Trials of an adoptive parent and the kids we love

I have given some deep thought to posting this or not, mainly because I am still not totally comfortable with some of the emails I have been getting from someone locally. I know being in blogville gives the individual freedom to randomly select what he or she types or doesn't type. By nature I am not one that plays my cards close to the chest, so to speak. I tend to be fairly open and honest, although I don't just spill my guts out to everyone. I am more a middle of the road type of gal.

So my hesitation to post this is more in reflection of the individual that wishes to sit back and analyze my life, but yet has made no effort to expose themselves to me as a parent or a total fruit loop. I can deal with a curious person, I can deal with another parent, and well....I can even deal with a fruit loop at times, but please pick a side or a position.

Anywho, I wanted to do this post because it is a topic that has been coming up a lot recently between myself and another adoptive parent. It deals with how you can have two children basically raised to a certain age in an orphanage and how one child seems to struggle with issues surrounding those circumstances and how some children seem to walk away and appear to have little to no issues.

My friend has three adopted children. The two older ones were adopted together from the same orphanage and basically were the same age. The younger one seems to have many more problems and issues than her older sibling with the past and her environment.

My youngest son appears to have no memories of his homeland. He doesn't react to old photos, he doesn't seem to have any feelings about it one way or another. He was one of the orphanage favorites and in the bigger picture, he was treated a lot kinder than many of the rest of the children. The only true issue we ever had with "J" was his huge fear of water and the food/sensory issues. We were told that "J" had almost drowned as an infant and he had a deep fear of anything involving water. Even up to last year, I could not put him in the shower or shampoo his hair without him going into a screaming, crying episode where he really just zoned out and did not recognize me. I cannot tell you how many times I have sat by the tub in tears rocking this wet and naked boy in a towel and sobbing away with him because I wanted to heal whatever was going on with him. It literally broke my heart to witness this. He has since moved passed this and loves to swim now. He is a wonderful swimmer and those that knew him before cannot even believe he just dives in. But I have never forgotten how horrible it was to just give him a simple bath. I would sit down by the bathtub and just sob along with him. I would be so sad for him and angry ( in a way) that he had been put through that. My heart just broke for him and I felt like a horrible mother because I had no clue how to get through his fear and gain his trust.

My oldest son has strong feelings and emotions about Ukraine. He remembers a certain caregiver there that was mean to him, although he cannot elaborate exactly how mean or what she did. He will get emotional and frustrated just looking at a photo of her. I should mention there were many photos of caregivers but this one in particular is a trigger for him and she is the only one he refuses to look at. He remembers being hungry and he remembers being lonely. He remember us leaving him at the orphanage and crying himself to sleep. He remembers banging on the window as we had to walk away and thinking we would never come back for him. I should mention that "C" is not an easy child. He definitely can be mischievous and a little deviant, two of the characteristics that obviously don't work well in an orphanage setting. We discovered this on the first day we met him. He had made this tower out of blocks which apparently he was not used to playing with, but he got so frustrated when the tower kept falling over. We watched as he picked up a block walked over to the other children and hand them a block with this big grin on his face. At first I thought it was sweet that he was sharing with his buddies, but I soon saw a pattern. The children were not allowed to play with toys during TV time and quite obviously my young son was trying to push the caregivers' buttons. They were not saying anything to him when he was trying to get his friends up and playing, but the looks on their faces showed how angry they were at his antics. "C" was one of the older kids in the group and he was one of the "caregivers" to his younger buddies. He had issues in the beginning of trusting us to take care of him and his younger brother. He would try to change his younger brother's diapers even when he was still in them himself. He would feed his brother and would make sure anything he received his brother or friends received too. He is still very much this way. We truly had to teach him to be a little boy because he always seems more concerned about adult problems and still does.

"C" has a huge temper. I am not talking just tantrums, I am talking about rages. Little things could set him off and it would get so bad that we would have to do holding therapy on him just to prevent him from hurting himself. During these early times of being home, he would usually rant away in Russian. We could pick up a word here or there, but nothing that made any type of sense. He would go into a trance in these rages and it was hard to get him to even recognize you. Now the rage is almost gone, but he still struggles at times. He is very critical of himself. He wants to be the best at everything and is crushed when this does not happen. He has went to a therapist and it is amazing how much comes out of him during these sessions. She has told me that there are things in his past that he will not tell me because he doesn't want me to be sad and he is trying to protect me. The most recent thing happened during a visit with my family. My husband was playing and wrestling with my sons and their cousins. Their cousins were beating on my husband's back in play and "C" went hysterical. My husband thought he was just jealous of the other kids playing with his daddy, but I saw more into it. There was a frantic fear within him. He told the therapist he really thought his daddy was being hurt. He admitted that when he was in the orphanage that he would lay over other children if they were being beaten and if you could have seen the scene with his cousins that is exactly the description I would use to explain how he was attempting to cover his daddy's back.


I know from time to time I will come back to this topic. I guess my main point would be that when we were new adoptive parents we were not prepared for so many things. Sure we stressed about the bonding issues, but I never worried about the simple things that grew bigger like the eating and sensory issues. I guess that will be another post.