Riding the Whirlwind

Beginning a new family with a child who has suffered abuse of any kind is a real workout! As I mentioned in my previous post, Lisa was very focused in the beginning on not doing anything to disappoint us. I can only imagine the stress that living under that kind of pressure must bring about. We tried to convey to her that we loved her because she was our daughter and that mistakes or misbehaviors were not going to separate her from us, and she would smile and nod, but her life experiences had taught her different and she wasn't even close to accepting that things could be different.

So, we brought Lisa home to live with us on October 16th. (Ironically, this is my biological son's birthday.) Lisa was completely overwhelmed by the school and had great difficulty adjusting. She didn't know anyone. At that time, we were the complete focus of her world.

On October 28th, I came home from work and ran slap into a very difficult morning. Typically, I try to go to bed shortly after I get home at 9AM, but on this morning I did not climb into bed until after 12:30. I sent Lisa a text message to let her know that I was just going to bed and would not be getting up when she got home from school and to please let me sleep until 5:30 or so. My phone rang shortly after 2 PM, which is when Lisa is due home from school. She was on the other end of the phone, sobbing hysterically. She was outside the door, locked out because she had left her key at school. I went to the door immediately and let her in and she practically fell into my arms. She was near hysterics and would not even look at me. It was not just that she had done something "wrong", it was something far more significant than that. Remember in a previous post when I mentioned that Lisa had had a failed adoption before? The day that adoption blew up and Lisa was removed, she had lost her house key. Her adoptive mother had blown a gasket over the lost key and locked Lisa out of the house. The situation escalated from there until eventually, police were called and Lisa was removed, her adoptive mother was taken away and, several days later, the adoption was terminated.

For twenty minutes, Lisa cried and I held her and comforted her and told her how much we loved her. She has always been so completely disconnected from her past and the trauma she suffered that she was unaware that in those moments, she was 10 year old Lisa, lost in despair and anguish and fear and desperately needing for a better outcome than the one she got when the original episode happened. I knew she was not connecting the dots on that yet, but for her to be able to be in such a horrendous place and to come out of it intact was really significant.

It was months later when we would learn the details of that whole afternoon; how Lisa was locked out of the home, how she begged to be let inside, how she lost her temper and yelled through the door that she didn't want to live with her adoptive mom anymore and how that statement was answered with the clicking shut of a deadbolt lock; how Lisa, as a young and frightened child, wrote a note to her adoptive mother saying she was sorry and she didn't mean it and signed it with a smiley face, then held it up to the window so it could be seen only to have her "mother" shut the blinds in her face. When Lisa was eventually let in the house, she was told to find the key. She was hit every five minutes that she failed to find the key until she was sobbing uncontrollably. She was hit in the head with a broom stick and sent to her room and told she would be given good reason to cry, and then she was punched in the face and left alone. A short time later, the police arrived, carried her mother away and she was taken by DCF to live somewhere else, believing all the while that she was to blame for the whole thing because she lost her key.

This will give you a pretty good insight into the kind of tension Lisa lives with all the time. She wants to believe that the world is better now and that people are trustworthy and she is safe. She WANTS to believe that in her heart, she TRIES to believe that in her head, but seventeen years of experiencing love as pain and betrayal causes a huge disconnect for her that she is finding difficult to overcome.

We have made some more significant progress in this area, which will come in future posts, but we still have a very long way to go.

Doing it scared - Part Two

Karen here.

What I want to talk about today is how Nicole and I perceived Lisa's fears during the first three months we knew her. I am not sure that even Lisa could speak directly about those fears. She had been in foster care for so long; had lived through a failed adoption and several potential adoptions that didn't materialize. All of that does damage and sometimes even when you are the one who lived through the damage, you can't see the full extent of it. So in this post, I am going to talk about the things that we COULD see, understanding that this is probably much like an iceberg and the vast majority of it lies unseen in the murky depths of Lisa's emotion ocean.

When we met Lisa, we felt an instant bond with her, and she felt the same thing with us. We know for sure that this phenomenon was happening on both ends. For our parts, we could experience it directly. For Lisa's part, we knew it was happening because this normally shut down child who wouldn't give most folks the time of day was opening up to us in ways that shocked the people who knew her best. We wondered a bit if she was just grabbing for what she felt might be her last chance at finding a family so she didn't age out of the system, but there was something we couldn't put our fingers on that told us it was more than that.

In the beginning, Lisa was very careful to be pleasing. She agreed with EVERYTHING! She called us both "Mom" from the very beginning. She was always happy, upbeat and easy going. She had been living in a group home on a "Ranch" that contained several group homes for six years. It was a religiously based organization and church attendance was compulsory. Lisa had a great deal of conflicted emotion regarding religion and had been required at various times in her life to conform to religious doctrines and practices that she was not comfortable with, so this six year placement for her was particularly difficult. To make matters worse, Lisa and the "house mother" for the home in which she lived did not get along. They were just like oil and water and the contempt between them was on most days only barely concealed and sometimes not concealed at all. For Lisa, the chance to live outside of that type of environment was almost a dream come true. What it would cost her to do so, however, was a nightmare.

Lisa was going to have to leave behind everything and everyone she knew. Where the first two thirds of her life had been filled with constant uncertainty and change, the last six years had given her some stability. She had come to know the people around her fairly well. She had attended the same schools for six years and had developed long standing friendships. The school she attended was small....everybody knew everybody. There might have been many things about her living circumstances that were not entirely pleasant, but at least they were very familiar. For a child who comes from a chaotic and unpredictable life, familiarity is like a warm blanket.

