St Petersburg 1990

Within three months our son graduated again and was transitioned into Toddler 2, with children his own age. Things did not remain so rosy though. The daycare director called me one day and told me that it was difficult to get our son to sit still despite various discipline methods. She complained that he was always moving. About a week later I attended a children’s holiday play at the daycare and saw what the director meant. Throughout the whole play, my son, unlike the other children his age, would not sit in my lap. Instead he hung from the ballet bar at the wall and swung like a monkey. I was surprised but noticed that he was not disturbing anyone, not making noise but in constant motion yet paying attention to the play, responding with facial movements. I discussed my observations with the director telling her I didn’t think his behavior was a concern since it was not disruptive.

Shortly after that, the director called again. Our son had diarrhea and she was banning him from the daycare center until it was cleared. up She was convinced that he had Giardia, a highly contagious intestinal virus, because of his foreign birth. We got a doctor’s exam and statement that it was not Giardia and it took a lot of talk to get the director to rescind her ban.

During the summer before our son’s third birthday, my husband and I began to recognize our exhaustion as parents. We lived conveniently between two large adjacent cities. My husband worked on the far western side of the neighboring city and endured a drive with heavy traffic both ways on freeways. I worked in the downtown of the neighboring city. Just our daily trips to and from our son’s distant daycare were adding an extra hour of driving each way every day despite our rotating turns between dropping off and picking up. We had chosen the upscale daycare primarily because it was the only one that would accept our son into an infant setting even though he was so much older than the other infants.

Now that our son had graduated to an older toddler setting, we decided it was time to look for a daycare closer to home. The search went quickly and we settled on a nice daycare center about three miles from our home. This would make a huge impact for ALL of us on our daily commutes to and from daycare and work. Over time we were to realize an additional but unexpected benefit from this choice. The new daycare was served by the public school system we lived in which had provided our son his infant stim classes and infant assessment services.

My son and I went to visit the new daycare after hours so he could see what it was like before having to interact with the other children. He freely explored all the play areas and seemed quite comfortable. Then we carefully planned a first daytime visit and subsequent visits to help our son transition to his new environment.

I took our son to the center on the appointed day so he could meet his future classmates. He sat on my lap for about half an hour watching the other toddlers play and participate in activities. A very tall, blonde girl approached my son and began to engage him in play. This was Rhiannon. She and my son would become inseparable within the next week. When it was time for my son and I to leave, as we got to the entrance he began screaming and glued himself to the outdoor gate with an iron grip. Even the daycare director and the teachers could not pry him loose. That became his first full day at his new daycare and he never returned to his upscale daycare so far from home.

Even with his attachment to his new daycare, my leaving him there every morning was a painful separation for him. We began to play a game at home and eventually at daycare. I would hold my son and hug him then opening my arms say” Go away! Bye, bye!”. He would run to the other side of the room. Then I would say “Come back!” and he would run back into my arms to hugs and smiles and kisses. We practiced go-away come-back every day over and over. Eventually his comfort level with my leaving him at daycare rose and he didn’t linger at the window for long after I left.

From the day we became his parents, our son was verbalizing in spanish vowel sounds. ” Ah-ya-ya” and “Eye-yi-yi-yi!” were frequently heard before our son began imitating English. My husband decided it would be good to learn the Spanish language, with the prospect of teaching our son Spanish in the future? My husband decided the best way to do this was to start taking college-level Spanish classes at the state university. This involved classes 3 nights a week, plus studying all night on non-class nights. I had already dropped out of my masters-degree classes because of our son’s frequent illnesses. Now I was only working full-time and spending every night and all weekend with our son with little participation in his care from my husband. When our son was about 2-1/2 years old, I had begun to take parenting breaks by going shopping on Saturdays for a 2 to 3 hours. I would frequently come home and find our son still in his crib long after his nap should have been over, frequently in wet and/or dirty diapers that should have been changed hours ago. But my husband was glued to his computer doing his Spanish homework. One day I came home to a child who was angry and difficult. I was having such a hard time with him I finally asked him what was wrong. My son told me that Daddy siad I went shoppping without him because I didn’t want to be with him and I didn’t love him. How could a dad tell his son that!!!???

