Forever Young...a blessing for my family

I just finished a little project I've been wanting to put together: a slide show of my family, to Bob Dylan's "Forever Young." I love this song...it's such a powerful blessing to bestow on anyone. So I've been going through my huge box of photos that never got put in albums. It was hard to narrow down the selection and laborious to scan them at Walgreens.

I have to admit it was a bittersweet experience to go through all these pictures. After all the severe behavioral and emotional problems many of the kids had during their teen years, and which many continue to have in young adulthood, sometimes it's hard to remember all the good times. But the pictures don't lie...there were moments of great joy, adventure, fun, and love. I was determined that all my kids, despite their disabilities, would have a normal childhood, including not only the fun parts, but the responsibilities, too.

Five of my children no longer keep in touch with me. I've tried to include at least one picture of each kiddo, but my focus was on the ones who remain part of our family life...the ones who learned some of the values expressed in the song.

Unexpected visitor

Yesterday I walked out my front door to go see my afternoon patients, and I noticed a car sitting out in the street in front of my house. When the window was rolled down, I did a doubletake...in the passenger seat was my daughter Leslie, whom I haven't seen for about 2 1/2 years. She lives down on the Gulf coast of Texas, so it was totally unexpected to see her sitting there! I walked over and talked a bit, but I had to get to work, so she said that she'd try to get back to visit before she left town.

So she dropped by this afternoon with her fiance. We did a little catching up...and then it was time for me to go see patients. As I thought about my unexpected visitors, I felt oddly detached. There was a time when I would have had a much different reaction when this person who had cut me out of her life, who had told me she was "divorcing" me, who now calls another woman "mom," showed up at my door with a fiance twice her age. It's funny...I used to say that ADHD was genetic...you get it from your kids! (You see, I used to be a focused, fairly organized person, before living with 6 kids with ADHD.) Now I think it's fair to say that attachment disorder is contagious...you catch it from your kids. After so many betrayals of trust and so many rejections, I find myself feeling very detached from the kids who cut me out of their lives. I have no desire for any drama or conflict. So it was a pleasant visit, but hardly an emotional reunion. Some may think that sounds cold or heartless, but until you've lived day in and day out with kids with attachment disorder, you probably can't understand.

In an earlier post, I said that, even though many of my kids have rejected me, I do have the consolation of knowing that I gave my kids a chance for a normal life. This was Leslie in Korea at age 3. 'Nuff said...

Introduction, part three

Now I turn to my "kids" who have chosen not to be part of my life. I'll try to be as diplomatic as I can, but understand I am sometimes very (dare I say it?) bitter about their rejection after I did so much for them.

Leslie, now 23, came to us from Korea at the age of 3. As you can see from her picture, her circumstances in Korea were pretty dire and her future likewise was pretty bleak. She has severe cerebral palsy and is totally dependent on others for all her personal care. She is also intelligent. When she was about to enter kindergarten, I insisted that the school district educate her in regular classes, which at the time had basically never been done in our school district. She now lives on her own with a part-time caregiver to help her and she attends community college.

Hollis, now 24, also came from Korea at age 3. He has mild cerebral palsy and has many indications of Fetal Alcohol Effect, namely poor cause and effect thinking and an inability to learn from his experiences. He works in a nursing home and lives with his brother Cedric.

Cedric, now 25, was also adopted at age 3. He has spina bifida. He does not work but lives on his own with Hollis.

Kristina, now 26, came from Russia at the age of 11. Her history and some of her personality traits also indicate the possibility of Fetal Alcohol Effect. She definitely had attachment disorder, and never bonded with me and never even referred to me as her mother (in conversation she referred to me simply as "she"). She could never forgive me for taking her from Russia and her favorite housemother, even though the housemother was desperate that Kristina be adopted because "there is only one future for a girl with black skin."

Misha, now 23, came from Russia at the age of 10. He was born with a form of dwarfism and had gone straight from the maternity hospital to a baby home (orphanage for kids under age 3). He stayed there until he was 10, because the director knew that the next and last stop for Misha would be a bleak institution for "invalids." He lives on his own and works at a movie theater.

Sergei, now 26, came to us one month shy of his 15th birthday. Like Kristina, he had been in children's homes since the age of 1, abandoned because he was biracial. He is a highly intelligent young man, but his emotional scars from being abandoned and from the devastating effects of Russia's racism run deep.

