Down the hill we go?

Long silence, I know. No explanation, really, other than busyness.

All's been surprisingly good. The healing we've seen in P over the past 6-12 months has been really unbelievable. We are now able to look back some years and be amazed at ourselves: how did we ever survive all that? What irritates us now is nothing compared to the ground we've covered. Still progress to be made, but the healing and attachment are so clear that it is pretty easy to stay motivated and positive.

We've headed into the season of trauma-versaries. This is the season of abandonment, upheaval, orphanage placement, separation from all that was known. With P's bday thrown into the mix in early January. And Christmas is all around us already even though it's not even December; decorations are out in the stores here, and our city had its parade last weekend (we did not go).

We're seeing the effects on our two princes. They are both more agitated these last two weeks, with some craziness coming through. Again, it's all mild when compared to much of what we've lived in the past. No one's running away these days, for example. But nonsense questions are back, there's been a decline in table manners on the part of the RADling, and -- judging by the dark shadows under the eyes and seemingly constant sleepiness -- sleep issues appear to have returned. We amped up rocking/holding time this morning, strong sitting remains a mainstay, some of us are jumping a lot on the trampoline, and we're trying to do a lot of talking about feelings. Thanks to niacin, I believe, we are rarely met with defiance these days when we work with P to try to uncover his deep feelings.

This morning's events -- aka what prompted me to post today:

First, P spent the morning exhibiting extreme survivors guilt. He was full of talk about the dire circumstances he imagines his birth family in, how poor they must be, are they cold, are they hungry, it's not fair, how can he be here in Canada, he has too much, we have too much, they don't have enough, everyone in Ukraine is suffering, what if they are suffering, we must go there now, we must send money, can he have $100 to send them, he needs to get gifts for the kids in his birth family, he can just picture their faces when they unwrap his gift. In the midst of the morning routine, this was a boomerang. I was thrown for a loop and didn't know how to handle it. (Advice welcome!!!)

Second, while B and I were brushing our teeth, he declared that he had figured out who his real family was. His birth family. I stated that I thought he had two real families but that I see us all as his one big family because, really, M and I are joined to the boys' birth family through P and B. B thought about this for awhile. Then: "But my birth family is MORE my real family than you are because my birth mother borned me, and you did not do that." Stake through my heart.

I'm still here

I apologize for my long absence. We endured The Regression of the Century (TRC - more on that shortly) from P in April and May. I was so occupied and exhausted by that each day that I was barely holding it together with work and all, which meant no blogging even though I probably could have benefitted from the support I know would have come my way if I had managed even one feeble post. Then end-of-semester at work kicked in. Then it became so long since I'd posted that it seemed like a giant task to try to get caught back up, so I just kept letting it slide.

During my absence, Lisa and Essie both checked on me (thanks!!). Then Brie returned but at a new blog, and I thought I might let her return prompt me to get back in the saddle, but still I let it continue to slide. And now J is offering a chance at a prize for linking to (or even just commenting on -- head on over there; you've got til Sunday night) her site where she recently got her 10,000th hit (congrats, J!). And that is what is finally getting me back to blogging, on this last day in the office before we leave for our beach holiday. (More on that in a minute.)

So let's get to it:

TRC was a doozy. P was totally dysregulated from early April through mid-May, no matter what we did to try to help him regulate or to head off any escalating dysregulation before it started. Tapping, hugging, rocking, rubbing, physical exertion, talking, discussing, breathing, bottle feeding; you name it we tried it. All things that have worked to varying degrees in the past just seemed powerless this time around. But it went way beyond that. Baby talk, food stealing (from teachers' refrigerator at school and from a store while grocery shopping with me), insomnia, extreme battles for control, constant low-grade defiance all returned. And it went on and on and felt endless. As I've posted before, we have noticed that at about six month intervals throughout P's healing, the regressions are noticably less frequent, shorter lived, and milder. There has been a steady observable progression in this manner over time. But TRC defied the pattern, and reminded us in a big way how non-linear healing from RAD and PTSD is.