When the winter snow and cold arrived, I began receiving calls from daycare. Our son did not know how to put on his snowsuit, mittens and boots. Could we work with him to learn these skills? We tried. Finally it became apparent that he did not have age-appropriate fine motor skills. That Christmas, in addition to lots of toy cars, his presents consisted of Barbie and Ken dolls with clothes. My husband scoffed. I prevailed, noting that this was a fun way for our son to use fine motor skills as he dressed and undressed the dolls in a non-pressure setting. Our dogs enjoyed them also, soon chewing off all the arms and legs of both dolls!

As the winter wore on, the dressing for outdoors routine at daycare did not much improve. His daycare teachers noticed other issues our son seemed to have and their suggestion was to bring in the public school assessment team for another go-round. This time the testing showed a myriad of results – sensory defensiveness, attention problems, and more.

The same physical therapist who had worked with our son as an infant, came back on the scene and taught us the brushing technique. In this technique, a very soft bristle brush, like a pre-surgical scrub brush, is used to brush lightly over the skin in a pattern to slightly stimulate the nerves to acheive desensitization with repeated sessions over a period of several weeks.

The timing of starting to use this technique was really bad. My company was sending me to Fort Worth, Texas to attend management training in a week. We decided to combine my training trip with a visit to my in-laws so they could meet their grandson for the first time. We started the brushing sessions, well, mostly I did. I made sure my husband knew how to do them too and he promised he would follow the schedule while on our trip. We flew to Fort Worth, I got off and my husband and son continued on to the in-laws. When my training week concluded, I hopped into a rental car and drove north to my in-laws, both eager to see my son and dreading the in-law visit.

Shortly after my arrival, I discovered that no brushing had been done. The therapist had told me that once the sessions had been disrupted, the whole desentization process would have to start over from the beginning. I was frustrated and angry at my husband’s lack of responsibility in this matter.

To further make the visit unpleasant, I felt I needed to guard my son against his grandfather’s wicked verbal spewings. My father-in-law was accustomed to corralling a person and unleashing racist, hate-filled monologues from which he could not be interrupted. The family dynamic then called for either my husband or his younger brother to enter the room and “rescue” the trapped person grabbing them by the arm and insisting they exit with them. My father-in-law was an intelligent person so I am not conviced that he believed anything he said during his monologues. I think they were attention-getting devices or a way for him to control. Nevertheless, abusive.

Since my son was now old enough to understand some adult language, I did not want him to be subjected to racist epithets and was constantly on guard in my father-in-law’s presence. To his credit, my father-in-law did not spew in my son’s presence and he seemed to accept our son without reservation graciously accepting his hugs and kisses.

Recently I read in a book about parenting a special needs child that his misbehavior is his way to communicate that he is having trouble with something in his environment the the child is unable to control or change.

By the summer of 1990, my son began having uncontrollable rages. The first one happened when I drove to a public beach with our son on a week night after work. We played in the water which was a new experience for him. Then we played on the swings and I intentionally was moving us gradually in the direction fo the car. In the previous months I had noticed that my son was very sensitive to transitioning between activities. I finally got him to the car and into his car seat. He was having none of that! He screamed, twisted and fought my attempts to attach his car seat harness. He bucked so hard that he got out of the car seat and began climbing around the car. I could not catch him! I closed the door and he locked himself in. After frantic attempts to get him to unlock the door, he splilled into my arms and began thrashing, kicking and beating me about the head, screaming the whole time. I thought I would be arrested for child abuse! No one took notice, no one came to help me. I could not calm my son for over half an hour and we stood there in the parking lot with him bashing me about. I was stunned and embarrassed. I could not understand what had set him off. I was shook to my core.

