Homeschooling

Home schooling (really we're doing supervised independent study if you want to get technical) is going well.

I like a few things about it. Number one, T gets to sleep more, and so do we. Teens need their sleep! If T can sleep til 9 and have an afternoon nap, he's a lot mellower. He benefits from a lot of "down time."

Also, schooling him from home is like having a lot of homework, in a good way. The homework is directly linked to his credits - it's not seen as "extra" on top of other expectations, like showing up and behaving in class. The learning is the thing. He has a nice retired teacher who meets with him once a week, reviews his assignments, and gives him new assignments. There are fewer distractions and clearer expectations.

Which brings me to my next point: homeschooling strikes me as a healing opportunity, because it gets him a lot more one-on-one time with adults. His teacher sits with him for an hour at a time and focuses only on him. We sit with him for part of the day and help him with his work. He likes to sit very close to us, and he organizes our schedule, letting us know who is helping with what each day. It's a chance for a lot of proximity, and eye contact, and engagement, and yet another way to show him that he's important.

Neglect is a bigger factor in his background than I realized, and only as we've settled in to a deep long-term attachment have I been able to see that. He has many of the hallmarks of a neglected kid to this day, which is especially evident to me now because his more distracting, dramatic trauma-related behavior has settled down. He behaves like a parent sometimes, he has trouble in school, he has bursts of temper that he can't control, and he's extremely controlling about his food. Anything that surrounds him with love and attention helps him relax and grow. In that context, it makes sense that sitting close to us and getting daily attention from us and from his teacher are beneficial. In place of traditional school, with its emphasis on discipline, it feels like we've arrived, for the moment, at a situation where his needs rather than his behavior are the focus.

Sometimes he's bored and lonely for his peers - he's taking a class at the local junior college one night a week, as much for the social stimulation as for the credits. But I'll take a little boredom over the chaos of trying to navigate him through the school system anyday. Plus, I think having him out of school forces him to try harder to make actual plans with his friends, rather than just hooking up after school. For a kid struggling with impulse control, that's a good thing.

Complex

We've spent a lot of time lately thinking about why T seems to alienate some people completely, and totally endear others. I have never known anyone with quite this effect on people. Older people, babies and small animals flock to him like he's Saint Fancis of Assisi, and at the same time, police, school administrators and hallway bullies fixate on him like he's got a bull's eye on his back. In any setting, we could take a poll, and half the respondents will tell us he is smart/gentle/thoughtful/helpful/mature, and the other half will tell us he is a out-of-control/angry/controlling/difficult. The people who love him RAVE about him - from teachers to school nurses, administrators and friends of the family. The people who don't "get" him tend to come quite unglued describing his misbehavior - they almost seem fixated by how frustrated he has made them. We've been thinking about why he has this extreme effect on people, because all our lives took a bizarre turn this summer after he really alienated the director of the program where he was getting addiction treatment.

First of all, I think strangers struggle to make sense of him, because he is highly intelligent and mature on some levels, and almost infant-like on others. At home, he is often like a young child - he likes to be close to us and spend more time with us than most 17 year-olds spend with their parents. Abandonment and neglect as a young child left him with an unfulfilled need that we're quite happy to fulfill. But when he is separated from us, he often becomes anxious and unruly. What would be perceived as quite normal in a young child is hard for people to understand in an older kid of his size. So he gets misinterpreted a lot.

Also, there is an element of racism at play. As a young Black man, his tantrums and irritability are readily interpreted as aggression or hostility in some settings. What might be seen as brattiness in another child gets read as threatening behavior because of stereotyping to which he is vulnerable because of his physical size and the color of his skin. In a few settings, including the treatment house, he's been accused of being "threatening" despite having never once laid hands on another person or purposely caused anyone harm.This can be a real challenge when you have a kid with complex mental health needs that you're trying to address. Because people don't perceive him as vulnerable, it can be hard to get him the services he deserves -- and the help for which he is asking. He is tall (six-foot-three), and dark skinned with enormous Bambi eyes, a sweet baby face, and tremendous gentleness. But he is often held to a different standard in terms of how vulnerable he's allowed to be, because of the stereotype-infused lens through which he is sometimes perceived.

I also think his instincts are cranked up much higher than is probably healthy, because of his abuse history, and for this reason he is exquisitely sensitive and easily triggered. Someone's tone of voice, their smell, a facial expression, a gesture can all set him off. His perception is exaggerated or even distorted because he is an elevated state of vigilance pretty much all the time. This is improving, gradually, the longer he lives in safety. I have tried explaining this vigilance to officials involved in his schooling or his care before, with mixed success. About half the time, I get a variation on "Well, he's a big guy, nobody is going to hurt him." See paragraph three, above. It doesn't matter if he is actually in physical danger in the present moment - he was hurt, badly, as a young child, and some part of his brain still reacts to everyday situations from that position of pure instinctive self-preservation.

