You say goodbye and I say hello

J and  I just arrived home from spending a very extended period of time with AJ in Haiti.

When I arrived in Haiti in July I had every intention of staying until I crossed through the immigration line in the U.S. with him, proudly wearing our Colorado t-shirts, hopefully by end of this month.

But things don't always turn out the way we have planned. It became clear that AJ's passport and visa would not be ready in July or August.

J left Haiti first. So it was up to me on Tuesday afternoon to haul my 55 pound suitcase out to the van and wrap my arms around my distracted little boy with the frown on his face. I told him I would be back.

I didn't think I would cry. I honestly thought that I've cried every tear available to me since January and have not a single drop left.

But when he started crying I cried. I cried for him and for us. So many hellos and goodbyes. So much time passed since we first met. So many hurdles we've had to overcome and so many still to go. Confusing for a 2 year old.

I cried for the pure unfairness of life. And for what he will think when I am gone. And how he will view me when I show up again, randomly, in his life at a future date.

If I'm honest I am still crying. Something happened today that just set me off. It's interesting isn't it how when you are holding back one big set of tears, something can sneak in and trigger them from an unrelated angle?

I wonder sometimes how many times we can all pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off and keep going forward. How many times can I wipe away the tears in the shower and keep a stoic face when friends ask how the adoption is going. How many times can we go to Haiti and not bring AJ home?

I wonder how long Ariam can deal with this - the tension, the anxiety, the not knowing and waiting. I wonder how many more midnight phone calls I can field from other adoptive families using our former organization who are terrified for their children. How long can I keep up the strength to listen and support and encourage?

I guess we just keep walking forward. Putting one foot in front of the other. I'm going to try to blog more. It helps. Most of the time it is easier to write about all of this than it is to talk about it. Thanks for being here with me.

~A


AJ the morning before I left. He's getting so big.

(I put him in the Colorado t-shirt that was meant for his homecoming.)

A Year Behind Us

One year ago exactly I woke up in my own home, with a baby sleeping in the crib her daddy for built her.

After three weeks in Ethiopia battling the bacterial infections from hell and the big fat ?? mark of leaving together or staying ALONE with my sick self and my sick baby for another month, the three of us somehow managed to pry a visa out of the embassy and claw our way across the universe back to our cozy den of safety.

Ok, we flew. We didn't claw. But if I had been told by the embassy that "clawing" my way back to the US with Ariam clinging to my back was necessary I would have signed at the dotted line and put on my knee and elbow pads.

Parenting was so daunting a year ago. I think that's why the Ethiopian experience and the trip home meld together in my mind as less of a realistic memory and more of a big black void of churning, sick to my stomach feeling.

Do we let her crawl on the airport floor, is that o.k.? (yep - she'll crawl on worse!) Do we wake her up to feed her on the plane? (duh! NO! never ever wake her up!) How do we cut her nails? Why is she crying? Are we supposed to burp an 11 month old? Do babies eat corn? Can her body really hold 10 bottles in 24 hours?? Is it ok if she holds her bottle herself? Am I witnessing a severe attachment issue? Why doesn't she ever sleep? When will we ever sleep? How does a onesie work? Does her head look big? Do her toes look small? Is one eye opening wider than the other? Why is she so annoyed by socks? OMG are they cutting off her circulation?!

I remember waking up that first morning home. (Probably because I never went to sleep.)
Lots and lots of crying from the little lady.

But then we introduced her to the bedroom of delights. Filled with fantastic things to discover like the mirror on the door, the baby books she couldn't rip up, baskets of stacking toys, soft stuffed animals, and the yellow rocking chair. Two parents at her service completely.

I remember our concern that neither of us would ever be able to go to work again because well, a. we didn't want to be away from her for even a minute and b. it took both of us to tend to her every need and desire. It seemed like a truly legitimate concern at the time!