These incidents became more frequent and almost a guaranteed part of any trip outside the house. My husband experienced these outbursts also and finally refused to take out son anywhere on his own. I knew something was really wrong, but had no idea what it could be. I argued with my husband about taking our son to a therapist. He would not agree to get our son evaulated.

These incidents coincided with my husband beginning to have angry outbursts at home 3-4 mornings a week on work days. If our son refused to cooperate in any way with his dad, my husband would fly into a rage and run out the door leaving me to do most, if not all, of his turns at daycare drop off. What was even more disconcerting was that when I interceded between my husband and son during these outbursts, my son would attack me even though I was trying to protect him from my husband. I know now that my husband was afraid of losing his job and any lateness, even by a few minutes, was unacceptable to him, whether his boss was on him about this I never knew. Didn’t matter that I had to pick up the slack and be late for work by taking unplanned turns at daycare. There was no physical violence during these incidents but I frequently drove to work on these mornings with tears streaming down, so upset by the volume of verbal rage on an almost daily basis.

It probably comes as no surprise that by this time, I was depressed, but good. I finally convinced my husband that our son needed to be evaluated.

At age four our son was diagnosed with ADHD based on symptoms and test results by one of the top child psychiatrists in our state. Our son was being treated by a wonderful child therapist.

At one session in which I participated, my son, without prompting, re-enacted his birth and adoption story. It was amazing to watch him play out his birth with dolls, how his birth mother disappeared and his life mom (me) appeared. Even the therapist was enthralled.

Eventually my husband and I began meeting with a therapist for parenting help. One of the techniques the therapist taught us was the “hold” where the parent would hold a child against the parent’s chest by wrapping the child’s arms criss-cross over the child’s chest. The “hold” was to be used when the child was raging to protect the child from harming themselves or others. The “hold” would be done without much if any verbal interaction, but to reassure the child that they could calm down and be safe. After the frist week of trying the “hold” with our son, the therapist wanted to know how it went and how we each felt about doing it. I don’t remember exact my response to the therapist. I found it difficult to do the “hold” – to control another person and see them though a difficult emotional experience. I do remember my husband’s eager response; the therapist questioning him further, asking if he enjoyed it and then, barely controlling himself, walking over to his desk, pausing and muttering for minutes to gain control of himself and then telling us to leave. At the time I blocked some of my perceptions of what was happening. What I sensed was the therapist’s outrage that an adult man could feel such triumph at exercising total control over a 35-pound four year old. I blocked that this was a symptom of something very awry.

One of the things the therapist encouraged us to do was reward out son for appropriate behavior – we didn’t know when to stop, or maybe I didn’t know when to stop. By age 5 our son had over a hundred Hot Wheel and Micro-Machine toy cars.

Age 3 with Trike

When we returned from Bogotá, I took the first turn with maternity leave for six weeks. I don’t recall much now about that period. Except that it was an adjustment to remember there was another person in the house, and not one who was independent. I have a guilty picture of me propping up my son with pillows in front of the TV while I went to cook a meal. What was I thinking? I would come back into the TV room moments later to find him laid out on the floor, having fallen out of his sit. My reluctance to invade his privacy while changing his diapers had, out of necessity, been rapidly overcome. My instincts to mother fell into place. My love for the photo transformed into a protective bond with my child.

I remember also standing at the window holding him and pointing at things in the backyard and talking to him about them. His world had dramatically changed from a tiny crib in an orphanage where his cries did not elicit any response to frequent rides in a car where the bright sunshine would make his eyes stream with tears, to attention at his slightest peep and to movement from room to room almost hourly. As time went on I realized that his ability to register what was before him was limited – like it was almost too much to take in at once. At first he could only absorb what was in a three-foot circle around him. Gradually, the circle expanded and one day at the window he could respond to seeing our dogs in the backyard.

