My Journey With Attachment Disorder

An Awesome Experience

February 16, 2008
So much is going on that I am not doing a very good job at keeping my journal updated. My husband and I met with Tony's new therapist Thursday. We like her, and I am excited about beginning our work with her. Tony and I begin working with her on Monday. I am anxious to get a therapist for Kellye. I feel that she is in urgent need of therapy to follow up with the issues that were stirred up in our session with Sharon Gary in Memphis. Her behavior this week has been pretty much the same as always, which is not surprising. No one expected one 3-hour session to turn her around. I do think that it gave her a lot to think about, and certainly a place to start the healing process. We just need to find a therapist very quickly. She seems to have so much anger toward me. I'm not sure what all of that is about. I have lots of ideas, and imagine it's a combination of things.

However, I want to record something awesome that happened with me and my son this morning. I just had the most awesome conversation with Tony. He was 3 years old when he came into foster care, so there has to be some memories of his trauma with his mother. But he also came to us with the language of a very small toddler, so he never had words to talk about the past. I always, from the beginning, thought it was very odd, in a very scary way, that he never asked about his mother. He did ask about "Bobby", who was his mother's live-in boyfriend at the time. In fact, his mother called a couple of times, and I had a great deal of trouble getting him to even understand who was on the phone. I used all the mom names I could think of, and even her given name of Amanda. He only connected her when I said something about Bobby.

Anyway, I have been using some of the cuddling and snuggling techniques I am learning about in the book I'm reading. This morning, being Saturday, we had a long snuggle, while James went early to get the oil changed in the car. After we had played word games and tickle games a while, he asked me to talk to him some more about if I had been his Mommy when he was a baby. I started playing a baby game with. I would put the cover over his face and sing, "Where is Tony? Where is Tony? There he is! There he is!" He got really sad, and asked me not to play that game because it made him sad. He said it reminded him of Bobby, because Bobby used to play that game with him. He has NEVER told us ANY memories before. He began telling me about his own memories. I don't know if my previous snuggle times had planted these memories, or merely triggered them, but he said to me, "I wonder why my mommy left me." I asked him if he meant she left him alone, or if he meant when she left him with us. He went on to say that she left him alone, and didn't take care of him when he was scared and hungry. I told him that some mommies just didn't know how to take care of babies. I said, "That must have been scary." He said, "It was scary and it made me very sad. I kept looking for her and wondering where she was." Then, in a very quiet solemn voice, almost with a tear in his eye, he said, "Thank you for caring enough to take care of me when I needed you."

Wow! I never dreamed he would be ready to say something like that already.

On the other hand, Kellye is really pushing me away. I am trying to find ways to be near her and give her some Mom time. I am going to have to be a lot trickier about it. She is rejecting any obvious attempts to spend time with her. I'm guessing that the session with Sharon has a lot of things stirred up, plus the extra time I'm giving Tony in the snuggling, etc.. probably makes her jealous. And part of it is just that she is angry right now, and most of the anger is being directed toward me. Anyway, that's the way it goes.

By the way, we have now had breakfast, and Tony is having a major reaction to the progress he made this morning, which is actually very typical. After revealing such a painful, deep revelation about himself, and making himself vulnerable to adults by telling me thank you for caring enough for him to take care of him, he has now taken a scary step. He has allowed himself to think that just maybe adults can be trusted. So, as typical of these children, he is now testing us to the limit. Rather than having a great morning, he is purposely agitating us, and using his best skills of proving to himself that adults are mean. Wow. What a process! At least I can recognize it now, for what it is. If you were looking at it the way you look at typical kids, you would go crazy, thinking, "What in the world is wrong with this kid?"

Well, I'll go for now and see what I can salvage of the mess James and Tony have created with each other.

Later: I sent James to the store for something so Tony and I could talk. I talked to him about how hard it is for him to trust adults. I said, "I know it's hard for you trust Daddy when he says that he will play basketball with you when your room is clean. You just have to trust that he will do what he says. Of course, if you take a very long time cleaing up your room, he will not have time to play basketball, because he has a meeting to go to this afternoon. Now, we will just have to see how things go from here.


Warrior Mom

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