I remember how, after dressing her in a ridiculously poofy sundress, we just sat and watched her explore the room. Nobody laughed or smiled. We were so. serious. All the time! She was serious. We were serious. Geez, it was like we were attending a wake those first few days. We had absolutely no idea how to make her laugh even after spending 3 weeks with her in Ethiopia. We were really worried she would examine her new situation and find it all very....wanting. We were also worried that if we did anything wrong she would potentially break, crumble and turn back into the dust of a dream.

But, in the end, she didn't. She liked us! And she stayed very real!

A year is behind us. I wrote in her baby book each month of the year. A year of months of firsts and discoveries. Of feeling our way through the impossibly black night of new parenting. A year of seeing the sun pop out in unexpected places.

J is prone to telling me "She makes being a toddler look like so much fun!"
I smile.

I don't remind him that for years I (and a counselor) told him that having a child would help him to rediscover his own lost childhood. It would bring him retroactive joy.

 I don't have to tell him how redemptive parenthood is - how it seems to balance out the universe in indescribably right and good ways.

Last week we celebrated our 12th wedding anniversary.
On our 10th we went to Greece. Thank God we did that. Because on our 11th I'm pretty sure that one or both of us were laying in a bed in Ethiopia puking. And our 12th was very...understated.

Last week we hired our first babysitter. We paid her and everything y'all. (Ok, I am not southern and am not even sure if I spelled y'all correctly, but it just seeemed to fit and I may toss it around a bit more in the future...)

We paid her and left her in charge for four hours and took ourselves to happy hour and to a movie. It was blissful.

I think we're going to make it. I think we have found our equilibrium in parenting. It only took a year. A YEAR! It was a year! I am so in love with this past year and so very equally glad it is behind us.

~A

PS. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your comments about Cassidy. Sometimes I have to ask myself why I blog - why I choose to take time out of my family life to write self-indulgently funny or snarky or thought provoking or sad things on a page on the anonymous internet. And then when I wrote about Cassidy it was like putting a little bit of our life together in a bottle and setting it to sail. Honoring her, giving closure, and receiving the gift of comments back was priceless.

The Attachment Post (at 9 months)

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Ariam was cradling plastic baby in her arms, attempting to feed it from a miniature plastic baby bottle last week. She kept trying to jam the little pink n.ipple into plastic baby's mouth but it wouldn't fit. Instead of getting frustrated, she gave baby a very empathetic look, bent over to set the bottle on the floor, tipped baby onto her back, looked her in her blinky blue eyes and quietly whispered...
"shhhh sh sh sh shhhh."

For 9 months that has been our comfort language. "Shhhh sh sh sh shhh" I whisper in her ear when she's upset. "Shhhh sh sh sh shhhh" is the sound I make when she cries at night, it is our mommy/baby language.

Maybe nothing has been more satisfying than watching Ariam use my love language to share comfort and love with her baby.

.....................................................................................................

Like every other adoptive mother that has been steeped in attachment literature and scary adoption trainings I searched those early photos of Ariam. Looking for signs of her past, her early life, and her capacity for resilience and future attachment. I looked and looked and looked.

Her shining open eyes gave me reason for hope.

Then we showed up in person. And I'm not saying it went...badly. No, I can't say that exactly. But we received a child who was tired, plain old tired, of packing up her little bags and moving on. The eyes didn't shine for us. We faltered, there were a few days when I didn't even touch Ariam (I was sick), and while we had initial feelings of adoration for her, we were not sure she would ever like us in return.

Looking back I think we made it all much harder than it had to be. We were serious and sick. We were incredibly sleep deprived. And we had no clue how to be parents. So she was probably just reflecting our own mood.

I will not forget the first time I saw Ariam's face light up, not for food or her bottle, but for a person. I knew then, I just knew that she (in her baby way) loved deeply, trusted, and would attach to us.

On day 14 together, we took a very bumpy dusty ride to Debre Zeit (a smaller city about an hour and a half outside of Addis Ababa.)