Finally, I think he is smart and independent, and some people love that and some people aren't comfortable with someone so self-assured. Particularly in combination with his sensitivity and vulnerability, his confidence and intelligence are confusing. He sends conflicting signals all at once. He's extremely funny. He talks back...and he's often right. He is articulate when he wants to be - sometimes unusually so. He can be profound, and he can also be painfully dismissive of that which he perceives to be beneath him. All that makes for a complex personality. I happen to like complex personalities. But not everyone responds in the same way.

We've decided to home school him. Despite his difficulties, he's managed to be ahead on his school credits, eligible for early graduation. One of us can work from home, and there's a home schooling option in our district that provides structure and weekly check-ins with a teacher at a local campus. He'll take an elective at a local junior college where he can get a taste of life post-high school. He can sleep a little later in the morning. He'll get a little more time with us. He can still build social relationships with peers but he can do so outside the classroom, on his own time in less provocative circumstances. Eventually, he needs to learn not to push buttons, to take direction and to keep himself in check. But it takes time to move beyond the chronically stressed limbic state where he got stuck. Meanwhile, I like the idea of keeping him out of traditional school, because of the extreme reactions he tends to provoke in other people, particularly officials.

Crazy Crap

Well, that was crazy crap. We finally hit an experience associated with our adoption that I really just couldn't even talk about. I went a week in pure crisis management mode, with no commentary to share with anyone about what we were going through. The short version is this:

- T had a court date in front of the judge who has him on informal supervision for a prior petty theft charge.

- In the weeks leading up to that hearing, the place where he is in residential treatment got frustrated with his behavior and wrote a report to the judge about how he'd been causing problems - fighting with other kids and losing his temper.

- They repeatedly cited his size as a problem, stating that he "intimidates other kids" because he is so big. He's tall and skinny, and although he can be a real pain in the ass, he has no history of physical bullying or violence. It was hard not to feel that the repeated comments about his size reflected an element of racism.

- In any event, the judge, upon reading this inflammatory report, got mad and put T in juvenile hall for seven days, although he's not on probation and wasn't being charged with or convicted of a crime, just to teach him a lesson.

- While T was in juvenile hall and unbeknownst to us, the treatment house phoned in a "7 day notice" to T's social worker, and thus washed their hands of him.

- The judge's order only permitted T to be released to the treatment center, so when they phoned in the 7 day notice and refused to go get him, he was stuck in juvenile hall with no way out.

- Meanwhile, a child is not allowed to be under the jurisdiction of both the juvenile probation court and DCFS/dependency court, so by placing T in juvenile hall, the judge inadvertently triggered a legal administrative process about jurisdiction. That meant that DCFS felt they weren't responsible for picking him up or resolving his situation either.

- We tried appealing to DCFS for help, and instead found out that they had now decided that, based on T's behavior, he shouldn't remain in our home, at least not under their jurisdiction. As if we were expected to "fix" him, and having failed, they would just move him on to a group home - or, their true desire, hand him over to the probation department to take over where they left off.

- All this meant that we couldn't get T out of juvenile hall, even as his release date came and went. As pre-adoptive parents, we still have very little in the way of legal status, so although he's been with us for two-and-a-half years and we are the only "real parents" he's ever had, according to him, we were not able to get him released. He sat there on his release date with nobody to pick him up, unable to make a phone call, frantic that he didn't know what was going on.

Happily, after we spent two days banging on doors at the courthouse, calling attorneys, gathering letters and sitting around waiting on judges, we finally got a hearing in front of the juvenile court judge to get him to revise the order. It turns out that the judge is the foster parent of an older child himself. He walked into the courtroom this morning, smiled at me, said "I'm sorry about this mess", called T in, gave him a speech about getting his act together, put him on electronic surveillance/house arrest, and sent him home with us. He announced that "Over the objections of all present, I am placing this child back with these people, who are his de facto parents, and who have shown up at every court hearing to speak on his behalf and proven over and over their commitment to him." At that, T chimed in himself: "It's true they could have given up on adopting me but they never did and that's why I have to get myself together!"

What. A. Mess.

We're pissed at the treatment house for abandoning T without involving us - after all, we've been doing three hours of family therapy at their facility every week with him, and they have involved us as his parents in every step of his treatment right up until they decided to leave him stuck at juvenile hall without telling us. Even the judge was mad about that.

We're pissed at DCFS for trying to take advantage of the administrative mess regarding jurisdiction to wash their hands of T - and for being generally negligent, and for continuing to fail to move his adoption forward, so that we can have legal status and we won't be subject to this constant bureaucratic chaos.

We're unhappy with the judge for putting a kid who isn't even on probation or charged with a crime in juvenile hall for seven days just to frighten him and make a point about his behavior. For all sorts of reasons (including T's various diagnoses, his abuse history, and the realities of juvenile detention in a big, rough city), I don't feel comfortable with that sort of extreme discipline. However, I will say, of all the officials who stuck their hands in this pie and messed it up, he is the one I have the most respect for. I don't agree with his techniques, but I do admire him for admitting the error when it became clear that something had gone wrong, cleaning it up, and recognizing that, with or without legal status, we're T's parents. He was gracious to us, and tough but very clear with T. I wish more people involved in deciding the lives of kids in foster care had firsthand experience as foster parents themselves. It makes a huge difference.