Not surprisingly, TRC was bookended by some pretty significant events: five-years since landing in North America on the front end, and Mother's Day on the back end, although TRC extended beyond Mother's Day by about a week-and-a-half, I think because P's class was starting their "family life" unit the week after Mother's Day. In past years, when his class has covered family stuff, it has always been along the lines of bring in a baby picture of yourself. So P was extremely (and understandably; I know that other parents of international adoptees know how hard/sad it is that our kids so seldom have baby pictures of themselves) sad/worried/freaked out about the upcoming family life unit. For days, it was all he could talk about. Once it got going, it became clear that it was going to be fundamentally different than in past years because it was all about two main themes: division of household labour among family members; and human reproducation. P finds both these topics interesting, so once the unit got over the initial short-lived topic of all the ways in which families can be formed ("what is a family?"), he was okay. Seriously. TRC ended as though with a flick of a switch.

The school cracked down on P pretty hard (for them) for the food stealing this time around. (It was the third time he's been caught at school stealing food in five years, and the first time from teachers.) M and I were happy about that, as it really meant that we could leave the legal/ethical/moral issue of it between P and the school, which we have always thought was important so that P would view the school officials as solid authority figures. That freed us up to be focussing on the root causes with him at home, rather than putting us in the position of doing that while simultaneously consequencing. So that was good.

At one point in the middle of a very calm, regulated talk about the stealing and what hurts he might be feeling inside, P flew from very calm to extremely agitated the fastest I have ever seen him go. It took about half a second, and then he screamed at us "at least my birth mother cared about me." It was so out of the blue. And it connoted so much pain, especially when you factored in his look of utter anguish as he screamed it at us. It makes me think that TRC was a period of him really working through (struggling with?) some huge things that he's trying to reconcile in/about himself. We have since had many many very good talks about the relationship between loving someone, caring about someone, and treating the person in a caring and loving manner. These are difficult for me to talk definitively about because I am not totally convinced that you actually love someone -- even if you say you do -- if you routinely treat them unkindly or uncaringly. But I hesitate to be too "gray area" with this for P right now because I don't want him to feel that I am suggesting that his birth mother didn't/doesn't love him because I honestly don't see how she couldn't love these boys and think of them and wonder about them and want the best for them. Fortunately, P is a bright enough kid and intellectually old enough to understand that I seem to be struggling with this a bit, and to understand why (after I explain it a bit), and to understand that I want these talks to nourish his soul rather than chip away at his developing but still-new-enough-to-be-very-fragile self-worth.

Almost exactly since screaming that at us, P has been regulated and chipper. But more than that, he seems to have leap-frogged forward in some huge ways. He is articulating his feelings in much more mature ways, noticing his own dysregulation much more, taking responsibility when he screws something up (instead of the constant deflection of blame of the past). I am not doing a good job of describing it. It is this all-encompassing change in him that makes him seem developmentally on-track in ways he hasn't ever before. Not across the board, but in some really wonderful areas. And this has held for nearly two months now. It has been glorious. We have been able to grant him more freedoms (though in baby steps) and more privileges (again, baby steps), and maybe the best part of all, for me, is that I am finding myself becoming able to do these things with less and less of that nagging worry that stems from an assumption that these grants of privileges and freedoms will come back to burn me. This is such a liberating and fresh feeling, and I haven't experienced it before in parenting this particular kid, which doesn't really seem fair to either him or me, so it is a really welcome development. It has been so long that I've been so distrustful of P's ability to handle much of anything that I had not realized exactly how exhausting it was for me to have been in that mind-space all this time. It had become normal. I knew it was different from parents of other 10 year olds, but I didn't realize how tired I was. Now that we've evolved, I am getting a big sense of how tired I was. Again, I don't feel like I am describing this well.

In late April, B passed his belt promotion test at taekwondo and became a yellow stripe belt. He was so thrilled, and continues to be. Here he is with his instructors.

Sometime around that time, P got glasses. There is a long story of shame for M and me related to this that I will skip (for reasons of time and post length rather than shame, ha ha), but suffice it to say that we may have set a new record for the length of time parents manage to ignore their child's assertions that his eyes are worsening and he now needs glasses. Doesn't he wear them well, though, now that we got our act together?

