As an adoptive parent, I never experienced pregnancy and all the fun, pain, and wonder that comes along with it.  Instead, I adopted a daughter from Russia and another from Guatemala with all the fun, pain, and wonder that comes along with that.

I love being a mother, but it is the toughest job I’ve ever had…without training.  As I watch them grow into beautiful young ladies, I am struck at how much work goes into raising them.

Raising  “normal” child is difficult and challenging enough, but when a child has special needs, such as Reactive Attachment Disorder, the ante is raised.

I love my daughters, but besides protecting them, loving them, teaching them about life, making sure they brush their teeth, ensuring they get their homework done, and reminding them to change their underwear on a regular basis, I schedule, drive, and attend weekly therapy sessions.  And when we are not in therapy, I try to keep everyone on a strict schedule, apply our attachment therapy skills 24-7 to their behaviors, while trying to be a happy, upbeat, loving, awesome mom.

This is exhausting.

I never feel like I get a break.  If one daughter has her RAD under control and is working on her life, the other is exploding.  They are two separate pendulums swinging in opposite directions at all times, never in sync with each other.  The hyper-vigilance this requires on my part to always be ready to handle any behavior from whatever direction it comes from is exhausting and as taken its toll.

The saying, “if Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy” is true, but as mothers, do we really take the phrase seriously?

For years I watched my mother give and sacrifice to the detriment of her own self.  She gave everything to us, leaving nothing left to give to herself.  But, it wasn’t just my mother who gave of her self; it was my grandmother and her grandmother.  I think mothers throughout time have given of their selves to make the loves of their children better.  It’s part of the job description.

So, with this “giving” of generations of women to their children, I always feel guilty when I set aside a little time just for me.  A chance to steal away from the stress and chaos of raising special needs children.  While attending Nancy Thomas’ RAD camp, I learned that if my tank is empty, there is no way I can give my children what they need, so I must take the time to fill my tank.

This means I occasionally take a break from the routine of bedtime, letting my husband handle it, while I soak in a bubble bath.  Or, I schedule a massage or a facial, or spend an afternoon at the movies…not watching an animated or 3D children’s movie.  In the summer I garden and in the winter, I read or crochet, and I schedule an occasional weekend to visit girlfriends or take a vacation with my husband, sans children.

I recently applied this “fill ‘er up” theory to my own physical health.  The years of stress had caused me to gain weight and ignore the possible threats to my life.  So, I decided to take my life into control like I do with the lives of my children.  I started exercising and I changed how I ate.  I made it a priority to walk an hour a day, not only for physical exercise, but also for stress relief.  The result is a 25 pound weight loss and a happier, healthier mother.

It is true that if Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy, but it could also be true that if Mama ain’t healthy, ain’t nobody healthy, and if Mama ain’t here, everybody is screwed.

So, set aside the guilt of taking time for you, and start taking time to care for yourself.  Because when Mama is happy…everyone benefits.

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Being the mother of a child with Reactive Attachment Disorder is beyond exhausting.  I would say being a parent in itself is a tiring job, but when the complexities of an emotionally damaged child is added in, exhaustion doesn’t go far enough to describe how you feel at the end of the day.

Nancy Thomas wrote a book about RAD called When Love is Not Enough.  This was the first book I had ever read about RAD and immediately, the title resonated with me.  For years I had given and given and given to my daughter, but I never seemed to get anything back.  The love I had for my daughter was not being reciprocated.

Although I understand my daughter is incapable of loving me like I love her, the knowledge doesn’t lessen the hurt, anger and resentment I feel for her unrequited love.  I feel like a failure because the one job I have as a parent, to love my child unconditionally, isn’t enough.

Besides feeling like a failure, I struggle with what to do.  What is wrong?  How can I help?  Is my love enough?  With these feelings of parental inadequacies, I feel guilty for not being able to help my daughter, not liking her, and sometimes not even loving her.

I also resent her.  She wasn’t the child I thought she was going to be.  She wasn’t the daughter I had dreamed about.  My beautiful little Russian doll was broken, but not on the outside.  By the time she was diagnosed with RAD, she had drained away so much of me, I wasn’t sure I had anything else to give her.