Late in the afternoon as we were preparing to leave Debre Zeit the social worker we were with just happened to mention that Ariam had actually lived in a baby home near where we were parked. (News to us!)

She offered to take us by the home and introduce us to Ariam's favorite nanny.

We pulled through the gates into a compound that looked just like a regular, small, concrete Ethiopian home. Washing strung across the yard on ropes. A comfortable front porch. A few women, a few babies.

I carried Ari in and up the porch stairs and heard a gasp of joy. Women began running and calling out in Amharic.

Lovely Alemtsehaye:

This woman cared for Ariam from the first day she left her mother. This woman did not put her in the crib they showed me (on the "Derartu" tour!) but rather slept with her in her own bed. This woman tended to the bug bites on her legs and hung her photo on the wall (it was still there.) And quietly/aside, the social worker told us that Alemtsehaye cried and begged for Ariam not to be moved to Addis Ababa.

I am so thankful for Alemtsehaye and the love she poured over Ariam.
The bond they had, even after not having seen each other for the past 3 months, was palpable. We stayed for a long time,  had coffee, and enjoyed the handful of babies and equal number of nannies. We took a photo of Ariam's first baby photo.  The experience with Alemtsehaye and the baby home was a priceless glimpse of Ariam's early life attachment story.

I know that Ariam lived through trauma in her short life before us. But I know that she also experienced very real care and devotion .

Our attachment story, like all, began WAY before we entered the picture. It began with Ariam. With the people who shaped her and whatever was inside her that stayed aware and willing to reach out.

In my less than expert opinion, I'd like to posit that attachment begins with trust, not with love.

Attachment is not a willingness to love whomever comes along. It is a willingness, based on previous experience and probably just inherent to some personalities, to trust that your needs will be met. It is the desire to put your hand and heart out there and trust that it won't be hurt, even if it has been before.
We were naive, but it served us well in the long run. We had no previous children or experiences against which to measure either Ariam's attachment to us or ours to her.

We didn't instantly love or attach to her. But we trusted that it would happen. We didn't always even like being parents at first. But we jumped when she said jump and as her trust in us grew, our enjoyment of parenthood grew.

For Ariam attachment turned into love for us. I think it happened more quickly for the three of us than it does for most - and for that I am eternally grateful. I can't believe that I wrote this post after being home just one month. (Of course, at the time, it felt like an eternity.)

Somewhere along the line Ariam began to reach for us. Hold our hands against the side of her head and look up, making eye contact and smiling. She began to come to us for kisses with every little bump instead of getting up stoically and moving on without a sound. She began to point and name us and light up when either of us entered a room. She molded her little body onto my hip, found her groove with looping one arm around my bicep, and we...well we both attached and we loved.

Problems? At 9 months I am guessing there's a lot we don't know and have yet to experience. I feel sure that we'll continue to wonder about things - "attachment/adoption issue or normal kid issue?" (Um - I feel compelled to insert here that I wonder this all the time about her huge preference for daddy.)

One thing I've found that adoptive bloggers don't seem to ever talk about though are our own issues.

The attachment discussion on blogs this month, and the interesting representation of daddy preference stories, has made me think a lot about this. What kind of baggage do we bring to the process of attachment and parenting? What expectations/hopes/dreams set us up for fear, concern or disappointment? Do we project and displace some of our own insecurities about attachment onto our children?

I don't say this to rock the boat at all. I'm not suggesting that it's all in our heads. What I'm suggesting is that we bring a lot more "stuff" to the adoption triad than we probably realize. Stuff that helps, stuff that hurts, and stuff that prevents us from knowing how to move our children securely through the massive life change that is international adoption.

I think that a lot of the things we, in our own family, get stuck on have as least as much to do with our own childhood, our own daydreams of parenthood, and our own attachment styles as they do with the actual issue at hand. A conversation for another day...unless you want to respond in the comments! (hint hint...)

