Starting Our Second Year

I have started this post three times now!  Once towards the end of the summer, once right after school started, and once now.  Now we are approaching a year and a half with Daniel rather than just starting our second year.  And this second year has gone in a totally different direction than what I predicted when I first started this post.  It almost seems pointless to finish it...but I want to remember how the summer felt, and this will remind me.

So here is where we were at the end of the summer:

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Life has been quite the ride lately.  I started out our second year with Daniel rejoicing in how much progress we've made.  There was the visit to the dentist where he had to wait for nearly an hour, but didn't do anything more disruptive that unplugging and replugging the waiting room lamp several times.  He even refrained from playing with the elevator chair when I asked him!  Then there was the comment from an adult he is close to in China that he is like a whole different person this year compared to last year.  Apparently, some of my efforts at teaching him to speak positively and respectfully to others have been successful!  And he did so much better with being out of routine on our long summer trip than we had feared.  We had some "moments," of course, but on the whole he was cheerful and adaptable, and had a good time.  Even the unstructured time of summer has been going reasonably well, with the kids less rowdy and more capable of (occasionally) entertaining themselves or each other.

However, this summer was intense.  I don't think it was as stressful as the first summer we were together.  Daniel has calmed way down, and only rarely gets into the "lets have a blast being wild and crazy!" moods that left me feeling last summer like I was just hanging on by my teeth and toenails.  And he has learned a few more things he can do to entertain himself, so I had a little more breathing room.  So the norm this summer was relatively calm, but the outlying incidents!  Well, let's just say that this summer featured both the lowest low points and the highest high points of our relationship thus far.  And I am ready to get off the roller coaster and enjoy a little monotony!

I won't invade Daniel's privacy by sharing the low points, but I have wondered about the timing.  It seems like the trigger is usually if I do something that makes him feel rejected.  I don't know if our relationship has become important to him to the point that the stakes are higher than they were before, or if he has now made enough of an adjustment to his new life that he is ready to deal with deeper-level challenges.  Or maybe the summer was just too stressful, what with unstructured time to fill and my demands on him to study with me for an hour a day.  But whatever is going on, a trip to "that place" is hard on everyone involved.  Hard, because when Daniel is in that mode he can't be reasoned with, can't be touched, but often won't let me disengage.  Hard, because he only ever goes there when I'm alone with both kids, so I also have to worry about keeping Esther out of the interaction without scaring her or making her feel responsible.  (She has a very unhelpful tendency to inflame the situation by adding her two cents about what Daniel should or shouldn't be doing.)  Most of all, hard because I know "that place" owes its existence to hurts that I don't want my child to live with, and that I can't fix.  Thankfully, he doesn't go to "that place" often and doesn't stay there very long (although it feels very long indeed).  We (me and our social worker, me and Tim, and me and Daniel) have talked about counseling, and all feel that it will be a very good thing for him once his English is enough to communicate.  He is very articulate and insightful, and willing to do the hard work of healing.  But that still leaves us at a loss as to what to do right now.  We've considered medication for anxiety (and are still considering it), but whether it was catharsis from the last incident, the start of school, or just a natural cycle, Daniel seems to be in a better place right now.

Meanwhile, we are still rejoicing in this summer's high points.  We got to travel for three weeks to the west coast and see both of our extended families.  Both kids did great on the trip, and Daniel told me afterwards, "Now I know who everyone in my family is."  We planted tomato and pepper seeds, watched them grow into plants, and enjoyed the fruits of our labor.  One day after not having been in the garden for a few days, Daniel went out and saw ripe tomatoes on our plants for the first time.  I got the biggest kick out of him jumping up and down and yelling, "Mommy, come quickly!  Come look!"  :-)  Daniel was able to use his English well enough to talk to friends on the phone, and he made great strides in learning to read.  He is starting to believe that he could be good at learning.  Daniel added his birthday money to money that he has been saving in the bank for months, and bought himself an iPod touch.  And occasionally I will find him and Esther curled up on the couch together looking at something on the iPod.  :-)  We figured out a way for everyone to enjoy the Olympics together: Tim and I and Esther sat in the living room and watched the sports, while Daniel (who is not much for TV) sat on the couch and had me rub his feet.

One special highlight for me has been Daniel's growing relationship with God.  We had a conversation mid-summer where Daniel explored all the different reasons he had for not wanting to follow God.  He came out with a lot of ideas, but basically it boiled down to him not wanting anyone to tell him what to do.  I left the conversation feeling a little down, although I firmly believe that thinking through all your alternatives is a necessary part of the process of owning one's own faith.  But then, the funniest thing happened.  Daniel started to become more enthusiastic about all things God-related.  And one day, a few days after the most memorable of our "low points," we were having testimonies in church.  Daniel asked why people were standing up and talking, and I explained that they were telling us how God had been good to them.  Daniel said, "I want to say something too!"  So I helped him get the pastor's attention (having no idea what he had in mind to say!), and Daniel told the whole congregation (in English): "When I tired, angry, Jesus help me.  Jesus tell me peace in heart.  Everybody peace."  Not only was it a very appropriately communicated testimony, but I think it was good for our congregation to hear someone testifying about God working on their character, not just healing an illness or removing a difficult external circumstance.  On another Sunday recently, Daniel decided to sit by the pastor in the very front pew.  He knew and especially loves one of the songs that morning (I think it was You Are My All In All), so he was singing his heart out.  Later in the service our pastor got a little choked up about a story he was telling, and Daniel grabbed a tissue out of the box in the front pew and darted up to give it to him.  Later the pastor pulled me aside to tell me how much Daniel ministers to him.  And it's true, Daniel has been a blessing to a lot of people.


Adopting (or being adopted) is, I think, a lot like culture shock.  The "classic" progression of adjustment includes the honeymoon phase (everything is new and wonderful!), the disillusionment phase (everything is weird and dumb and bad and uncomfortable and you just want to get back to the place that feels right to you), and the realism phase (like any other place/person, this one has its good and bad points; you know how to handle the bad and you can enjoy the good without reservations).  But real life rarely follows a classic progression, so the first year with a new child can be suspenseful.  ("They" say that an adoption honeymoon typically lasts several months, though some kids cut right to the disillusionment phase and others, especially older ones, can honeymoon for a year.)  I don't know about other adoptive families, but I periodically found myself wondering:  Is this just a honeymoon?  Are things going to get worse, and if so, how soon and how bad and for how long?  Does XYZ incident mean that the honeymoon is about to end?  At the same time, I have been going back and forth between countries for most of my life, and while I have had culture shock on a couple of occasions, I've also had plenty of transitions that went smoothly, with bits of extra stress (and extra excitement) spread out over a long period of time rather than all bunched together.  And to me, it looked like Daniel was transitioning much like that: noticing things that bugged him, that he missed, or that he was no longer competent at, and processing them as they came up rather than stuffing them all in until the wheels fell off the bus.

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So, as we got several months into our second year, I was feeling pretty sure that we weren't going to have a wheels-falling-off-the-bus experience.  We had worked through a lot of challenging behaviors and were steadily having "Wow, we could never have done that last year!" moments.  But I was wondering if the second year wasn't going to be harder emotionally than the first, finding us periodically falling into a morass of old hurts and having to work our way out.  In the event, those fearful expectations didn't materialize.  (Not that I fear dealing with old hurts, it's work that needs to be done sometime...but the way they were surfacing this summer was a little scary, for us and I think for Daniel as well.)  Instead, we are having a year of realizing how far we've come together.  And we are so very grateful we didn't miss out on this journey!