Her disorder has stressed my family, my marriage, and myself to the breaking point.  One more push and I feel my life will crumble around my feet.  Her disorder controls our household.  Every waking moment is spent analyzing her behaviors, going to therapy, keeping a close eye on her, and wondering when she will decide to make a bad decision.  As she has gotten older, her bad decisions threaten to have a longer lasting effect, not only on her, but also on us as a family.

But, I have to live every day with faith.  Faith that I am doing the right thing to help her, faith that she will get better, and faith that one day she will become the daughter I always dreamed about.

Until the day when love is enough, faith will have to help me put one foot in front of the other.

Because I do believe she can be healed.

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The start of this New Year has not been an easy one around our house.  With two daughters in full-blown RAD mode, our family life has not been chaos-free.

One prevalent behavior of Reactive Attachment Disorder is lying.  All children fib and stretch the truth, but children suffering from RAD have perfected the art of lying to such a level, the lies should be hanging in a museum.

Elle, my 13 year old RADish, is so proficient at lying I’m not sure she knows how to tell the truth.  The hard part about the lying is you know they are doing it because your built-in lie detector is flashing red.  But how are you going to prove it?  Should you try?  Should you call them on it, or just let it slide?

Our therapist told us that for every lie we let slide, the sicker they become.  If they can get away with a small lie about using their sister’s hand lotion, then they can easily get away with stealing your iPad and using it to text their boyfriend…the boyfriend they lied about having in the first place.

For every lie Bunny or Elle would tell me, my blood pressure became more elevated and my stress level became unmanageable…

…Until I met a very wise, fellow RAD mom.

Around her house, lying is a thing to be celebrated, because every time one of her RADishes lie to her, she earns a point.  For every 10 points earned, she gets ice cream, and not just a small scoop of vanilla ice cream from the freezer, but a trip to Baskin Robbins or to Stone Cold Creamery.  I thought this idea was brilliant.  Why not take a negative and turn it into a positive?  Isn’t that the whole point behind the saying, “When God gives you lemons, make lemonade?”

But as much as I loved the idea, I couldn’t get my excitement level up over ice cream.  Although I like ice cream, I don’t LOVE it.  Now, a brownie with chocolate frosting might get my heart a pumpin’, but my true heart’s desire is cupcakes.  A red velvet or chocolate cupcake could send me over the moon.  Ten points for lying and a confectionary masterpiece of cake and frosting could be all mine!

Neither daughter was too thrilled to help me earn my cupcake points.  Bunny even cried when I caught her in two lies in a row and danced around the kitchen.  When I finally earned my 10^th point, I yelled so loud my husband came running to investigate.

Nothing was wrong, it was just me earning 10 points toward a coconut cupcake.  And as I ate my bakery work of art, savoring every last crumb, my daughters were rethinking their lying strategy.

But, if I start to gain weight because I am earning a lot of points…I might want to rethink my cupcake strategy.

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The dream follows the same script with a few variations.  Once the monsters burned the house down and roasted us inside.  They have tried smashing the house, but when they were unsuccessful, they went to our barn and ate all of the animals.  The rest of the dream is always the same, we end up dead and Bunny ends up alone.

We’ve tried countless times to help Bunny with the dreams that leave her overtired and unsettled.  Once we talked her through a dream letting her tell the tail in detail.  We asked questions like, “What were the monsters wearing?”  “Did they use good table manners when they ate us?”  “Did they have bad breath?”  But, the levity didn’t seem to make the dreams go way.

Then we tried to “re-style” the monsters.  Since Bunny is a budding fashionista, we decided to glam up the monsters.  We thought a monster wearing a black and white zebra-print dress, neon green leopard print shoes, large dangling frog earrings, and a pink hair bow surely couldn’t be all that scary.  But, the nightmares still haunted her.

Yesterday morning, Bunny awoke again with bags under her eyes and a tired, resigned air about her.  I was so busy getting breakfast made and both girls out the door for the school bus that I never really noticed anything wrong.  It wasn’t until we were in our therapist’s office that I noticed the dark circles under her eyes.  I asked her about the dream and after a moment’s hesitation she told our therapist about her dreams and how she felt afterwards.

She suggested when Bunny has a dream about the monsters and she can’t sleep, she should turn on the light and draw a picture of her dream, rip the page out of her notebook, crumple it up in a ball, and then throw it in the garbage.  In the morning, she should tell us about it so we can get it out of her garbage and throw it away forever.