Suffice it to say that early neglect, abandonment, and abuse took their toll on these kids. And parenting them definitely took a toll on me. I was assaulted and emotionally abused. One child threatened to burn down my house (we found matches squirreled away in his drawer). For many of them, I was the convenient target for all the anger they felt for their birthmothers. All I can say is that I did the best I could, and the one small comfort I have is that the 5 who came from other countries got the opportunity to get an education which they never would have had in their home countries.

Introduction, part two

And, continuing the introductions:

Gabriel, about to turn 22 at the end of this month, came to me at the age of 5 months...the only one of my children who came to me as an infant. So, in my mind, he's always been my "baby." His birthmother was schizophrenic, so delusional that she sometimes thought she was Tina Turner, sometimes a white woman from California. She did not realize she was pregnant until she was about 8 months along, so she had still been getting injections of a powerful antipsychotic medication during the pregnancy. Gabriel appeared normal at birth, but at the age of 1 month became jittery and developed high muscle tone. Doctors suspected seizures and cerebral palsy. Over time, both diagnoses were ruled out, but they were followed by many more. As a toddler, he had speech and language delays. In elementary school, he had successive diagnoses of ADHD, obsessive compulsive disorder, depression, and Tourettes syndrome. But he was a charming, goofy kid...one speech therapist who evaluated him wrote "too cute!!!" in her observation notes. Then things got more complicated when he was in middle school. At the beginning of summer after 6th grade, I gradually came to realize that Gabriel had virtually stopped eating and was exercising for hours. He soon started to look shockingly thin. The pediatrician took a wait and see approach for a month, while Gabriel's weight continued to plummet. By the time he was admitted to an eating disorder program at a children's hospital in Dallas, he weighed 69 pounds...he'd lost about 30 pounds in a month. He was hospitalized twice, for a total of 5 months, that year. It was during his second hospitalization that the doctors diagnosed him as psychotic. But during the next 5 years, his psychosis was characterized by some skewed thinking and poor motivation. Then, in July 2006, over a weekend, he became somewhat moody and obsessive about certain thoughts. One evening, as I was walking through the den, he told me that I needed to put some curtains in the back windows, because someone was trying to kill him. When I pressed him to elaborate, he clammed up, saying, "I've said too much already...they'll kill me for sure now." He would say no more. I was unsettled, but we don't live in the best neighborhood, and I thought it was conceivable that some punk had made an idle threat. Later he came to my room, asking about police protection, whispering, closing the A/C vent. He said the people were trying to kill him because of something he had told me and Marcus at dinner a couple of nights earlier. But how would they know he had told us, I asked. He looked at me incredulously. "You don't know???? The police are in the room upstairs, listening to everything we say!" I realized that he had had a psychotic, paranoid break. Luckily I was able to convince him to go to the hospital. Incredibly, they didn't even want to keep him there and were going to just send him home. I convinced them to keep him a few hours for observation...a "few hours" turned into 7 months, as his condition quickly deteriorated and he was committed to the state hospital. I was shaken to my core. For months, he was unable to understand the simplest bit of conversation, he was so absorbed in his hallucinations. He moved unseen objects and talked with unseen people. He's been home for a year and does OK...considering. Schizophrenia has been worse than I ever expected and I am often disheartened at his present condition and fearful of his future.

Tevis, 18, came to us at the age of 16 months. Like Jesse, he had been diagnosed as having cerebral palsy and developmental delays. I have to admit, I thought that he might overcome his delays as Jesse had. But he didn't. He is moderately retarded, hyperactive, and has had severe behavior problems. He has to be supervised every waking minute, and actually during the night as well, as he wanders and gets into EVERYTHING while everyone is asleep. I decided to place him in a group home several years ago, when the school started calling me frequently to tell me to come pick him up as they couldn't handle him. I'd been through that with Marcus and knew that it was almost impossible to hold down a job under those circumstances. I wish I could manage Tevis at home, but it's not possible. He comes home several weekends a month. When he's not acting out, he's SO sweet, loves to help, and comes out with some really funny comments. After 7 years on a waiting list, he finally got on a state program that pays for a higher quality group home with only 3 residents. Tomorrow he's going with other clients on a cruise to Cozymel!

That wraps up the introductions to the kids who remain part of my life. In my next post, I'll introduce the rest of my kids...

