A Day of Note...

When Shawn called from work yesterday, he told me they had a cake for him; it was his 20 year anniversary at his company...Wow, how time flies. I thought back and instantly thought of his 1st very memorable night, 20 years ago. He was on night shift and in the middle of the night, his brother knocked on the door, waking me up fromthe sound sleep that I had so much trouble entering; their father had died. And James was still with us...

There is nothing you can do for him...you should just let him go. You will never be able to afford the treatment he will need...

Those words were spoken by a highly respected therapist I knew for years. A man who was married to a close friend and co-worker. A man who was currently working for the Children and Youth Agency where we lived, fostered and consequently adopted our first son, and the site of one of the most horrible moments of my life. I don't know when I have talked about this last; its been years. I am Catholic, but have a problem with confession. Shawn tells me I don't feel the need because I confess everything in my life every time I open my mouth. But not this...The little boy we adopted when we were very, very young was being fostered by my parents. They could not handle his escalating misbehavior. Shawn had a pretty good relationship with him and it seemed obvious that rather than allow an eight year old to go into residential treatment, we would give it a shot. He was involved with foster care through the agency that I used to work for, so it all seemed possible. It went well. We had some problems, but overall when we went to court to put in a petition to adopt and the judge immediately granted the adoption, we thought, "well alright!" We changed our tune to a more conservative, "well..." when after we got home, the boy immediately called his best friend and asked to go live with him and his family.

The next several years were a nightmare of him trying to get away from us. Typically, as it turns out, he could not handle the closeness of our new relationship of parent and child. Also, typically, he turned to me to act out his anger towards the mother who hurt him so badly. No one could see it...not even Shawn. Especially not Shawn. He wanted it that way. Pretty diabolical for a nine year old, right...but family members who helped me with him at the time saw it almost immediately. He only behaved for Shawn...it almost broke up our marriage. If my sister-in-law...Shawn's sister who didn't live with us had not been with me the day that he systematically and with a smile kicked his bedroom wall in because I would not let him go outside until he picked up the dresser that he pushed to the ground--an hours worth of entertainment for him and me getting bruised from him repeatedly hurling himself at me, I might have thought I WAS crazy when he calmly picked it up and went outside after Shawn told him once to take care of it. Shawn had been sleeping because of his night job and finally the banging woke him up. I became upset when Shawn let him go outside and Shawn told me, "maybe if you weren't so mean to him, he would behave better for you." I left that day and didn't come home for a few days. But Beth was there and she knew I wasn't crazy. There was something seriously wrong with the child that years of therapy hadn't caught. My husband didn't see. But I did and I knew I wasn't crazy. I love my husband so I went home. For us and for my sister-in-law who lived with us since the death of her father. I had gone back to work, and the child turned his mommy anger on her when there was no one else there. We took to sleeping with dressers against the door. After many intances of him becoming violent, we called the police. The police didn't want him; Children and Youth were done with him...they wanted us to get him to a counselor. His therapist told me that he probably was too far gone to work with but respectfully apologized when the Doctor said he was fine after a two minute interview. One night he came after me with a butcher knife and Shawn took him to Children and Youth and said you NEED to do something. It moved quickly after that. The conversation with the therapist and his subsequent recommendation of the book, "High Risk: Children Without a Concience" convinced us that we needed to relinquish our parental rights. I won't bore you with the details. Really...it was heart-breaking and wrong. So much wrong in that little person's life. I don't feel good about my part in it. I was supposed to be the adult. I didn't know what the problem was and in 1990 not many therepists knew what Reactive Attachment Disorder was...the average mom certainly didn't. But I did, and in my job as parent education trainer (all snickering must be hidden...well!!) I vowed to learn all there was to know about attachment and problems with it.


My first introduction to attachment disorder was the first book recommended to me, High Risk: Children without a conscience, has a great introduction on the subject and describes the problem for children who have not been able to attach to their caregivers. The outlook in the book is very grim, however, much more is known about this disorder now. We are now aware that there are continuum's in the spectrum of attachment. Next week I will be looking at a more modern book on the subject of attachment disorder. I mention this book because it was pioneer in its day. However, while it called for a very "one size fits all" approach to therapy, the basic premises of the book are still sound. I think what I like most about the book--the hope I found there was that it listed, as a symptom of your child's disorder, "a very angry mother." Don't get me wrong...I don't think it is good for mother's to be angry. In a field where we tell people all the time that they are not responsible for someone else's feeling, it is appropriate to to recognize this. These kids deliberately try to splinter relationships and make, usually the mother, a target for all the bad. They usually have a very cute and delightful personality, except for her. While it wasn't an especially happy time in our married life, the trials we went through with James helped us to become better parents and better people.

Lord, help us to remember people in our past who are gone, either through death or circumstance. Help us to remember they still need our prayers. Even if we don't always have good memories about them, they have played a part in making us the people we are today. Help me to remember only the good, in order to help us pray fervently for them. Every person and every trial has a reason. while we may not know why on this side of heaven, help us to praise you in all things. amen...