A New Normal

Today marks nine weeks home. I don’t really know what to say about these weeks. They have been incredibly hard, hard in ways I was prepared for, and I’m thankful for that. So, so thankful. But still so, so hard.

My greatest regret from my first adoption of Garrison three years ago was my lack of preparation. No one talked to us about attachment, or lack there of. No one said anything about caring for a premie. No one spoke a word about any of the things I was facing. Everyone spoke as if unicorns and rainbows had taken up residence in my home and heart. Oh God, how I wanted that to bet true, but the truth is that those first 6ish weeks with Garrison were indescribably hard. Add on to that the layers of guilt and self doubt from my years of infertility and I was spiraling down a dark hole fast. I didn’t know how to explain it to anyone and all everyone could see was that I finally had my baby, and everyone (myself included) assumed I’d be blissfully happy without a complaint in the world.

When we decided to adopt again, and internationally this time, I knew I needed preparation. I had an agency in mind that several close friends had used, but I decided to dig deeper and hunt for the best fit. I asked lots of people and called lots of agencies. We eventually landed with Lifeline in part because I was desperate for education and post-adoption support (I also believe in their ministry, they have a good reputation in the adoption community, and I love how willing the China Program Director is to answer all of my calls). I assumed at the very least that this adoption would be very different, but likely harder and I wanted to be ready.

We did buckets and buckets and hours and hours of training. Read books on adoption, attachment, Trust Based Relational Intervention, and China. We took courses on Communication, Attachment Styles, and a four-part TBRI workshop. Lifeline requires a two day training for all families adopting internationally called Crossings, which we attended in November. If it was offered, I signed up. If it was recommended, I read it. I so deeply wanted to be ready, both for our son and my family, but also for myself.

Ready. I don’t know if you’re ever truly ready. Maybe the mamas who are true veterans, there and back again half a dozen times. For me, this was all still so very new.

I arrived home DESPERATELY thankful to be in the USA, and to feel the comforts of home. Many people long to explore the world...I am not one of those people. I wish I was. I wish I had a pinky toe worth of adventure in me, but vacation sounds like the beach in Florida or the mountains of Colorado. An adventure sounds like Hawaii or Europe. China was next level for me and my heart hungered for home.

But suddenly home didn’t really feel like home. There was an extra person and despite spending the last two weeks with him in country, i think we all suddenly became very aware just how much we were still strangers to one another. His cry was foreign to me. My voice was not soothing to him. We all arrived home to obvious jet lag (13 hour time difference, flying east to west is a b$:%# in ways I can’t explain) but also illness. Sam had a double ear infection. Joel had a cold and infections in both eyes. I had caught the cold that Sam had for a week in China the day before we left. The first four days home were unreal. I still can’t believe we survived. I assume the details will eventually fade and we will have some form of amnesia about the whole event...otherwise, no one would ever return to China a second, third, fourth time.

We saw glimpses of grief from Joel in China. Lack of appetite. Tantrums. Arriving home opened the flood gates. Our solid sleeper suddenly couldn’t sleep longer than 90 minutes without waking and transferring him out of our arms was akin to placing live bombs in a crib. He grieved so deeply at night, and it manifested in fits of crying so loud I thought he’d wake the neighbors. He was simultaneously desperate for us to hold him and furious that we were touching him. Nights were long and yet never, ever long enough. He seemed ravenous for food, but refused to eat all of the things he had eaten in China. He attacked crackers like it was the last food on earth, shoving them in his mouth while crying, yet completely without the ability to chew them. If I tried to slow him down, he interpreted it as me denying him food, which sent him even further over the edge.

We’ve been cocooning since we came home. Cocooning is a term used in the adoption community to describe a season of intensive care, in which the parents meet all of their new child’s needs. Interactions with people outside of the immediate family and the environments to which the child is exposed are very limited. When a family cocoons, they keep their new son or daughter’s world small, simple, and predictable. For us, that has looked like staying home 99% of the time. Joel has gone with me each day to drop Garrison off at daycare, but then the two of us return home. We’ve slowly started to open up his environment just a bit by eating out at some quick restaurants, visiting the park at low attendance times, and running errands to the grocery store. In the beginning, I wore him in an ergo anytime we ventured out. Now, he can ride in a cart or sit in a high chair, but he occasionally still needs a hug or kiss to settle down, other times, he just wants me to hold him. While it’s easy to look at him and think he’s almost two, he should be better capable to handle these situations, research says that it is far better to allow him to revert as far back to infancy as he wants. If he wants me to hold him in Target rather than ride in the cart, then that’s what we do.

Slowly, the tantrums have dwindled. The nights have held more sleeping than screaming. He’s trusting (sometimes) that there will be more food next time. He and Garrison are starting to play a bit more than they fight. When I think rationally about how much has changed in these nine weeks, I’m amazed. I couldn’t change the same amount about myself in nine weeks (just ask my therapist). But most of the time, my rational brain is foggy and I’m tired of the hard. While I know that the Lord calls us into the hard, and that the hard things in life are the ones that refine us, when I’m in the fire, I’m quick to think I have been refined enough.

I return to work after one more week, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t grateful. Add that to the column of things I feel guilty about. I am simply not good at being a stay at home mom. You know the phrase “absence makes the heart grow fonder?” Well that absence is critical for me, for my mental health, for my ability to parent the way I want to. Feeling guilty about it doesn’t change it...these nine weeks have been a marathon battle of keeping my head in the game and my mind free from the tangled web of thoughts that can spin out of control. I’m praying that Joel can and will transition to daycare smoothly, and that the changes won’t set us back in terms of attachment.

I have to remind myself a half dozen times a day that our old normal is gone but that the present is not our new normal. This is a transition period, a hard one, but not a forever one. Six months from now, life will look and feel so very, very different. And while I long for our lives to feel normal again, I’m trying to remind myself just how quickly things change. Someday these photos and videos of Joel in these early days will be precious memories as time will have softened the details and we will have forgotten so much.

The days are long, but the years are short. Garrison is closer to kindergarten than he is to his birth, so while I may hunger for a bit for the comfort of normal, I know that these days are golden in their own way.