She also told me this is a method used with traumatized patients and those with PTSD in order to get the event out of the subconscious and out of the brain altogether.  I wondered if Bunny’s dreams of being left alone in the world wasn’t in some way connected to her abandonment issues.  She had been given up at birth by her birthmother, and then taken away from her foster mother when we adopted her.

Our therapist said that dreams are a way for the subconscious to deal with issues the brain isn’t ready for yet.  If we can successfully deal with Bunny’s nightmares, her fears of abandonment may become more manageable.  She felt the dreams were a breakthrough and that Bunny’s protective wall was starting to crumble.

This morning, Bunny woke up with a picture of monsters eating her sister.  She wadded it up and threw it in the garbage.  All of a sudden she seemed happy and secure.  She bubbled all over her eggs and bubbled her way out to the bus, seemingly like she hadn’t a care in the world.

I never imagined a dream could be the start of a therapeutic breakthrough, but I guess all it took was a zebra-print wearing monster to sit on Bunny’s wall for the bricks to all start crumbling down.

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The start of a new year has always been more of a time of reflection for me.  I don’t make resolutions for the coming year because I know by February I won’t be able to remember what my New Year’s resolutions were.  Plus, I am so exhausted from the Holidays that it takes me until February to get my head around resolutions.

This year, I’ve spent a fair bit of time reflecting on 2011.  For me, it was a tough year.  Both of my daughters, Elle and Bunny, had set backs with their Reactive Attachment Disorder, and as a parent of RAD children, I questioned whether what we were doing to help the girls was the right thing.  I wondered if all the therapy was making a difference or not helping at all.  I questioned myself as a parent, and wondered if I really had what it takes to help heal my children.

Sometimes, parenting a child with RAD can be so draining that you feel like there is nothing left of yourself, not even a glimmer of your former self.  That’s where I have been for the last couple of months.  In a hole of despair.

I started to look at my life as a plate, with my family heaped on, my blogging, and the everyday requirements of my life.  Activities and responsibilities were heaped like mounds of spaghetti, and the spaghetti was threatening to spill over the side. Metaphorically, I scraped my plate clean, washed it, and then slowly started to add back to the plate.  I practiced the art of just being, with no deadlines and no responsibilities past taking care of my family.

It has taken two months to clean my plate and start over…and just in time for the New Year.  I am starting 2012 with a renewed sense of self, with grit determination to help my daughters, and an excitement for my writing that I haven’t felt in awhile.

I am not going to make any resolutions to lose weight (which I already have), or be a better person (because I work on that constantly), or write a book (which I would love to do), but I am going to continue to practice the art of being.  I am going to hope for a happy and prosperous 2012 for me, my family, and for all of you.

May your 2012 be everything you hope for…and then some!  Happy New Year!

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My husband once questioned our six-year-old daughter, Bunny, about the outfit she chose to wear for picture day.  His question was less about what he asked and more about how he asked the question.  Bunny took immediate offense to his question and burst into tears.

Oh, brother!

But, as much as Bunny has no problem expressing some emotions, others are locked deep inside her.

Bunny has Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), and as I’ve written before, RAD is a disorder of relationships.  At some point during Bunny’s development, a trauma occurred.  Her particular trauma came from the transfer from her birth mother to her foster mother, then the transfer from her foster mother to us, and then a daily transfer from us to a nanny.

During those multiple traumas, Bunny wasn’t able to create all the brain connections she needed to have a healthy brain.  However, through targeted RAD therapy, those brain connections can be rebuilt in order for Bunny to have the ability to form solid relationships.

For example, Bunny understands the core emotions of mad, sad, happy, and scared.  Where she gets confused is with the more subtle emotions that spin off those core emotions.  She understands mad, but rather than feeling a more appropriate feeling like disappointment, she becomes angry and her behaviors reflect the basic emotion rather than the more sophisticated emotion.

We work a lot with the subtlety of emotions.  We mirror feelings with her and have her mirror them back.  Or, she stands in front of a mirror and practices making faces…that is when she isn’t posing in front of the mirror.  It seems sort of infantile for Bunny to do this, especially when she is intellectually ahead of her peers, but she is emotionally delayed and she needs to catch up.

