When Grief Looks Like Anger

I have been pondering this statement that the Lord gave me for the last few days.

When grief looks like anger......

How does one wade through the ugliness and harshness of raw anger?

How do we find the pain locked deep inside?

How do we uncover trauma and fear and pain that has laid buried for years?

How do we seek out reasons when communication is hindered?

Is it disability or adoption or age?

Will we ever reach a point of total healing?

How can I better help to draw out the hidden?

Should it be drawn out?

Or is it better to wait till they are ready and it surfaces?

Do you point out to them the fears they may be unaware of ?

Or will it only add to the confusion of the mix?

Parenting treasures from hard places is HARD!

 Sometimes we are stretched way beyond what we know...

But we have been blessed with family and friends to help fill in the gaps.

 Sometimes we cry with our kids in their pain because we are lost too....

But tears can bring great healing and bonding when we are drowning in sorrow.

 Sometimes we all make mistakes and wish we were able to undo them....

But in our house we do RE-DO's and second chances and I'm sorry really well. 

So rather than wallow in shame, we do grace.

And we seek to have our eyes opened to the reality of what is occurring in our family!

We see hope!

We see growth!

We see healing!

We see promised futures!

We see treasures sent by God to bless our family!

To teach us about redemption!

To teach us about compassion!

To teach us about forgiveness!

We see a picture of Christ working in our lives!

We can be ugly, yet He forgives us!

We can be unlovable, yet His love never fails!

We can be full of pain and bitterness, yet His tender mercies never end!     

Praise God He is not finished with any of us yet, but we are being transformed daily into His glorious image!

The Rockin' Mama Challenge

I joined up with the Rockin' Mama Challenge today!

As I have talked about many times on this blog, attachment is not always an easy thing.

Even after 5 years we see big gaps for both of our treasures.

After Caleb and Hannah had been home for a year I was talking with a dear adoptive mom friend about the struggle I was still having with Caleb and his attachment. She so wonderfully pointed out to me that I also was not attaching to him!!

Interestingly I had never thought about it in this way, nor heard about it, nor read about it. It was always the child attaching to the parent being the issue.

So at that point we did lots of research and I sought lots of advice from experienced adoptive moms, and we started the 'over loving' phase of adoption.

We praised EVERY small thing, we let some things slide that we never would have with our bio kids, we took every opportunity to touch and hug, we said words of affection at every turn. We found our hearts learning to love in a new way and him responding in a new way. It was great!

This is not to say everything was wonderful. We still had our struggles, but things were so much better.

And I would say now he knows we love him and we will never leave him. He still has behaviours that are related to trauma and loss. But overall we are on a good path.

This challenge with him, is hopefully to go deeper and help him with touch and expressing feelings at a new level.

With Hannah things have always moved at a different pace.

Due to her delays we have always worked with her a little differently from Caleb.

I have missed seeing that her attachment issues are definitely not going in the right direction.

Just in the last week it was confirmed in my heart that some intervention was going to need to happen and soon.

Thankfully my blogging friend, and now face to face friend, Lisa, posted a couple of days ago about a new challenge her great therapist gave her for one of her children with past trauma issues.

It was a rocking challenge!

You simply rock with your child on your lap with nothing else going on. Just you and them and a rocking chair for 15 minutes.

Now for me that is 30 minutes of uninterrupted time.

Not easy to find, but essential as I see it for my family right now.

You can go to Lisa's blog post and read more about it if you are interested. I will be posting here as we move through this process and let you know how I am doing and what responses we are seeing with the kids.

So day one looks like this:

Hannah-after 5 minutes laid back and started looking me in the eye and giving me full dialog of her day with prompting!!

Caleb-after trying for 5 minutes to remove himself sneakily from my lap, relaxed. He told me it was starting to feel comfortable after 10 minutes. He told me how much he liked his building sets and what he was reading about. Never really got more than a few fractions of eye contact.

Let me know if you decide to take the challenge and we can encourage one another!