During the first week home, one of the things I had scheduled was a visit from the school district’s infant development assessment team. They played with my son and tested his responses and motor skills. It was difficult because he’d had such limited exposure to toys; they could not hold his attention, instead he preferred to repeatedly pound his thumb into his chin. Their conclusion was that he was at the developmental stage of a 3-month old with poor muscle tone, yet over-developed hip flexors (from the orphanage nurses forcing him into a sit position before his muscles were strong enough to support it) which they predicted would delay his ability to gain mobility skills. They recommended he be enrolled in an infant stim class.

Two weeks after returning home from Bogotá, we celebrated our son’s first birthday with family and friends. It was a very warm mid-October day. We dressed him in a beautiful aqua knit outfit we had purchased from an upscale baby boutique in Bogotá. However it got so warm during the party he got stripped down to his onesie. We have a photo taken by my neice of him lying on the floor, spindly legs stretched out, his face gazing back at a party guest.

We embarked on bi-weekly infant stim classes. His first class was around Halloween and they gave him a pumpkin to play with. The top of the pumpkin was removed and helped him dig in with his hands! This was a new sensory experience – slime and goo – and he loved it. The teachers were so proud of his eager participation. He had further assessments done, his first of many IEPs written and his goal was to walk by age two and a half.

When my six-week maternity leave was over. my husband insisted on taking his six-week paternity leave. Great! I returned home after my first day back to work, to find that my husband had rearranged my son’s bedroom and changed his daily schedule, of course, to fit my husband’s need to control, not because the schedule no longer fit our son’s needs. I was stunned and somewhat angry but kept my cool. My husband would not give an inch in returning to our son’s familiar schedule.

When our maternity/paternity leaves were up, we placed our son in an upscale daycare center. He went into the infant room initially.

Soon though my husband and I realized that a child born overseas and then brought here has no built up immunities to our germs. Our son was sick in 3-week cycles. He’d get over one infection and then launch into another. We barely had time to breathe between doctor visits.

And then came the night terrors. Also in three-week cycles. Our son would “wake” screaming in the middle of the night. He was inconsolable. His body would twitch violently especially his legs. He was not really awake or aware and did not respond to our comfort. His infant stim physical therapist explained to us that he was finally getting the movement required for his nervous systemto develop. In the orphanage, being strapped in his crib day after day did not allow his body the opportunity to move through space which is essential for the nerves to spread and become enlivened throughout his limbs. At her suggestion, we installed an infant swing in the basement and during a middle of the night bout of night terrors we would put him in the swing, turn on soft classical movement and push him back and forth until his wails and twitching subsided. It usually took a little over an hour for his body to calm down. This was a nightly routine for about three weeks and then we would get a three week respite and it would start all over again. Neither my husband nor I slept much while this stage played itself out for the following eighteen months. I figured this was the tradeoff for not having a newborn who would have kept us up with night-time feedings and developing a sleep-through-the-night schedule. But eighteen months – whoa!

Our son was progressing very quickly through his development and began crawling by the first of the year! Amazing! However he was ill non-stop and in February he developed a fierce ear infection that would not respond to antibiotics. We were referred to an ENT specialist who decided that ear tubes were necessary.

After the surgery, the nurse brought our son out to the waiting room, gave him to my husband and we were told to stay there with him while he continued to recover from the anesthesia. He was crying and thrashing and struggling against the effects of the drugs. Something elemental, biological, hormonal screamed from my brain – I needed to hold and comfort my son. But my husband denied my instincts, insisting that only he could hold our son. I sat in agony and watched my son writhe and cry in my husband’s arms. I felt put down and deprived of my natural role as nurturer.

Eventually the drugs effects wore off and we left the surgical center. That evening, the three of us were playing “Come to Daddy, Come to Mommy” where our son would crawl back and forth between us like a game of catch. I stood him up with him grasping my fingers and he took his first steps. From that night on he was running. Children run because with speed they don’t need good balancing skills. And our son ran! He was on his feet only five months after his initial assessment and had met his IEP goal to walk 13 months early. He had breezed through each developmental stage not missing a one, but also not lingering long before blazing on to the next. Amazing!