Both boys gave very good piano recitals in early June. And P pulled off a first-class honours score in his grade 1 national piano exam. We were all thrilled by that. He has, at the age of 10, surpassed my level of musical knowledge (ever heard of a A- tonic scale? I hadn't!). Kudos to M for this, because he is the one who oversees piano practices at our house. P, to his credit, is mostly manageable about piano, and says that's because he likes it a lot and wants to go as far as he can with it. But it wasn't always like this and let me tell you: piano practices with parental supervision is a area that is ripe with RAD nonsense potential, as we have learned well over the years! So, again, kudos to M!

Somewhere in June (or maybe it was May), our city had a give-away weekend where people put stuff they don't want out at the curb and you could go around and take whatever you wanted off people's piles for free. This is oh so fun at our house, and P and B were up for walking many miles to get lots of free stuff. B scored a bunch of St*r W*rs books that he then tried to sell from our front porch. Too bad for him, no one was biting, not even his parents, at that hefty price ($25.99 in case you can't make it out in the picture).

In late June, Art City had their annual bike parade. This is an inner city arts NGO near our neighbourhood, and their annual bike parade is loads of fun. This year's theme was Planet of the Plant People. The themes are always a bit wacky, which adds to the fun. Here are P, M, and B after the boys decorated their bikes and M got his prop to carry in the parade but before the parade actually got underway. The second picture is of one of the "floats," which I was very impressed by because of how large and lifelike it was. The third picture is how long the parade stretched behind us. We were about midway between the front and back. You should see the faces of the drivers who get stuck at an intersection while this type of parade passes by. Many of them are less than thrilled, and their faces are priceless!

Sometime in the midst of things, P expressed once again a strong interest in cooking and baking. He has been (along with me and B) a bit of a foodie for a few years now, but until now he has stated that he wants to learn to cook and bake but then continues to just relish the reading of recipes. He is a subscriber to C*nadian Living, a magazine that is kind of like L*dies H*ome Journal, for the recipes, and pores over any recipes he comes across in any source. And he is a very adventurous eater. This time, when he mentioned learning to cook and bake, I jumped on it and offered to let him bake muffins. And that got a great thing started. Every weekend for about six weeks now, he has made a batch of muffins. (Note: I have built up the boys' kitchen skills over the years, so P ws starting from a pretty good base of knowledge in terms of where things are in the kitchen, kitchen safety, measuring ingredients, and so on.) This experience has been an interesting thing RAD-wise, as I decided to be very peripheral because I really didn't want the whole thing to become a low-grade RAD experience of control battle or self-sabotage or any unpleasantness between us. So I told P that I would be on hand to help or answer questions or whatever. The first batch was somewhat comical. P asked for no help whatsoever until he had the batter ready to go into the pans. That was when I got to see how runny the batter was! Below is a picture of that first batch of muffins. I commented that the batter looked runnier than muffin batter usually looks, but left it at that. The first batch, as you can see in the picture, surprised me by mostly turning out. But they were very very oily. P and B snarfed them down anyway. The next batch is where things got RAD interesting. P came to me and asked for help. This is a huge thing for him, so I was rejoicing internally when it happened. I just answered his question and left him to it once again. He asked for help and clarification several times throughout the process, and that second batch turned out fantastic, as have all subsequent batches. He is trying to get to 15 successful batches before he chooses another thing to learn. I am thinking a basic cake might be next but I will let him have input in the decision.

As I mentioned at the outset, this is my last day in the office for a month. !!!! We are headed to points south. First to my brother's home in Illinois. While there we will go to the Exotic Feline Rescue Center. Then onward to NC for two weeks at the beach. It has been years since I've been to the beach, and P and B have never been, and M has never really spent much time there. I grew up in the US south going to the beach every summer, and I cannot wait to be there. It has been calling to me for a few years now. P, B, and M are also beside themselves with excitement. We will, of course, be doing lots of interventionist strategies to control for all the changes that lie ahead, but I am predicting things are going to go swimmingly (so to speak!).

