Skip to main content

Hitting the Reset Button

 It's been an awful weekend as a culmination of a terrible two weeks. Jane lost all her Halloween candy one week after Halloween for sneaking food. That seemed to have broken the good streak and sent her on an angry spiral. 

She is starting to tell us more when we confront her about her behavior. More anger and grief about being adopted. Just admitting that is new--she'd always deny any feelings of loss when I brought it up before. 

As I type this she's seated on the floor of my bedroom just out of sight (because I can't stand to have her staring at me) but still in the same room I'm in because she won't even stay in her room or the attic playroom when told to anymore. It used to be if I needed to isolate her I could trust her to stay. Now that's gone, too. This morning she snuck out of her room, got a cat, and then was physically abusing the cat. I happened to go in her room for some other reason and the cat made a beeline out, which clued me in. 

I kinda lost my mind when she told me she'd been "hitting [the cat] on the head with my toys because I wanted to be mean". I went and got four bags and emptied half the items in her room (Halloween costume from this year, books, hair bows, shoes, dresses, toys, blankets) and drove with her to Goodwill where she had to give it all away.

I've ordered two different kinds of bells to attach to her door and doorknob so it'll alert us when she opens her door. 

This is the way life is going to be with her. We will constrain her behavior with a consequence she doesn't like. She'll find a new way to slip loose. We'll tighten up; she'll plot and scheme to find a way out. We will always be at war with her until she has a genuine change of heart. 

And I have no idea when, if ever, that'll happen. She may simply be too broken to ever care enough about human relationships to maintain one. 

Today we were talking about her birth family. She ranked her birth father (a skeavy guy she hates and has no good memories of) as at the top of people she likes. Why? She thought he might have a good house and lots of toys there. She ranked her birth mother lower, even after naming several good memories, because she knows her house isn't "nice" and she doesn't have "good stuff". She also repeats that she doesn't want to leave our house because she likes living here, but she does want to see all the people who have given her gifts before, primarily the grandma who showered gifts on her. Every single good memory she could think of with grandma involved getting a gift. 

Hearing her talk coldly about who has better stuff as a measure of desirability for a relationship hit me pretty hard. Yet also left me strangely unsurprised and unmoved. It was like a confirmation of what I already know in my heart. She likes me when I give her stuff but that's the extent of our relationship. 

If I look at this with rosy glasses I can see her honesty as progress. Like popping a pimple we have to get out all the icky adoption feelings before we can start to form a new relationship. Without the glasses I see this as our life with her until we can send her away from our home. She's the one I'd send to boarding school without hesitation.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teaching "ouch"

I taught the girls to say ouch. When they first came to me their hair was a mess. Snarls, mismatched lengths where sections had been hacked off, thin and coarse hair that tangled in every hair clip I tried, etc. Due to a healthy diet and daily vitamins, as well as good hair products and regular brushing, their hair is now sleek and glossy. Jane has a cute haircut. Kate's hair is growing longer every day and curling into ringlets that bounce. I was so afraid of hurting them when they first came! I have naturally curly hair and my mother's is stick straight. She never understood how much it hurt when she pulled the brush straight through. I haven't let her touch my head since I could do my first clumsy pony tail. (At first, I held their hair so loosely while trying to do it that every single pony tail fell out minutes after going in. Looking back I feel like those people who don't know how to put a diaper on and it falls off when they lift the baby up!)  But eve...
Post a Comment
Read more

So What About Mother's Day?

I was looking ahead on the calendar to our next visit and suddenly realized it fell during Mother's Day weekend. A flood of mixed emotions hit me immediately. Mother's Day is not a deeply important holiday to me. It's nice and all but I've never had super big emotions about it.  The girls can't know what it is yet and won't have any big feelings this year. But...years from now...will this be a uniquely difficult holiday?  So if no one cares right now can I just kinda slide this one under the rug and avoid all the drama? Please, please, please someone confirm this is a real option!?! Ugh, but what about the birth family. Is this a big deal for them? Are there major traditions? Will this be a minefield of potential hurt feelings? Is there a tactful way to call them up and say, so, on a scale of 1 to 10 how invested are you into making this a big rigamarole? While thinking this through I did some googling and found that the local zoo does a special Mother...
Post a Comment
Read more

Flash Fiction - Guilt Free

And this one I wrote for the fun of it. It was delicious to wallow in such a world of self-indulgence I'll never know. This is flash fiction (less than 1,000 words). Guilt Free It was fudge sauce, thick and cold from the back of the fridge, dipped in gourmet raspberry jam—the kind from France with the understated label—straight onto a spoon and then suckled in my mouth, a frosty mug of milk tremoring faintly in my left hand, to be gulped in indelicate swaths allowing a dribble or two down my front, the first time I hit her. Not really hit. Shoved. A forceful push. A push that began with contact. The contact of my hand wedging so neatly between her small sharp shoulder blades, wedging in so that I almost could not retract myself from the catapulting force launching her into the tub. Not a hit—there was no smacking, cracking, sharp stinging rebound. No bruise. She’d laughed. She’d thought it was a game. Like when I clapped my hands together as she went up the stairs, cla...
Post a Comment
Read more