Heads Up to a New Resource and Some Great Books

We are heading out camping for the weekend, so I stocked up on reading material !!

Actually, I am over half way in Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God by Francis Chan. And I am loving this one. Right where God has been speaking to me lately.

This book, Raising a Sensory Smart Child: The Definitive Handbook for Helping Your Child With Sensory Integration Issues by Lindsey Biel and Nancy Peske, is in response to the last posting on learning delays. Our speech therapist has suggested that this may be the next issues we need to tackle with both kids.

And this one, The Connected Child by Karyn Purvis has been on my wish list for months and I finally just broke down and bought it. She is the lady on the videos I have been recommending on attachment and trauma. You can find her new web site at this address http://empoweredtoconnect.org/blog/ I was directed to her work by a blogging 'friend' that though we have never met or talked, she has given me so much wonderful advise, you can find her here http://www.abushel-and-apeck.blogspot.com/

Now I am just praying for a little quiet time for some good reading this weekend! Wishing you all a wonderfully peaceful weekend as well.

Flag Football

Today David and Drew are in Bend at a post season race, so I had kid duty with two kids that had activities at the same time! I decided Caleb needed to make his game over Hannah's ballet practice.

The bottom picture he is carrying the ball. In the next series he will actually make his first touchdown!!! It was quite funny. He first bulldozed through two smaller boys (remember this is flag, not tackle), then he thought he heard someone yell "stop" (so he did), then he heard them yelling "GO", so he spun two circles round then ran 50 yards for a touchdown. I guess he got it done one way or the other!

We also had to have a discussion about who his parents were. Attachment challenges children need constant reminding that there are differences in the way you should treat people. That just because your coach is nice, that does not mean you can lean all over him and talk his ear off about your entire life during the game.

Caleb took the advice well and corrected his overly friendly behavior. He has actually thanked me a couple of times recently for this, as he says he forgets and likes to know he is doing the right thing.

We are making progress! He was looking to me first for approval after each play.

Putting it in Action

My prayer time this morning focused on supplication to the Lord for wisdom and strength to walk this new path of teaching with the children.

And so we embarked on this new journey this morning to give Caleb and Hannah a 'voice'.

No lectures, no frustration, only words of encouragement, eye contact and empathy.

Sounds easy--Not with a child who has learned every button that you have and tries to push them all, while looking at you with the most innocent eyes. But the choice is mine to recognize the pain in those eyes and try to help him find a voice to talk of his feelings, rather than push away those who want to love you because you fear loosing them too.

So we walk through day 1
-being 'present' with them
-empathizing
-looking at the inside
-giving voice

Attatchment 101

We have our nephew, David, staying with us for the next 2 1/2 weeks. He has settled right into being part of the family, he even mowed the lawn for me yesterday!

Last night a friend from church invited both David and Caleb to come hang out with their kids for a few hours, at the last minute they decided to take Hannah along too. That left me home for a couple of hours all alone!! What to do?

I had been planning on doing my ironing while watching a movie with Hannah, but the change of plans allowed me to watch one of the online adoption videos I have been wanting to watch.

What an unexpected blessing the night ended up being!!

We had been seeing some attachment issues that needed to be dealt with, but were really at a loss as to how to proceed. Neither of the kids have any of the real big outward signs of attachment problems, but they both really hold things in and get the deer in the headlights look(fear) often. They are also extremely afraid of failing, so they will avoid doing things so they don't fail. Then they end up in trouble for not obeying or following through and I really feel it all stems from these attachment issues.

So last night I was able to watch the first video you will find at this site http://www.irvingbible.org/index.php?id=1581 I found the link to the site from the blog 'A bushel and a peck' that you can find on the sidebar. I love how as each of us share our thoughts and insights others can learn from our research. So I now pass on this wonderful site to others who may be struggling in this area.

I have 2 pages of notes I will work on digesting this morning and have already been praying for strength and consistency to follow through with these practices to help my newest treasures work through the fear and loss that they came to our family with. Hopefully I can post more later as we work through these new waters.