So, I came up with a creative and fun way for her to help identify her feelings.  I created a Bucketful ‘O Feelings.  I bought a bucket and filled it with dry beans.  Then I cut out pictures of faces showing emotions such as happy, sad, mad, scared, excited, bored, etc.  I glued them to colorful card stock, and then glued them to popsicle sticks.  I arranged them in the bucket like a bouquet of flowers.

The next time Bunny gets stuck on an emotion, she can pluck out the one that best describes how she is feeling and hold it up to her face.  Then she can practice making the face herself.  And, we can keep adding more sophisticated emotions as she gets better.

It may seem silly, but if the bucket of feelings helps her learn, then I’ll continue to keep my hot glue gun plugged in and ready!

Photo Credit.  LanitaM

Another right I have as an American that I don’t often think about is the right to be President of the United States.  Growing up, children are told they can be anything they want to be.  If they work and study hard, they can be a doctor, astronaut, or President.

But, because my daughters were born in a foreign country, they are ineligible to be President of the United States.  My Russian daughter who plays basketball and my Guatemalan daughter who lives to be a cheerleader…my red, white, and blue daughters can never be elected President because they are not natural-born citizens.  I used to tell Elle that she couldn’t be President of the United States, but she could be the President of Russia.

The eligibility for the President is established in Article II of the US Constitution.  Besides being a natural-born citizen, the Constitution requires the President to be at least 35 years old and a permanent resident in the United States for 14 years.

After years in law school, I am a true defender of the US Constitution.  I’ve always been in awe of our forefathers and the wisdom they had to write such a document that still remains fluid today.

The term “natural-born citizen” is not actually defined in the Constitution, although most scholars agree that the term includes those born on US soil, and those born on foreign soil to US parents.  This definition is the reason John McCain was able to run for President despite the circumstances of his Panamanian birth.

But as it stands, neither Elle nor Bunny could be President because the US Supreme Court has yet to hear a case defining an internationally adopted child of US parents as a natural-born citizen.

Personally, I could argue that Elle and Bunny have just as much right to be President as a child born in the United States to non-US citizens.  They came to the US as infants, they were both US citizens before the age of one, and they were raised as Americans.

With as many internationally adopted children there are in the United States, eventually the definition of natural-born citizen will come before the US Supreme Court.  But, if it doesn’t before my children reach the age of 35…is anyone up for a Supreme Court battle?

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As internationally adopted children, I know a part of them still resides in their birth countries.  As they grow up as red, white, and blue Americans, Elle is still Russian, and Bunny is still Guatemalan.

And I love that about them.

We recently celebrated Bunny’s Adoption Day, the day we brought her home.  Although I punted on making tamales, I did have cake.  While we enjoyed her red velvet cake, she asked when Elle’s A-Day was.  It’s in June.  Then she asked when her daddy’s A-Day was and then when was mine.

We told her we didn’t have A-Days because we weren’t adopted.  Then she questioned our citizenship.  Apparently, she thought A-Day meant American Day and not Adoption Day, because for her, her A-Day is both.

But as American citizens, the girls will have few opportunities to learn about their birth countries.  I often wonder if they will learn enough American history as it is, so I don’t hold much hope for them to learn Russian or Latin American history…unless we teach them ourselves, or at least expose them to their rich birth histories.

One way we plan to teach our children about their heritages and give them a chance to soak in their birth cultures is by taking them back to where they started, back to their birth countries.

As high school graduation presents, we want to take them back home.  I can’t change the circumstances of their births, I wouldn’t want to, but we can give them a chance to go home again, to see where they came from and how far they’ve come.

I think about Red Square in Moscow, one of the most unique and beautiful places I have ever been, and then I think about standing there with Elle.  It gives me goose bumps just thinking about it.

I look forward to taking them back to their birth countries and seeing it through their eyes.  I’m just glad it is a little way off because I don’t want them to grow up too fast.

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This morning, over a cup of coffee, I read this headline in the Hollywood Reporter.

Jillian Michaels Warns Against International Adoption Unless You Have ‘A Lot Of Money’

In the current issue of Prevention Magazine, Michaels, a former trainer on The Biggest Loser, discusses the difficulties she’s had adopting internationally.  She left the TV reality show last December and this February announced she was adopting a child from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Celebrity adoptions are not uncommon.  Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have adopted children from Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Vietnam.  Madonna controversially adopted a boy from Malawi.  Meg Ryan adopted a baby girl from China, and Katherine Heigl adopted a special needs daughter from Korea.

