Need help and suggestions....

Okay, so when I was growing up we were all card toting members of the Clean Plate Cult. You ate what was on your plate until your plate was clean. However long it took, you sat at the table. My parents grew up with parents who had survived The Great Depression and I quite clearly recall my grandparents having a slice of bread at every meal. The function of that piece of bread being to wipe the plate after most of the food had been eaten. Then, they ate the bread. Not a speck of food was wasted. So I get that. I understand the history and background of the cult.

I also understand eating disorders. Anorexia, Bulimia, Binge eating and Obesity. I don't understand them very well but I know just enough to be certain that Genea is an eating disorder waiting to happen. Her obsessive need for control, her compulsion to manipulate her environment, her hyper vigilance and constant elevated stress level. I get it that eating disorders are not about the food. Every couple of months she will go through a spat where her behavior focuses on food. Asking for extra and not eating it. Refusing to eat, then stealing food later. Hoarding food, hiding food in the trash, binging, all the usual. Want to tell her she has to eat? She will, and then she will spontaneously vomit. She doesn't need to gag herself, stick fingers in her throat or anything. She will just sit there, and then *splat* she pukes. She will binge drink her water or milk so fast that it chokes her and gags her and her face turns red and she is still trying to force more liquid in while she is coughing and it is flying out the sides of her mouth and down her shirt. She is in absolute control of this, and if I give her a spoon to get her liquids with for one meal *poof* problem over. The Husband and I are to where we can tell when she is being a regular bratty fussy kid versus having a RAD attack, but we are not going to ask anyone else to figure out the difference.

Here is where I need help. We are going to visit grandparents who are proud high ranking officials in the Clean Plate Cult. They are incessant about it. When they are not actually physically trying to force food on my kids, they are talking about their food intake in front of them. I have hinted to them to quit. I have outright said, quit it. I have taken food out of the hand trying to feed my child and said STOP IT. The Husband has tried to explain orphanage related eating issues. Has tried to tell them we want our girls to learn to moderate their own food intake. That Genea is coming from different circumstances and we just cannot make food an issue with her. And we cannot make it an issue with Teena either. I have told them over and over, we want the girls to stop eating when they are ready and to be able to figure out for themselves when they are full. To listen to their bodies and moderate what they eat as to how hungry they are and then to know when to stop.

The kicker is, both of these people are overweight. One directly attributes her weight to being made to clean her plate as a kid. Now she freaks out about food being wasted etc etc. So it is not that they don't know, they just cannot seem to make themselves shut up. On and on and on about how much of this, how little of that, maybe we should give her this, we've never seen her eat an entire plate of food etc. "oh sweetie eat that little bitty bit of food for gramma" and "you make gramma sad when you don't eat your food" complete with a pouty face. I just cringe thinking about it.

So my last ditch effort is to send them some reading material ahead of our visit. Maybe if they see it in writing, writing done by professionals, maybe they will get it then. Because if they don't, I am going to have to supervise every. single. meal. and after that, I will have to insist that all my kids meals be had away from them, which the result of that is then I am making an issue out of their eating. Which is of course, NOT the point!

Here is where I need help. I can't seem to find any good comprehensive articles about trauma, orphanages and food problems. I don't need suggestions on how to tell them to piss off, since that hasn't worked either. I am looking for some basic information that connects all the dots, even if it is graphic. Maybe even better if it is graphic. We have Attachment Disorder, Failure to Thrive, Bipolar Disorder, Post- Trauma, and Post-institutionalization to pick from to start with.

For as much as I may get my nerves tap danced upon, these are two people that adore their grandchildren and would never in a million years want to hurt them in any way shape or form. They just don't understand and I need to MAKE them!!!

So please, if you know of anything I can print out or buy, leave me a link or let me know of a website or whatever. I will be SO eternally grateful!!!!!

20/20 episode on Adoption

Last night, a TV news program, 20/20, did an episode on international adoptions that have "difficult" results when the child turns out to have mental- emotional- behavioral disabilities. Here is the link and you can watch most of the program on their website. http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=6322100&page=1
I don't even know where to start.
The main focus of the program was the Mulligan family, who adopted 2 girls from Russia, then went back rather quickly and adopted a boy. They showed pictures of the parents at their wedding and they were quite striking as a pair, very attractive. 3 or 4 years later, they are both a wreck. Overweight, visibly saddened and with rigid expressionless faces, they seem to realize that what they have done out of altruism has taken them to a path few would choose, and it is permanent. The oldest girl and little boy were diagnosed with Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD)as well as other mental health issues. One of the 3 children does well.
My problem with this show, is that they aired footage from the oldest girls first week home. They showed her pacing around the house, crying and sort of wailing, and at one point had to pull her out from under the bed. They showed another incident of her sitting on their couch crying as they filmed her during a 54 minute meltdown. THAT IS NOT A DISORDER THAT IS A CHILD WHO IS SCARED AND OVERWHELMED.
Then they showed the little boy having a tantrum of sorts. Having had immediate problems with their first adoption, I have no idea why they would go back for another child. And I really have no idea who would have let them do this. Anyway, he was about 4 or 5 and they showed him crying and sitting at a wall and giving the dad dirty looks while the dad was filming him. The boy turned to face the wall, and the dad insisted he turn around and started to count to 3 but the boy turned around on 2. Again, this is the action of a child who is probably angry, probably scared, and probably overwhelmed. This does not a disorder make. That is my most significant problem with this show that was otherwise ok. They made it look like parents who could not handle a child crying and not listening constituted an attachment disorder. Those kids may very well have had a long list of problems but that is not what they showed, those behaviors are not, repeat NOT what drives parents to disrupt an adoption.

