Happiness Comes From...

...an organized mind. Planning, finding patterns, predicting outcomes, maintaining focus long enough to follow through creatively--I am suddenly seeing mental skills I've never observed in Jane before.

This week Jane began lining up her dolls when playing with them. She played school with them for the very first time in her life, ever. 

In the sandbox area Jane has begun putting on tea parties. Each container (all identically holding mud, but some decorated with leaves while others have stones or twigs) is a different food. There are even condiments such as salt and paper and sprinkles. She does an elaborate explanation for me while inviting me to sit down and partake. It's so earnest and intentional and creative and REAL to her. She's enthralled.

She began writing "storybooks" which consist of multiple pages with pictures and scribbled lines that she tells me are the words of her story. She tells me what she plans to write before she makes a book. Her stories have a plot and a resolution. Example: "Once upon a time there were some people. They had a house. A big wind came. It blew down the house so they got a new one. The end."

Yesterday we started to set up a kiddie pool and Kate left the house without permission to try to get into it. Jane was overheard warning Kate not to do that. She predicted the outcome! She thought about a behavior and figured out that it was dangerous and opted out! (This is something I did not know if she'd ever become capable of doing. It's so exciting I want to cry. A deep relief from the horrible fears of risky behavior I pictured her doing as a teen.) And, P.S. Kate is fine and Gus learned a valuable lesson about how fast little kids can escape.

I am watching Jane and thinking: these are the behaviors of a healthy mind.

This is the play of a deeply happy child. She is creative, relaxed, smiling, expressive and genuine. The last few negative behaviors are fading away. She rarely baby talks anymore. She is less inclined to appear anxious and attempting to perpetually "kiss up" to me in order to gain my favor. Interactions with her feel so much less fake now and much more genuine. She was downright grumpy with me one morning and I was thrilled! Today she got quite sassy and sorta stomped out of the room and I was secretly smiling on the inside! It's like watching the Velveteen rabbit becoming Real!

I think I must attribute these changes over the last few weeks to several things. a) length of time in our home, b) the state-wide shut down forcing us to limit her world to only our family in our home has increased her sense of security and predictability while also removing the reminders of her past brought on by visits with grandma, c) general maturity--she's growing in her ability to comprehend and understand more complex concepts, and d) it's summer and she's playing nonstop in all the ways that meet all her sensory needs so she is more balanced and regulated than she could be all winter.

One of the scariest days during foster care was when Theo and I met with her therapist and the therapist gave us a dire prediction. She said that if we didn't get Jane bonded to us by age 7 or 8 then it would never happen and we'd have an angry, impulsive, disconnected teen on our hands one day. The therapist also said we needed intensive weekly therapy from age 4 onward until this bonding had occurred. That was one of our last sessions. I felt devastated and overwhelmed and that our family could not withstand this kind of ongoing pressure for years and years.

Somehow, instinctively, I just could not go down that path. My instinct was to pull Jane all the tighter into our family and make her one of us. A therapist analyzing us every week did not feel like progress towards normalcy. It felt like fetish-izing the weirdness in a difficult relationship.

Once the adoption was finalized it was the biggest relief to push away all the social workers and invasive helpers who hadn't ever been of help anyway. That was the first step. And then, of course, a global pandemic was instrumental in shutting away the outside world. Weirdly helpful. (Yes, I'd say that a pandemic was more helpful to our family than any social worker or therapist. That just doesn't seem right, does it?)

But for me it was about parenting instinctively and authentically. Not second-guessing myself any more. Not preparing for the big inspection visit once a month. Not wrestling with the late-night fears about losing the girls and realizing my heart would never fully love them while that was a real fear. Removing all those stressors finally allowed me to just BE. To just be with these girls--in the moment, without distraction, to begin truly loving them.

So, perhaps there's another reason for Jane's growth. Perhaps there's been a change in me that she needed. A more genuine love and the return of my sense of humor (finally!) that wasn't present in my parenting during the foster care months?

For all of these reasons and probably more that I may never know or understand, Jane is absolutely blossoming. It's summertime and she's like a beautiful flower opening wide to the sun (literally, she has begun drawing suns in her pictures for the very first time since coming here).

I am so grateful. Every single day I watch my three littles and think--if I'd have caught that moment on camera tons of people would be awwing at how cute and funny and smart and adorable my kids are. Happiness comes from...happy kids.