Persevere

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.

- Shakespeare, Henry V

Adam is once again bravely parenting the kids solo this week while I sit in the relative comfort of a hotel room in Denver, away for work until Friday. You’d think I’d appreciate the five day respite, but I don’t. I just worry instead. I worry about Adam. I worry about the kids. When I’m not home, it’s what I do. I worry.

I don’t like being on the road and I never have, but such is the nature of my job. I’m a writer and educator for an herb company, and part of my duties include training health food stores, exceedingly nice work if you can get it. The people I meet are phenomenally good and kind. I get to talk about products I sincerely believe in for a company of stellar reputation. I’ve worked 15 years for an 82-year-old company. We touch lives and heal people in 80 countries at the rate of 8 bottles a second. Can you imagine that? We sell 8 bottles of our products every single second.

And tonight, I’d chuck it all if I could just be home with my kids.

Adam had a great day yesterday. The kids were fantastic. They’re both doing a mini cheerleading camp after school this week for 45 minutes a day. Adam said he watched through the glass window when he picked them up and they were both smiling and laughing and having a great time. The coaches wisely kept them separated on opposite sides of the lineup so they stay out of each other’s hair.

Today, not so good. They had their usual, squirmy disobedience in the car. They wouldn’t keep their seatbelts on. There was the usual slapping and shoving. The usual smart mouths. Adam’s mom rode along to help out this afternoon and Justin told her he wished she'd die. Nice job, kiddo. Way to bond yourself to your new grandma. I'm sure she loved that one.

And Monday and Tuesday are Adam's easy days when I'm gone. Tomorrow he has double therapy. I have no idea how he’s going to pull that one off, since we usually tag team, one up, one in the waiting room and work it out in pairs. And Thursday is occupational therapy. We usually tag team that one, too. He takes Justin, I stay home with Justuce. There’s too much kid, too much therapy, and not enough dad this week. Way too much going on to be a dad in a hotel room. This is not a rest for me. This is just guilt.

It bothers me that I’m on the road and not able to help Adam cope. And I will be again. And again. And again. Not because I have a mean, unfair company…just because this is what it is. This is what we do. We go out, we find stores, and we talk to people. And that will never change.

I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching this past week leading up to being on the road again. Is this job something I can maintain with two new kids who need me at home? With an overworked, overstressed husband who bears more than his fair share of our child raising burden and definitely needs me at home right now? How long can I pretend to keep doing what I do when I’m no longer the person I used to be? At what point is typing blog entries in a hotel room in Denver, Colorado while Adam nurses a solo-parenting headache in Las Vegas useful or fair to anyone?

We’re bonding with these kids right now. We’re attaching to them and they’re attaching to us. Or trying to, anyway. It serves nobody’s best interest when out of the blue, I say to them – these two rejected kids who are far too familiar with parental desertion – “ sorry guys, I won’t be here this week.” You and I, as adults or even normally-nurtured children can rationalize, “this is what Dad does to pay the bills.” Justin and Justuce at 6 and 7, the way their life has worked up until now, can only see, "Guess what I’m doing this week? I’m walking out on you, too.” And that’s not very helpful to our cause right now. Because in their minds, when somebody important walks out, they don’t always come back.

And yes, I do come back, and sure, I do get to see the briefest smiles flicker across their faces before they quickly remember they’re not supposed to like me and they suppress their welcome out of principle. They don’t come bounding out to the car to give me a hug when they hear the garage door open, that’s for sure. They’re not liable to do that for a long, long time.

per·se·vere (pərsəviər)

 verb: Continue in a course of action even in the face of difficulty or with little or no indication of success.

There aren’t enough pages in my journal to write down all the important quotes I keep finding on patience and perseverance in parenting older adopted children. I could paper a small kingdom with them by now.

Whatever the motivation, the decision to adopt older children must come after careful consideration to the challenges involved. Older children come with histories - whether having lived in foster care, orphanages, or with birth family. Their pre-adoptive experiences may leave them with unresolved emotional issues. Such issues include significant loss of birth family, previous caregivers, and sometimes culture and religion.

All adopted children need help to grieve the losses they have experienced. Both the parents' and the child's expectations need to be carefully explored and adjusted for what the realities are likely to be.

Children may be very excited or scared about the new changes, and have difficulty adjusting to parental expectations. They may be confused by how the reality differs from their fantasies of what life would be like after adoption. An older child coming from foster care may have multiple models of what parents are like and unfortunately, some of their experiences may not have been positive ones. They may have a mix of feelings of excitement, fear and confusion.

Older children will go through many changes as they learn how to develop reciprocal relationships with their new family members. One of the most difficult aspects of parenting older children is the patience required for the time it may take for a mutually satisfying attachment to occur. In her book, Attaching in Adoption, Deborah Gray notes that it can take up to one to two years for the love to come. Many children who have been traumatized may be quite resistant to love for fear of being hurt and rejected.

Parents often report feeling guilty when there are times when they have negative feelings about their children. Others feel lonely when family or friends do not understand how hard it can be. Support is critical for parents to know that what they’re experiencing is normal, and important for helping them to persevere.

There’s that word again, persevere.

The books keep telling me to do it. My friends keep telling me to do it, as if I need to be reminded. As if I might forget to flip the switch back on. And here I am tonight, 750 miles away from Adam and my children, knowing that a week away from them sets us back three weeks in attachment momentum.

If they were babies, we’d be bonding from day one. If they were 11 or 12, it would be more of an anger-expressive “you’re not my dad.” But they’re 6 and 7, and at that age, it’s just behavioral inconsistency, inability to verbalize their feelings, and complete and utter disinterest in the fact that we’re here, we love them, and we’d do anything for them. We’d cross the desert, we’d walk through fire.

No go. I called this morning with a bright hello before school. Neither one would leave the couch to come to the phone. I shopped tonight for souvenirs they’ll glance at and discard. "What's the use?" I sometimes say to myself in times of greatest exhaustion. "What in the world is the use?"

It can take up to one to two years for the love to come.

Imagine that. One to two years. Maybe more. While Adam and I simply persevere. I wish somebody would have highlighted that little nugget in the fine print with a big yellow marker. Or maybe they did, and we were just too excited to care.

Whatever happened, all I know is, it’s not for the faint of heart, adopting older children. It’s love and it’s love and it’s loving some more, and not a whole lot comes back, ever. Nor will it for a long, long time. Longer than most could handle without a sincerely broken heart.

But still we persevere, because after all, what else is there?

There's no sense asking if the air is any good when there's nothing else to breathe.

- King Henry in "The Lion in Winter" by James Goldman

Once more unto the breach, dear friends. Once more.

Highlighted text from “Adopting Older Children,” by Ellen Singer, LC SW-C, Center for Adoption Support and Education, Inc.