Over and out for now. I will try to get another post up when we get back from our trip.

Five Years

I owe an update, but today is for celebrating the five-year anniversary of our return to Canada as a family of four.

Five years ago right now, we were in Vienna waiting to board a flight to Toronto. We had left Kiev on an early morning flight. We got picked up from our flat at 4:30 am. P and B looked so adorable in their little sweatpants and t-shirts and little backpacks. Travelling with two newly adopted, older, post-institution, non-english-speaking children was quite the experience. Flying out of Kiev, we had four seats in a row -- 3 and then the aisle. M and the boys sat in the 3, and I sat across the aisle from M. M made the mistake of not sitting in between P and B. And then the breakfast trays arrived, complete with packets of ketchup and all sorts of things that seemed to multiply by the second. P and B got a fantastic chance to demonstrate their super-stellar fine motor skills! It was quite the introduction to chaos parenting for M, while I sat peacefully across the aisle getting to read a newspaper. M took full advantage of the adult-beverage service, which is apparently available 24 hours a day on all flights out of eastern Europe. No one in our family slept at all on any of our flights all day long. 3.5-year old B screamed the entire way across the Atlantic. I walked and walked the aisles of the plane with him, took him into the bathrooms, tried feeding him, etc, but nothing worked. A lady sitting behind us told us we should get our child under control. In Toronto, we had a 10-hour layover waiting for our 10 pm flight to our home city. We stood in line to try to change to an earlier flight, but that proved pointless except for that while in line behind an African American man we got to hear P pointing out the man to B and saying "caca" and "chocolate." Fun discovery. P and B wrought general havoc in various waiting and play structure areas. And then we went to our boarding area, where P, B, and M all fell sound asleep about 20 minutes before passengers travelling with small children were invited to board the plane. (What a mistake to board then!) P and B did NOT want to wake up. But since they were older than 2, they could not be on our laps -- they had to be seated in their own seats, upright, and with seat belts buckled. We were boarded and strapped in in plenty of time to witness the look of dread on all the other passengers' faces as they came down the aisle to the tune of two children screaming their heads off. M and I each had one kid with us on opposite sides of the aisle, so we each had one more row-mate coming, and we could see how eager everyone was to discover that they had the seats in our row. I got a really understanding man with me. He told me he was a dad and understood what we were going through. He even offered his fleece to P to use as a bit of a pillow. P and B screamed through take off, and then fell back to sleep when we reached cruising altitude. Then screamed continuously upon being returned to upright seat position for landing. M and I were so worn out by the time we got off the place in our city, that I went straight out to the taxis with our two screaming banshees and straight home (got a nice tolerant cab driver who seemed very relieved to leave us off at home), leaving M to collect all the luggage. By 2 am, we were all sound asleep. P and B awoke the next morning chipper as could be.

I cannot believe how these two wonders have changed my life. They are two of the most incredible people I am privileged to know, and I can't believe I got so lucky as to have them for my sons. Did I ever hit the jackpot.

I will try to post pictures in a post to come. We were still on a film camera in 2005, but I have a disk on my desk at the office that I am hoping has some pictures of that era on it. I'm at home today.

For lunch today, I am going to kidnap the boys from school and take them to one of our favourite lunch spots. They are going to be very surprised. M will walk over from his library office to meet up with us. And tonight, before rushing out to B's taekwondo class, we will have our traditional celebratory "Happy Family Day" cake and tell stories.

Five years. It feels like forever and the blink of an eye at the same time!

And they're off...

M, P, and B hit the road for Edmonton at 8 this morning. I feel a really weird combination of giddiness at my temporary freedom from responsibility and lost at the removal of the structure those responsibilities give my life.

