A HUGE update to my previous 'March, I could take it or leave it post'. Thanks to our Behavioral Therapist for my A Ha moment today.

I dont have many 'A Ha' moments, but when I do.....

This is an extremely personnel post and quite honestly I hope I am doing the right thing by putting it out there. Since the name of my Blog is Where Do We Go From Here, Life After You Adopt Your Foster Child, it is my responsibility to share this with you.

Today we had our Behavioral Therapy appointment and I was not expecting today's conversation with the Therapist to go the way that it did. For the first time, I had a moment during the session. We have not been there in a few weeks due to scheduling conflicts and illness, and during that time many concerns had started to pop up with my kiddos. I made sure that I had my list so that I could be prepared and not forget anything while I was there.

Since we needed to have an adult conversation the kids went off to the play room and we went to her adult room. I began by telling her that Ademan has begun to bite his nails, his speech (only while at home) has deteriorated it almost borders on a mumble, and his overall demeanor is not nearly as happy as before. Then I moved onto JayJay who has been wetting her bed, she is now telling us she is terrified of monsters, and she is showing us quite a bit of defiance. Last but not least LeiLei in the past three days has also begun to wet her bed, as well as her brothers bed, and last night we discovered that she is also peeing on the floor in her room (in a specific spot). Allot of this started around the time that I got sick with Laryngitis. Unfortunately while I was voiceless it was not smooth sailing in this home. I was tired and frustrated and just not fun to be around. On top of that what little voice I had was very ugly sounding and almost 'attacking' sounding.

So back to my 'A Ha' moment. While I was talking she was flipping back through her previous notes to try and come up with something. That is when the bombshell was dropped. We started seeing the Therapist about a month after LeiLeis birthday. Initially we started going because LeiLei was non compliant close to 80% of the time. By December she had improved immensely thanks to our Therapist. Then in December we spiked back up in the form of anger and violence. January and February were pretty good and now (March) we have the issue of peeing. O.K. just follow me on this one.... Imagine placing all of those events on a graph.. Now lets start a new graph titled LeiLeis Timeline of her first year of life. The first dot would be September when she was born. The second dot would be around the Holidays when she left her Biological mom and went to live with her Aunt. The third dot would be around March when she came to live with us. Now combine the two graphs... All of her outbursts are occurring exactly when she had traumatic events in the first year of her life. Now lets try it with JayJay... Back in January is when we decided to have JayJay start seeing the Therapist as well, o.k. JayJay was born in January. Complete defiance this month, March ( I mean game changer type of defiance) well March is also the month she left our care when she was a baby (court ordered). Same phenomenon as LeiLei... Ademan, has had many women in his life that have played the role of mom. So earlier this month when I had no voice and I was not acting like my normal self he probably went into protect / shut down mode. he was probably gearing up for everything to change yet again. During the first year of life we can't express ourselves by talking. So our other senses really kick in. We will correlate smells and sights with experiences. The best example of this is when you experience a loss of a loved one. Always in the month of the anniversary of their passing you are not quite yourself. As an adult you are aware what month they passed away in so when that month comes up you start to think and anticipate the actual date. Many times you aren't even aware what is happening but as the actual date approaches you start to develop a bad mood or fall into a funk. Then you look at the calendar and immediately you realise that are hovering around the anniversary date of a loved one that you lost. Well for little ones they associates sights, smells and sounds with life experiences. For example seasons, Spring and Winter, what the weather was doing at the time of the event. What were the smells? What were the sounds?

Here is what is amazing. I don't know if you remember but not that long ago I wrote a post titled, March I could take it or leave it. I had all of these reasons for not liking March, but I now realize that they were excuses for not liking March. The real reason I have a hard time in March is because I have experienced the loss of a child in the month of March as well as the arrival of a child in the month of March. So now I am stuck in this pattern of not liking March, because I don't know how to deal with March.. Needless to say, the moment when we put these pieces together today in her office, I broke down. Even my laryngitis (which is quite often a stress induced illness) can be chalked up to all of this.

So Where Do We Go From Here? Well we now need to make the month of March our 'Just Because' month. Meaning we need to relax a bit more in the month of March, and incorporate some special activities that create love and security. Since four out of the five of us now have an issue with the month of March, we will have to be extra careful, tender, loving, compassionate and forgiving with each other. I am so grateful that we were able to put two and two together today. Hopefully we can start to heal.