worth a thousand words.