We have spent the past week getting "the men" organized and ready for their trip, and that seemed to give P a good preparatory period for his separation from me. By three days ago, he was keeping himself regulated once again and finding the strength to utter the words "I'm going to miss you soooooo much." That was a nice breakthrough. P's ambivalence has been pretty apparent to us, and then it was finally apparent enough to him to articulate it. These days, at this stage in his healing, I try to cue him less and wait for him to reach a point of identifying his feelings. Not always possible (nowhere near!), but I do try to make myself wait more to see what coping skills he'll choose to recruit and how much he'll choose to fight to let himself feel the actual difficult feelings without giving into the RAD impulses to mask with anger and control. Always rewarding to see him make the choices we would choose for him as well. He nearly sabotaged himself (out of a much-awaited in-the-car treat? out of a pleasant start to the day? out of pleasant interactions with me? not exactly sure what he was going for) through super-poor breakfast table manners this morning, which wasn't surprising so was easy to take in stride. I did cue him then by saying "Do you see as clearly as I do that RAD is choosing self-sabotage for you right now?" and he pulled it together almost immediately.

B has just been dying to get going! No ambivalence on his part. Though I did find a phone message at my office when I arrived this morning: "This is B*****. I love you and I'm going to call you everyday, so get ready!" He's such a goofball.

I'm eating appetizers for supper tonight! No work, as they're left over from a dinner party we hosted Saturday night. Hey, they need to be eaten!

The joke's on me!

Ha ha ha. Spoke too soon. P raged on M yesterday evening. I had to be out at a neighbourhood meeting, so I wasn't home to experience it. P and B had their bikes out yesterday afternoon and evening for the first time of 2010. Lots of excitement about this from all four of us!!! In a race after supper, P cut off B's lane, causing B to crash and get scraped on the sidewalk. This is a classic happening around here with P, but you never get used to this as someone's winning strategy. I guess there was some initial lying about how this happened, but since M saw the whole thing there truly couldn't have been any real doubt in anyone's mind. When confronted by that reasoning, P threw a tantrum the likes of which we haven't seen in over a year (according to M last night and corroborated by P this morning). It included kicking. And a ton of screaming. Fun stuff. M was proud of himself that he didn't lose it along with P -- stayed completely calm and even used Christine's line of "I'm right here." So the tantrum didn't last all that long. P seemed very embarrassed this morning when I talked with him about it. Today he is back to more of his normal self -- didn't even strike me as in his regression anymore, though I seriously doubt that can be the case as the spring break separation from me hasn't actually occurred yet.

Yes, as Lisa commented to my last post, the upcoming mom-break is completely and totally cool. I can't wait. So many silly little self-indulgences are building up in my mind, such as cleaning the bathroom and having it stay sparkling for the entire week and being able to be on whatever schedule I want!

Nothing much but counting down

I've been sort of ho-hum about blogging lately. Don't really feel like I have much to say. Life's been fairly repetitive. A week goes by, and then another week goes by. My teaching semester at work is winding down (we finish classes a good month ahead of US universities!). So the crunch is on at work, and this is one of the times of the year when I feel particularly pulled between work and home. But, again, this is routine.

Something that is maybe not so routine is P's current regression. We're on about day 5 of it. M and I noticed it in a big way on Sunday -- P put us through an agonizing day, forgetting how to play piano, write his name, and you name it. We're guessing this regression is triggered by the upcoming spring break trip (more below), but it could also be the fact that we're approaching our family's Adoption Day. Or it could be something else altogether! Anyway, while these regressions are always frustrating and exhausting, it is hard for me to get too wound up in complaining about it this time around because M and I are spending *more* of our time in this regression commenting to each other about the improvements we are clearly seeing in P in the midst of this regression than we're spending venting about the fact that we're in another regressive period. !! In other words, it recently hit us that our reaction to the regression this time around is a brand new thing. And it really truly is because we are witnessing real true change in P. Yes, he's regressing and it's irritating as all get-out. It's just that low-grade wear-you-down go back to the chatteriness and the distraction and the mild defiance and some passive aggressiveness and some minor/silly sneakiness. But this time around P has not had a single rage. Nor has he been disrespectful, nor has he escalated. He has barely even done RAD eyes at us, either the drilling into you RAD glare or the totally disassociative empty RAD look. There have been numerous times we've gotten to see him start down any of those negative reactions toward us and catch himself (without us calling him on it) and take a deep breath. One deep breath. And he gets himself under control. It really does make a difference when you can see the improvement so clearly. Plus, he is articulating this sort of battle that's going on in him. e.g.: "Did you see that, Mom? I started to let RAD make me do X, but then I didn't let it happen?" He has an awareness! And he's fighting. We need to get to the feelings level more than we are, now that I think about it.