Now that he was walking, his day care wanted to move him into the toddler room with children his own age. However, he needed to be able to sit at a table and feed himself. We practiced at home. My husband was reluctant to let go of the baby stage and continued to spoon feed. Looking back now, was this another control issue? His day care providers worked with him every day to develop his skills and in April he was moved into a toddler room with his age peers.

His cheerful personality was an instant hit with the other kids and soon he became dubbed “Jimmy, Jimmy Cocoa Puff”. When I heard this, I was appalled! The next day I approached the day care director and told her that his nickname was to stop being used immediately. My son is a blend of many races, Spanish giving him his beautiful light tan and graceful fingers, native South American Indian giving him his dark brown eyes with blue-tinged whites and Caribbean Black (as they call it in Colombia) giving him his full lips and wide nose. I did not want to subject him to racism so early in life. Nip it in the bud. Now!

We had already had an incident at a local grocery store. An older woman saw us entering the store from the parking lot and began taunting me and my son with racial slurs. My son could not understand what she was saying thankfully. I placed him in a shopping cart and whisked him away and she did not follow us very far into the store. Even as our son grew older, people would stare at us in public, the white woman with the racially mixed child. Our society has grown more accepting of Hispanics and other racially mixed people over the years which has made things easier for our son.

A few months after my son’s first steps, on my birthday in early May, I was taking a vacation day to get in some early gardening. A police car drove up and my husband and son emerged. My husband’s car had been hit by a semi making a turn on their way to daycare. The car was totaled which was OK since it was a 2-door and difficult to get our son in and out of his car seat. So we began collecting car brochures to find a replacement. As each car model we researched was rejected, the car brochures found their way into our son’s crib. He was eighteen months old. Language was just coming to him and we could frequently hear him talking in his crib. “Cah, cah”.

When my son moved to his dad’s in late August 2009, he filled his dad’s car with heavy boxes of hundreds of toy Hot Wheels cars.

Only 3 months after my last miscarriage, I’d had surgery to diagnose abdominal pain and obsteric related symptoms. During the laparoscopy procedure, the surgeon unexpectedly found a huge web of scar tissue dangerously compressing my intestines in addition to a sizable uterine cyst. I ended up having full abdominal sugery and spent several painful months recovering.

To attempt another pregnancy seemed foolish and scarey to me. I am basically a chicken. One day at work, talking about children with a co-worker, he suggested we consider foreign adoption. Taking this idea home, I discussed it with my husband and we were both interested in looking into this path to parenthood. Back at work, my co-worker volunteered to discuss our situation with the director of the adoption agency he and his wife had used to adopt their two children.

Just a few days later, my co-worker gave me the adoption agency director’s contact information. I made an appointment to see her. This agency worked directly with an orphanage in Bogota, Colombia.

My husband and I visited the director on a Friday in late May. Our conversation was actually quite brief. We told her we would consider a child that had some remediable health problems. Out from her desk drawer she drew a set of photos of a baby boy, saying, “Would you consider this child?”. She explained his background: surrendered at birth, he was born 2 and a half months prematurely, weighed only 2 pounds six ounces at birth and subsequently experienced aspiration pneumonia several times. His original diagnosis was biliary artresia, a very rare liver disease, and he was expected not to live long, medical care being what it is in third world countries. However, around age 5 months, a doctor revised the baby boy’s diagnosis – the lack of the valve between the stomach and esophagus preventing him from keeping food in his stomach. His treatment then consisted of more of the same he had received up to this point, being strapped in an upright position into either a sling or an infant seat 24/7 in a tiny crib. He was small and had some delays, no big deal.

I was ecstatic and fell in love with this child on sight. We took the pictures home and told the director we would discuss this opportunity and get back to her in a few days. It was all over for me. My husband was agreeable. The following Monday we called her and said we would take this child. The process was set in motion very quickly after that. Because we were adopting a medical needs child, the adoption agency’s one year waiting/preparatory period was waived.

