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.