On the taekwondo front, the dojang has told B that he will test for his belt promotion in April. He is so eager that I wish it could be sooner, but I completely trust the decisions of his instructors. B just got the news of the April testing at Tuesday evening's class, and he was tickled pink, so I'm finding it in myself to be satisfied too. It has been so much fun to watch him improve. He is getting more powerful and crisp in his movements and much more precise in all the body positions. And he just exudes confidence about it all, and it is completely an earned confidence. Very very cool.

In perhaps the best news of all, M and the boys are gearing up for their upcoming spring break trip out to Edmonton to visit M's side of the family. This is my husband: taking P and B, for the second year in a row, out to Edmonton by car without me. Last year all 3 of them had a ball, so this year M has added in a stop at the T-rex museum in Alberta. They leave next Thursday and come home just over a week later. It is perfect timing for me because it will allow me to just go whole-hog at work and get the semester's teaching work mostly finished off without any guilt. AND the big bonus is I will still be able to build in plenty of time for myself to just space out and recuperate from the general struggles of being a working mom and the specific exhaustion of parenting a radical kid. Aren't I lucky?

Catching up

Going to bullet this post because there is no real topic.

• B got his eighth tiger stripe at taekwondo last week. He is really hoping his instructors will decide he's ready to test for belt promotion on this month's date of March 20. It would be so awesome for him to earn his new belt this month. But I am starting to worry about his chances. I know he knows his stuff, so that's not the worry. The worry is that he gets so nervous in test-type situations. For example, he just freezes at piano recitals (but he does pull them off). The dojang does everything possible to prepare the kids so they can be relaxed, and hopefully that's going to be enough in B's case. He just needs to relax enough for his brain to access what it definitely knows. The having to wait and see is killing me. I wish he could test tomorrow so we could see how he's going to handle it.
• P pulled out of his regressive streak last weekend. An almost magical turnaround executed on the last day of February. Could it really just be that the month of February was behind him? If not, the dates of onset and end of this streak were extremely coincidental. He is back to the "normal" we've started to get sort of used to: really pleasant and compliant and loving and helpful; far from perfect but perfectly acceptable in ways that allow us to relax a bit and just enjoy him!; socially about 7.5 years old; new addition is directly observable and huge efforts -- often successful now -- to control his initial kneejerk response to defy or speak disrespectfully when being called out on something. We are also seeing beautifully consistent eye contact (even when scared or angered), nice small non-RAD pupils in those eyes, and generally less RAD-daggers shooting from his eyes.
• We are following Dia's, Christine's, and Lisa's lead and administering P 1500 mg of Vitamin B-3 (niacin) daily. He has pretty much taken charge of the process himself and handles it responsibly. The end-of-February turnaround in his demeanor may have had something to do with this, although the huge turn occurred on only day 2 of the niacin.
• B attended a glow-in-the-dark mini-golf birthday party yesterday. The invitation said to wear white. B wore white shorts (why do we even own white shorts?) that stretched to his knees -- keep in mind it's March in Canada -- white socks that he pulled waaaaayy up, a blue button-down shirt with white buttons, and a blue, orange, and white flecked clip-on tie. It was very funny, although he was very serious about the outfit so we didn't chuckle in front of him. When we arrived, he was the only kid in a tie, and he wasn't the least bit concerned about it. And those white flecks on the tie looked super cool in the black lights. This boy just makes me chuckle so often.
• M has been invited to be on a panel with Margaret Atwood. Needless to say, he said yes!
• Is anyone besides me wondering whether Pioneer Woman knows the Cowboys on The Amazing Race?
• On that note, over and out.