When Genea first got here, she ran away from me in the store. She would not hold my hand, I had to drag her to the car and if she got free she would try to run through a parking lot in traffic. She pee'd on herself, on the couch, on the floor, wherever. She picked the paint off the wall and I suspect she ate it because I never found the chips. She took off her seat belt in the car, and took off Teena's too. I had to buy a special mirror for my car to be able to watch her in the back seat. At home, I walked away for 1 second and caught her hitting Teena. Just hitting her. No tantrum, no reason, just hitting her. Every great parenting idea I had was quickly stomped over and useless. Say 5 positives for every 1 negative. Tell the child what TO do, not what NOT to do. Ignore the bad praise the good. Please.
She woke up 2-3 times a night yelling NO NO NO over and over. Woke up in the morning around 5 am give or take an hour and would wail on and on, crying and screaming to make sure everyone was up with her. She looked like a kid with the most raging ADHD ever, she moved constantly. She would asked to be picked up and within 3 seconds would be squirming and kicking at me to be put down. She would reach to hug me and went rigid when I hugged back. She body slammed into me all day. She crawled on me or jumped on me or lurched at me with elbows and knees digging and jabbing painfully and had no response when I tried to tell her that hurt. .She did not stop talking and asking nonsense questions. Is that my lunch? Are you making my lunch? Are you using bread for my lunch? What are you putting on my bread? You are using a knife right? You need a plate right? Is that my lunch? Are you going to make me my lunch? Are you getting out the bread now? I want 2 pieces of bread, make sure I get 2 pieces ok? This went on with everything, not just food. If I did not give the answer she wanted, meltdown. And she binged on liquids. She would drink water and keep chugging it and chugging it until she started to choke and turn red and she would keep chugging it until she could not breathe anymore and was gagging and spraying water everywhere and still kept trying to get more. She stole things and broke them and hid them. She lied, and would tell a lie with the truth in front of her. It was maddening to ask her what is the truth. And I would spend 20 minutes assuring her I was not angry, I just need the truth. And you are not in trouble, nothing bad is going to happen, I promise. Just please tell me what really happened. And without flinching, without breaking eye contact, without a change in expression, she was adamant that she was telling the truth. She wasn't. I would catch her trying to hurt our cats, in minor ways. Her meltdowns went on every day. 5 or 10 or more, for 6 months there was not a day free of meltdowns. If she did not get what she wanted, meltdown. And she would ask for things she knew she could not have, like a glass vase, and when I said no, the wailing began. Meltdown. And there was no middle ground. She went from 0 to 120 in a second. There was no warning, she would perceive a trigger and then BAM you have a full blown meltdown. And I almost forget the dissociative episodes. Every once in a while, she left the building completely. Her eyes were open and she was sitting up but she had no reaction at all. I could pick up her arm and it would flop back down. Conscious, but unresponsive. And let me say this, Genea's behavior, as challenging as it was- is- can be, is probably moderate in severity. She probably meets the criteria for RAD. For some kids, it absolutely gets worse. She will not approach strangers and sit on strangers laps. She will not walk away with anybody who smiles at her. She does not poop on herself or smear it on walls. She does not use weapons. She has never actually used threats towards us. She is typically not aggressive to people or things. She doesn't hoard food or hide it. And I don't know if Genea has RAD, or Bipolar or Oppositional Defiant Disorder, or Conduct Disorder, or what. Doctors tell me, there is no precedence for her. Her physiology and neurology are so scrambled that there isn't a name for it. There is no one good answer for her. And that is why, while I think the concept of the program on 20/20 was great, it did not even touch the tip of the iceberg. If they wanted to do a show on this issue, they should have gone balls to the wall and done it right. The children that were shown, those are not the children that get disrupted from their adoptive families and that behavior is not what destroys their families. There IS help, and there IS hope. Sometimes it works. Not always. And the disorder is not limited to international adoptions either, in any adoption preceded by abuse and/ or neglect and the child is going to an unknown family, there WILL be challenges.
Phew.

Disrupting an Adoption

Disrupting an adoption is brutal. It is something I am familiar with and I have seen happen, most recently in my own home with the adoption of my new daughter, Genea.

