Just a normal day

Little does not want to do her reading practice. It's boring, apparently. She flounces up the stairs, flinging her reading book around. By the time I get to her room she's hiding under the duvet. I sit down on the bed and attempt to empathise with how horrible it must be to have to do something so boring, and promise some fun afterwards. She kicks me. I ask her to stop; she doesn't. I retreat to my bedroom, and let her know where to find me when she's ready.

She follows me to the bedroom. I attempt to use humour to snap her out of it and point out she's got some cheese from dinner stuck to her cardigan. I pick it off and feed it to the cat, who's asleep on the bed. She hits the cat. I ask her not to. She hits the cat again. I pick the cat up and call my wife to come and remove her.* While we're waiting for her to come upstairs, Little continues to hit my legs and pull the cat's tail. Once the cat is out of the equation I offer Little a hug. She declines. I let her know the hug is there when she's ready and follow her back to her room.

We sit side by side on Little's bed. She tells me she doesn't care the cat is hurt. I tell her this is a shame, that I care about her, I care about the cat and it hurts my heart when people I care about hurt each other. She reiterates that she doesn't care the cat is hurt because she doesn't like the cat. She wants her to go away apparently and for us not to have any pets.** I wonder aloud if she's saying that she doesn't like the cat because actually she knows that hurting her was not the right thing to do, and inside she's feeling really guilty about it. But it's easier to pretend she doesn't care than think about the yukky feelings.

She nods, we hug and she reaches for her 'What a Muddle' workbook, saying 'I think this will help me Mummy'. I gently suggest there's something we might want to do first, and we go downstairs holding hands, she seeks out the cat and very gently apologises to her, strokes her and gives her some treats. We spend a good 20 minutes working through What a Muddle, and reminding ourselves of the calming strategies. She says she wants to take the book in to school for show and tell the next day. We've not read her school reading book, but she's happily taken turns with me in reading the paragraphs in What a Muddle.

This is progress. Physical aggression (towards me, my wife, her brother, the cat) used to be a daily thing for Little. Now it's more like weekly, and much less intense. She's mostly quicker to calm, usually willing to suggest and engage in strategies, and is starting to move from all-consuming shame to healthy remorse. There's no way we'd have got here without ASF funding for a therapeutic parenting programme, and it was a real battle to get the children's local authority to agree to that. I've seen a lot out there about post-adoption support and self-care recently, and I'm inclined to agree with others who say this kind of thing should come as standard. It's one thing to sit in a prep group and be told about how parenting adopted children is different from traditional parenting, but (for us at least) it's not until you're in the thick of it that you realise what triggers you, what situations you need a bit of extra help with, and how difficult it is to remain calm and therapeutic when little hands and feet are laying into you.

---

* I know I could have just let the cat run away of her own accord, but I'm slightly paranoid that without a bit of positive attention of her own, she'll decide one day that enough is enough and find herself a quiet old lady to live with. The cat is a huge part of our adopter self-care regime and the children love her 95% of the time, so she needs to stay!

** This is blatantly untrue. She adores the cat and is thrilled whenever the cat decides to hang out in her room.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Great Behaviour Breakdown

This week's #WASO theme invites us to write about challenges, positives or something that's worked really well for your family. It's a good one, as it's pushed me into writing a post that I've been wanting to write for a long time, but which I've been putting off because it's a big one and needs quite a bit of time and mental engery. I've referenced some training we attended recently in a couple of previous posts and haven't said much more than that. I wasn't meaning to be cryptic, I just didn't have the time at that moment to write too much about the specifics. And because it's something quite different to anything I've done before, I didn't want to mention it without being able to do it justice. So here it is... The Great Behaviour Breakdown, which is the cornerstone of pretty much everything we're trying to put in place at home at the moment. Rewind nine months. Little and Tiny had just moved in. We had the typical 'h
Read more

Triggers

We’ve recently braved travelling abroad with the children for the first time. Staying away from home is a challenge for us all, and is an area where we’ve been gradually building up their tolerance over the past year or so. We started off with one night away at my parents’ house and have very gradually increased the number of nights. We’re up to three nights now, so the time felt right to attempt a trip to see their other set of grandparents, who live abroad. The trip involved a number of firsts… namely their first trip abroad, and their first time on a plane, and we’d done a lot of thinking about possible triggers and had planned accordingly. We paid a bit extra to secure a sensibly timed flight from a small airport not too far away and created a plan together of how we’d get there, what the flight would be like, some of the things we’d do while away, and how we’d get back. We made both of the children visual planners to track how long we’d be away and how close we were to going h
Read more

All families have different grown-ups

This week is LGBT adoption and fostering week. I am an adopter. I am also LGBT. If you read my blog regularly, you’ve  probably worked out that I’m parenting as part of a female same-sex couple. It’s not something I’ve explicitly written about in any level of detail though. Not because I’m particularly trying to hide it, but more because I feel that as a parent, the adopter part of my identity is much more significant than the LGBT part, in the sense that if I were to separate the two, I can usually find a lot more common ground with other adopters (be they gay, straight, single, coupled) than I can with lesbian parents who have chosen other ways to build a family. Would I have become an adopter if I weren’t LGBT? I can’t honestly answer that, because I don’t know. I’ve never tried to have a birth child or felt a need to try so I don’t know if it would have been an option for me under different circumstances. My wife and I knew early on in our relationship that we wanted children;
Read more