Introduction

I started this blog with one thing in mind, but am beginning to change my idea of what it will include. When I began here, my main blog was on Yahoo 360. I considered that blog to be my personal blog, since it was on a social networking site. In my mind, the 360 blog would be the one which detailed every day events and thoughts in my life for my circle of online friends. I saw this Blogger blog as something a bit more literary, a place for some of my favorite essays and poems. But Yahoo 360 appears to be in its death throes, so I've been spending more time browsing blogs on Blogger. I've found some fascinating blogs, many of which fall into the more personal journal category. So I've decided to make this one more of a personal log, and I realized that, if I'm going to do that, I ought to introduce folks to the cast of characters who might be appearing here.

In my earlier post of my obituary, I've already given an overview of myself, so I'll move on to my 10 "kids." First I'll introduce you to the kids who remain an active part of my life:

Jesse, 28, was adopted when he was 2o months old. He had a diagnosis of cerebral palsy and was considered mentally delayed as well.

Well, yes, he did have mild cerebral palsy, but he turned out to have an IQ in the superior range. By fourth grade, his vocabulary and reading skills were on a college level. But he never did that well in school, and by the time he was 11, he began to display serious behavioral problems. This was a long time ago, and not that much was known about attachment disorder, so I had not realized the serious effects of his early life experiences: born 10 weeks premature to a teen who had already planned on giving him up for adoption, spending months in NICU with no one to bond with, moved to a foster home and then to another a year later. I would later learn much, much more about attachment disorder. So he acted out, ran away, got involved with drugs, etc. He spent some time in residential treatment, got kicked out, came home, and ran away for good, eventually living with a much older partner. He cared for this man several years as he battled AIDS and cancer. When his partner passed away, Jesse went through a rough period, hooked on painkillers. But a couple of years ago, he suddenly decided to get his life together. He got his GED and enrolled in cosmetology school. He graduated a year later...the longest he'd ever stuck with anything! He's currently working full-time as a stylist. He has long been destined for this vocation. When he was 2 or 3, he was obsessed with Snow White. He dressed up like her, listened to the soundtrack for hours, staring at the pictured 33 rpm album spinning on his Fisher-Price record player, even went so far as to offer a plastic apple to a stranger in a doctor's office waiting room, saying, "Would you like a bite of my poison apple?" But at the age of 4, Snow White gave way to Cindi Lauper. He brought home a little book of nursery rhymes he made at preschool, with a memeographed page for each rhyme. Jack B Nimble had flaming red hair. "That's Cindi Lauper/Jack B Nimble!" he explained. Each time I see Jesse now, his hair is a different color, sometimes purple, sometimes blond, and, yes, sometimes Cindi Lauper red.

Marcus, now 27, came to me at the age of 3, ten months after he had been brought to the ER semicomatose, with a severe traumatic brain injury, 3rd degree burns, detached retinas, and broken-out teeth. This severe battering was the culmination of 2 years of ever increasing abuse at the hands of his birth mother. Tragically, CPS had had an open case on Marcus and his twin brother most of that time, but chose to leave them in the home, in spite of both boys having broken bones, numerous bruises, and increasing signs of emotional disturbance. Marcus' injuries left him legally blind, paralyzed on his right side, and with severe learning problems. He was also prone to unpredictable fits of rage, due both to the brain injury and to the emotional scars of the abuse. But for many months, each night I would rock him, and the bond of trust between us grew strong. At home, he was loving and playful, but at school he was often withdrawn, electively mute, and unpredictable. When he was in 4th grade, his PTSD reached its peak, and he began running away from school in a blind rage (and the school just let him go!). So I quit my full-time job and homeschooled him during his middle school years. It turned out to be the right thing for him. He felt secure and safe at home and was able to work through his PTSD. By the time he returned to high school in a vocational program for disabled students, he was mellow, got along with everyone, and, according to his teacher, was like her personal assistant, he was so helpful. At last the rest of the world saw the Marcus I had always known! Marcus lives at home and would like work, but hasn't had any luck finding employment. He developed seizures a few years ago and just had 2 operations on his foot, so medical issues still affect him. Of all my children, Marcus is the kindest, most loving one, so amazing when you consider the horror of his first two years.

Well, this introduction will obviously take a while, so I think I'll do it in installments. So...to be continued.