Time is a circus, attachment is a river, attachment triage, goodness there are so many great metaphors and talented writers exploring attachment this month.
I find myself ending this blog without any profound conclusion.

I recommend you head over to Claudia's blog to read all of the gathered attachments posts and form your own conclusions.

~A

Attachment stress and the holidays

The day after I submitted our 6 month post-placement report stating that we had "no concerns about Ariam's attachment" we began to have concerns.

A few little questionable moments - my inability to console her during a few nights of wake ups, her complete disinterest in me when I picked her up from a friend's house, a huge crying tantrum at my birthday lunch - reached its peak on Sunday.

On Sunday morning we, the three of us, were the family chosen to light the advent candles at the front of the church. I dressed Ariam in her cutest purple outfit - striped tights, velvet tank dress, white blouse - gave her a Sunday morning bath and hair style, and sang Christmas carols all the way to church. It is a wonderful feeling to enjoy Christmas carols at church this year and not end up a sniveling pool of tears.

So we lit the candles, marched proudly back down the aisle, and I carried Ariam up to the church nursery like I do every week. She has been attending the nursery for a couple of months (it is one hour in a room full of awesome toys and fun little friends) and sometimes we stay with her but usually we drop her off and head back to the service.

On Sunday something compelled me to return to the nursery halfway through the service. She was sitting at the little round table on a toddler chair eating her goldfish crackers out of a papercup with about 8 other toddlers. She saw me and said "hi!" but didn't make a move to come to me, which was ok.
But then she started messing around on her chair and before anyone could catch her she had toppled the chair backwards and hit her head. The nearest nursery worker scooped her up and Ariam cried into her shoulder as she rushed her over to me.

Because of course the woman assumed a crying toddler would want her mommy...right?

Apparently not. Ariam refused to come to me and continued to snuggle into this TOTAL STRANGER (to her) while sobbing very melodramatically. I sort of yanked her out of the woman's arms and forced her into a cuddle but to be honest I was in shock and dismay.

This hasn't happened before. We've had no reason to question Ariam's attachment. She runs to either of us when we get her from daycare full of smiles and hugs. She clings a little when we go somewhere new. She doesn't try to hug or kiss or love on strangers, or even friends. It took her awhile to warm up to her Aya and Papa (grandma and grandpa) even.

But looking back over the last month I can see how we have relaxed our attachment standards. We've become complacent as we've assumed that the attachment bonds are strong. This month alone Ariam and I have traveled for five days without Jeremy, we had her at daycare (Mondays and Tuesday), at a friend's house 2 Fridays, and babysat by another friend (once in our house and once at hers) twice. Oh, and we've had her in the church nursery every Sunday. We have been distracted. Busy decorating the house. Traveling. Frantic to unpack and renovate. We have relied on Baby Ein.stein a bit too heavily for entertainment. We have not lingered in play or cuddled without glancing at the clock. We haven't had leisurely family meals or weekends uninterrupted by errand running and Christmas shopping.

And look what this has gotten us. A broken attachment thread.
Sure there are many threads we've woven together with the good stuff, but I think the holiday frenzy has set us back.

Ariam doesn't care about presents. She barely even acknowledges the giant green tree in our living room.
She wants us and if we don't give US to her then her attachment...I don't know...wanders? Is that the best way to describe it?

I am pulling it together and regrouping. Attachment style. We are shortening daycare hours as best we can. No Fridays at a friend's house for a few weeks. No church nursery unless one of us stays there with her. I'm trying to think of some things that she and I can do together that get us out of the house and having some fun while restringing some of the attachment threads. First order of business needs to be less concern about grocery shopping, Target errands or post office runs and more focus on things that little girls enjoy doing!

Do you have any suggestions for navigating the holidays? How do you get it all done while promoting attachment?

~A

Thanksgiving at the Olson house - TX - 2010