In Bogota, the baby boy was rushed into surgery to repair his stomach valve. Back here in the States for the next three months, my husband and I went through the agonzing process of gathering all the volumious documentation required for foreign adoptions, participating in the home study, planning for a new baby in the house, at break neck speed.

In the midst of all this our garage was torched by a pyromaniac that was loose in our city late that summer. Finally we had our tickets to fly to Bogota to pick up our son. It was early September and we were ready to go! Call late one night informing us that our son-to-be had been hospitalized again with pneumonia. Delay the trip by a week, they said. Three days later they called and gave us the go ahead – hospitalization was a false alarm. He wasn’t that sick. Off we flew!

I think it was a Friday morning that I became a mother. I was sitting in the orphanage director’s office, husband next to me, our back to the door. The Director’s assistant stood in front of us with a camera. My son was delivered from behind me and over my shoulder. Boom! There was a baby in my arms!!!

There was no looking each other over first, just boom in my arms! Birth! I was stunned at the reality of him. Yikes! I was a mother at age 40. What was I doing with a BABY??? I thought. He was beautiful! His head was flat in back with a slight bald spot from being immobile on his back his whole life. He was dressed in the outfit we had given to the orphanage nurse – a nifty size 3-month one-piece with blue plaid flannel body and blue knit sleeves and leggings. He was swimming in his new clothes! He was wonderful!

The adoption representative, the daughter of the adoption agency director back in the States, took us back the the residentia where we would stay for the next eight days while we became acquainted with our new son and finalized the adoption with Colombian government. She gave us a schedule for our son – when to nap, when to feed, when to bathe. And when to take him back to the orphanage for his respiratory therapy. Every day! Sometimes twice a day!

While she was cuddling our son and writing down his schedule in a notebook, the adoption rep made a comment that stuck in my memory. Except when our son was hospitalized, he showed failure to thrive. What is failure to thrive, I wondered to myself. I came to understand that term in a myriad of ways over the next decade and longer.

All the clothes I had brought for our son were too big, they were all size 3-months and he only weighed 10 pounds. It was 3 weeks before his first birthday.

I did not realize our son had no teeth and had never had any solid or even semi-solid food. Only bottles of milk and beef broth. I fortunately brought some baby food that was new in the States, various meats and veggies in a dehydrated flake that could be reconstituted with water. He adapted to the baby food quite easily.

I couldn’t change his diapers the first few days. I felt like I was invading the privacy of a stranger.

He slept soundly. He laughed and laughed. He was delightful. He entertained us and loved interacting. His laugh was pure and joyful and unrestrained, from the belly. To my ears the sound of his laugh was like water burbling from a deep warm spring. The first afternoon, we sat our son on the bed in our room at the residentia. We gave him some baby books. He didn’t know what to do with them. But he connected with us, with our faces, with our smiles and laughs and words. He sat on the bed and laughed for over an hour… then he fell over.

He could not get into a sitting positon on his own. Once sitting, he would stay upright until he fell over – he did not know how to get out of a sit. He could not roll over on his own, nor crawl. He had never lain on his stomach. Until we got him, he had never slept horizontally or on his side. He had seldom had toys to play with and spent hours repeatedly and forcefully tapping his thumb on his chin or his cheek. This is how you stay awake in a crib with no other stimulation day after day. We gave him his first toy – “Clowny”, a Gund stuffed toy.

He still has “Clowny” with him today.

A geopbyte is 1₅267 650₄600 228₃229 401₂496 703₁205 376 bytes which is how many pieces my heart has been broken into during the course of 21 years of parenting.

My situation is not unique but also not very common.  I contacted an “expert” psychologist in parental alienation.  His opinion is that a completely different approach needs to be taken since the usual course of action for a child under 18 is a legal one and is not possible with a child of adult age.

I intend to use these posts to examine the issues and circumstances which contributed to this current outcome with openness and objectivity, as much as I can muster.  I am hoping that this process wiil help me cope with what now feels like a permanent loss in my life.