When celebrities adopt internationally, the spotlight on international adoption can either create negative publicity, as in the case of Madonna, or it can help educate and highlight the positive aspects of the process.

Unfortunately, Michaels’ recent comments may do more harm than good.  She is clearly having a difficult time with her adoption.  But, all international adoptive parents know how difficult it can be, how long it can take, and how it feels to have their life controlled by a foreign government.  So, it was no surprise to me when it was reported Michaels seemed “more fatigued in this [Prevention Magazine] interview than ever before.”

I sympathize with Michaels.  I know exactly what she’s going through, but I find it disappointing she chose to use her celebrity to “caution others who may not have the same financial resources as her against it.”  In the interview, she says that adopting internationally requires “tremendous patience and financial resources because it’s going to cost a lot of money.  If you don’t have those two things, go domestic.”  As if domestic adoptions are cheap, the majority of domestic adoptions cost between $25,000 and $30,000.

I am disappointed with Michaels because I wish she’d taken this opportunity to share her experience rather than make such an unfortunate statement.  The process, the paperwork, and the waiting IS difficult.  Completing a dossier IS a full-time job until it is signed, apostilled, and delivered.

And it is expensive.  The average cost for an international adoption ranges from $20,000-$30,000.  But, it’s not impossible.  Over 11,000 children were adopted internationally in 2011.

Not everyone has a celebrity-sized bank account.  Those wanting to adopt internationally can get very financially creative, from taking second mortgages, to fund raising, to finding adoption grants.  It’s not easy, but it can be done.

Jillian Michaels has made a career out of helping others with their health and fitness.  She is an advocate for living a healthy lifestyle.  But she has disappointed me as an advocate for international adoption.

I wish she had used her platform to share her fears and struggles with international adoption.  She would have helped so many people who are in the process.  She had the opportunity to reach out to others and lessen the sense of isolation so many adoptive parents feel.

My biggest fear is her comments will discourage people from adopting internationally.  I pray this won’t happen because it would be a tragedy for the process, the families, and most especially, the children.

I wish Michaels all the best in the completion of her adoption.  Perhaps her next interview won’t be such a lost opportunity.

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In my house, the disappearance of a carrot peeler doesn’t mean that I’ve misplaced it in the wrong drawer.  It is a red flag that one of my daughters is angry.  Angry at me.

Parenting a child with reactive attachment disorder (RAD.) is not easy.  Parenting is not easy, but when your child has attachment issues that result in a lack of trust, simply loving your child is often not enough.

RAD is a disorder of relationships, and the root cause of the disorder is the broken mother/child relationship.  Until this basic, fundamental relationship is restored with the adoptive mother, the child will be incapable of forging normal, healthy relationships.

I have spent years trying to repair my relationship with my daughters.  During that time I was constantly being undermined, and not just by anyone, I was being undermined by my own children.

In a RAD household, chaos reigns because the child is in control when all others around them are out of control.  RAD children have an arsenal of tools to create chaos.  Elle used to steal things, and Bunny has physically lashed out at me when she was in the middle of a volcanic temper tantrum.

For years, I have the target of my daughters’ anger and resentment.  And for years, because I am human, I reacted with anger and resentment.  But, anger and resentment is destructive to RAD children.  It doesn’t help heal.  It actually makes them worse.

This isn’t anything new.  Even before Elle was diagnosed with RAD, she was constantly stealing my things, the more valuable and sentimental the better.  What she was looking for was my reaction.  If I got angry, then she was happiest, because her goal was to destroy my love for her.  By targeting the parents, especially the mothers, parents of RAD children are basically being abused in their own homes.

The more Elle has healed, the less I become her target.  Now, she would rather die than hurt my feelings.  But, Bunny will still lash out at me when she is angry.

Last week, she was mad at me because she got in trouble at school for talking.  Somehow she felt it was all my fault.  She expressed her anger at me by taking my carrot peeler, and rather than put it in the right drawer, she hid it another drawer, buried underneath some spoons so I wouldn’t find it.

It took me awhile to put all the pieces together and figure out how a seemingly unrelated incident at school resulted in a missing carrot peeler.

Parenting is not easy.  Parenting a child with RAD is even harder.  Especially when you want to make a pot roast.

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