So, as long as she was there in her familiar surroundings AND she also had the assurance that a family was coming to be, Lisa was in a pretty OK place. She was unaware of what was going to happen to her emotionally when she left her familiar home. As much as she wanted to live "in the 'burbs"; as much as she wanted away from the "Ranch" and it's dogmatic requirements; as much as she wanted to be away from ALL THOSE KIDS and have the spotlight of an only child; Lisa had no clue what it was going to feel like to be all alone in unfamiliar surroundings with no one to confide in. She was leaving a small school to attend a school with 3,300 students bustling through the hallways. She was leaving a home with the background din of nearly a dozen kids under one roof and where there was always someone to talk to or play with for the quiet of a home where there were no other children. She would sit alone at the lunch table at school. She would sit alone in her room or in the living room after school until one one of us arrived home or until I woke up from my bat-like schedule. She would come to find the noise of school overwhelming and the quiet at home deafening. She would feel equally claustrophobic in the over crowded halls of school, getting bumped and jostled as she would at home where she could walk/sit/stand anywhere she wanted without competition.

Imagine being in completely unfamiliar surroundings like that, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and not having any idea when or IF things will ever feel comfortable again. Now imagine feeling that way and knowing that if you do something "wrong", all of THIS will disappear and you will be hurled into....who knows? Imagine giving up everything familiar for the hope of a dream and then feeling like if you didn't do everything JUST RIGHT, you would not only lose your dream, but you couldn't even get back what you left behind? THAT was the place that Lisa was having to function from when she moved in with us. We lived five hours north of where she had been living. It was in the same state, but it might as well have been a whole world away. Her old life was inaccessible; her place at the ranch, gone. This was where the rubber met the road and it was dance or die.

It wasn't long before the pressure of making such huge and sweeping changes came crashing in on Lisa and the challenges started. We had known all along that it wasn't going to be all sunshine and roses, but let me tell you, NOTHING can prepare you for the hurt and chaos of that first emotional explosion.

Doing it scared - Part One

I love my comfort zone. I mean seriously...I really LOVE my comfort zone. I am one of those people who likes to know what is about to happen. I read instructions; then I follow them. I google maps locations before I go to them and I print the directions. My clothes closet is divided into dresses and skirts, shirts, uniforms and pants and those divisions are further divided by color. I do things in order. I load the dishwasher the same way every time. You get the picture.

Now don't get me wrong, I can be spontaneous. As long as I am not doing something that could have life altering consequences, I can be spontaneous and happy at the same time! Knowing this about me, you can imagine that becoming a lesbian adoptive parent in a VERY conservative state was a bit un-nerving. Becoming an adoptive parent to an almost grown person who has spent almost her entire life so far in abusive or challenging environments and who has lived through experiences that she is not even able to voice...well, let's just say that there were times when I questioned my own sanity.

I had to commit myself to the idea of "doing it scared". I couldn't have done it without Nicole by my side; nor could she have done it without me. We spent months in anxiety over whether or not this child would accept us. We were so different from her. The very first question we asked the adoptions recruiter was whether or not she would accept lesbian parents. The answer came back pretty quickly that she had no issue with that. Not long after, Nicole asked me one day, "Do you think she will be OK with us being white?" I just laughed and said, "If she doesn't care that we are lesbian, I can hardly imagine that being white will throw her!" In the moment it was funny, but in my heart of hearts, I harbored serious worries over being rejected and hurt. So did Nicole. We tried our best not to leak worry into our daily lives, but it is difficult when you have such strong feelings about a child and you have no idea how things are really going to go when you meet.

Before we could meet her, we had to have an approved match. Typically the way this happens is that your local agency does a home study on you and forwards it to the child's agency, who gives it a once over and as long as they don't see any obvious conflicts or disqualifiers, they send you a packet of information about the child that gives you a cursory run down of their history, personality, medical/behavioral/educational issues, etc. You read through it and if there are no disqualifiers on your end, then a conference is scheduled between your agency representative and the child's agency and they all get together and talk about you behind your back. The point of it is to get down to real brass tacks and make sure that everyone believes that this is a good match and that it is in the best interests of the child to proceed with an adoption with this family. Typically, at the end of that conference, a determination has been made, yea or nay, and so we were VERY surprised when we got a phone call saying that they were just not sure and needed more information. A phone conference was scheduled between our daughter's agency and ourselves, so that we could answer the agency's questions directly.

Remember that thing I said about liking things to be predictable and orderly...ESPECIALLY if the results could be life altering?

I remember like it was ten minutes ago sitting in our car in the parking lot of Nicole's work talking on the cell phone connected to the car speakers to a room full of people we didn't know but who held our hopes and dreams in their hands. The car was awash in papers. I had brought every single document that had been generated during the previous nine months, just in case.... There was nothing left to do but to swallow hard, breathe through the fear, be absolutely honest and pray that things would go well. They asked some really hard questions. Remember, their job was to protect a child who had been through hell and who was emotionally shut down and could not take another hit. We sat in the car, holding each other's hands so tightly that it hurt, eyes locked together and answering questions that dug at our souls....."She is completely shut down. How will you reach her?" "What methods will you use to motivate a child that is completely unmotivated?" We talked and listened and then all of the sudden, there it was! "Well ladies, we have only one things left to say. Congratulations...It's a GIRL!"