Disrupting an adoption is a subject going around blogs at the moment, so I decided to jump on in. To "disrupt" means that adoptive parents have gone to court and had their parental rights terminated forever. The child is then without parents and goes to any of several possible places, with another family, to a group home, to a foster home, etc. Sometimes the child is re-adopted, sometimes not.

Like many people, I had never even heard of the idea, and I never knew it was possible. About 10 years ago I was in charge of a treatment group home in a large city for young girls who had been sexually abused. To be placed in this home, the children who were between 5 and 12, had to be so damaged they were un-placeable elsewhere and could not remain in their homes if they had one at all. This was the last stop before institutionalization. Most of the girls were in CPS custody, there were a few that still had parents but most had been taken from conditions of abuse and neglect and parental rights had been terminated by the state.

One of the little girls was named Laney. She had been placed as an infant with her adoptive family and by the time she got to the group home she was 12. Without going into a long history, her parents terminated their rights saying that when CPS placed her 11 years earlier, they never told the parents that Laney's birth mother had abused drugs while pregnant. I judged this family with every bit of anger and degradation I could throw at them. Not that I ever met them because they came to the house exactly one time, and that was to drop her off. Every bit of hatred and bile and frustration and helplessness that I felt for the abusers of all of the children I aimed at this family. For a long time.

Fast forward many years and I am living in the midwest, I have had Teena who is about a year old and I see an ad in the paper for volunteer guardians. It is a program in the state to provide guardianship for adults with disabilities who have no one willing or able to take care of them. Elderly people with no family left, ''incompetent'' adults who have mental illness, people like this. My ward, as is the terminology, is an 18 year old young lady who was adopted as a baby after suffering abuse so horrid it damaged her mental capacity permenantly and put her in a full body cast. As a baby. No member of the family, who placed her in a group home at the age of 14, not one is willing to be her legal guardian when she reaches legal adulthood.

Then comes Genea and I have written about her and Teena and our family many times so this blog contains a lot of information and little stories about them and how they became sisters and how Genea became our daughter. There is no secret that Genea lived with another family who legally terminated their parental rights so that she was free to be adopted again, by us. She was adopted by this family from Ukraine when she was about 15 months old and lived with them until she turned 4.

It is easy to take aim and fire at the first family. What kind of horrible person does this? How could anyone be so wretched as to un-adopt an orphan? It is so vile of a thing to consider you want to wash your brain for the thought to disappear. But.

They did everything. And when everything failed, they did more. And when more failed, they stuck with it and still tried. No one spends $35,000 and a year of their life to give up. No one spends thousands and thousands of dollars and a year if they are lucky, two years for some to bring a child into their home and then change their mind when the child cries.

I have Genea's medical records. I will not go into all the details but I am going to summarize. Something was not right with Genea from the beginning. They took her to the pediatrician. They took her to specialists. They took her to 5 different medical professionals before they got a diagnosis from a Pediatric Endocrinologist which turned out to be similar to Addison's syndrome. Her body did not make a certain hormone it needed.

At the same time they knew she was having emotional problems that went WAY beyond what they had been told to expect. They called their agency. The agency told them to go for counseling. They went. And when that didn't work, they went to another clinic and tried again. And when that didn't work they were sent to a specialist in autism where she was diagnosed with moderate Autism Spectrum Disorder. They went to yet another clinic to get help for the autism. But by now they are done. They cannot do it. They have gone so far past what they are able to handle that they are destroyed. Literally. Genea is re-diagnosed with anaclymic depression and has been labled with failure to thrive as well. She had not grown for 2 years.

They went looking for another family to take Genea into their home. We were not looking to adopt a child, but became aware of the situation and decided to do it.

The original adopting parents had been devastated and they seperated soon after the termination hearing and are planning to divorce. They have been wiped out financially and emotionally. Their families have turned on them. Her parents tried to intervene and cost us thousands of dollars in trying to stop the adoption. Having a child with multiple disabling conditions can be isolating, and they no longer had any friends. Genea looked, and still looks, on the surface to be an average ordinary little girl. From the outside it was obvious where the problem was, squarely with those parents. And wouldn't it be nice if it was that easy.

Genea is working, and we are working, hard. The changes in her have been termed, more than once, a miracle. She is in kindergarten and acts just like the average child. Her problems are far less severe but they are still there. What made the difference? I don't know for sure really. I suspect that the neurological was driving the physiological was driving the emotional was driving the neurological. If that makes sense. Her little body had created this impenetrable cycle. I will write about that in another post because there is a lot to it and I have learned so much in research.

I remember early on being in the grocery store with Genea when suddenly she went into one of her hard core tantrums. The kind where a comparison could be made to a wild animal, and I am squatting down trying to calm her and a woman walks past us and gives me the fake sympathy look and says, awwww. And I thought lady, you have NO IDEA what you are judging. None.