And of course, we are also frustrated with T for misbehaving at the treatment center, failing to complete the agreement we had about how long he'd stay, and so aggravating the staff there that we had no choice but to bring him home because they flat out abandoned him. Now we have to enroll him in yet another school, hasten him to outpatient treatment, and get back on the horse in terms of daily parenting on somewhat unexpected terms.

However, he's so worth it. When we finally got him out of juvenile hall today, he presented us with a long letter covered with hearts and smiley faces about how frustrated he is about "all my problems and how I put them on other people" and how he wants to keep trying, because he knows "we are a family and there's nothing I can't face down now." It wasn't a desperate letter - it was fairly realistic, very loving, and appropriately optimistic. Somehow, he has come out of this experience without any bitterness or cynicism, which is more than I can say for myself. He has a characteristic calm sense of endurance, coupled with a philosophical ability to scrutinize himself and recognize his problems and his promise. Now if only he could learn to govern his behavior!

Also of note: Tim and I made it through this insane and unexpected drama with our relationship intact. We worked hard every day to get T back - but we also slept at night, we went out for dinner, we got a little exercise, and we (kind of) did our jobs. We maintained our sanity. We stopped socializing, as we didn't feel like explaining what was going on, and we just conserved and focused our energy without getting all nuts. In my first year or so as an advocate parent, I had trouble accepting the turbulence and drama and I let it take a toll. I'm not a good parent and I'm not a good partner when I'm that stressed. We're battle-scarred but wiser and calmer now.

I will also admit that we are rather enjoying T's house arrest, at least for now. I think it might be the secret dream of every parent of a teenager. I jest, and don't advocate using the juvenile justice system for discipline - as we learned this week, that can be like lighting a candle with a blowtorch. But T is relaxed and engaging and fun to talk with at home, and now he has no choice but to be here. We missed him while he was away, and it's nice to know EXACTLY where he is for now. Which, at the moment, is in his own bed, in his own room, right next to ours, after a week when we feared we may have lost him.

Happy

Last weekend, we had two back-to-back visits with T at the treatment house; a six-hour outing on Saturday, and our usual Sunday night family-dinner-plus-family-therapy.

He said something to me in the course of our time together that sticks with me. He mentioned that he was having some conflict with one of the other kids in the program and had gotten into some trouble for it. I started to ask for details and suggest corrections (read: nag). He stopped me and said,

"Listen, these things are about my behavior. I know I need to work on my anger. But it's going to take awhile. I can't do it all at once. But I've made a big change inside, you know? I feel different now that I'm not using drugs anymore. The rest will come."

I know what he meant. I said, "You seem happy," and he said, "I am."

Teenagers are Children Too

Last week, during our family visit at the treatment house, I was being a nag. T lost his patience, stormed away from the table where we were having dinner and refused to come back for group family therapy (which we do every Sunday). We shrugged our shoulders and, after he made it clear he would not return, left.

During the course of the week, we got a reasonable apology letter explaining that "I get a lot of feedback here every day and sometimes I just don't want to hear anymore. I'm working on myself, and I'm making change, but more pressure from you doesn't help." He added "What I did was wrong," and also "You are the best parents I could have!" He excels at stream-of-consciousness.

We returned to family group this week, and T made me an origami paper heart while we were talking. He also made a lengthy speech for all present about how he is there voluntarily, and about how he came there because he wanted to stop hurting us. He went on to explain that he used to think that it was his choice if he wanted to do things that caused him harm, but eventually saw that hurting himself was hurting us, and realized he didn't want to cause pain to those who love him.

He also went on to share an epiphany that I found most striking. It went something like this:

I like to help other people, but I could never help myself. I wanted to focus on others, because to focus on helping myself would mean thinking about my history. I didn't want to look at my history. I've been through pretty much everything you can go through. I am starting to realize that I can help myself by looking at what I've been through, and that helps me listen better to other people too.

I am often astonished when the kids join us for the join parent/teen session at how much they illuminate the room with their insight and tenderness. Most are on parole, and all are "at risk", or however you want to put it. Many are not there voluntarily. And yet they are all working so hard to communicate with their moms and dads, and they are full of self-reflection and uncertainty and perception. It makes me think that perhaps teen addiction and teen treatment is quite unique; their motivation to repair a rift with a parent, and their awareness about needing parenting in the first place is surprising and moving. Their flexibility is also striking - they try out new ideas, and absorb optimism when it is offered to them. They are all still children, in many ways, some perhaps all the more because they have missed out on certain healthy experiences of adolescent independence by falling into substance abuse and dependency.

Tonight, we mixed it up and parents spent some time talking with a kid other than their own. The boy I was paired with told me how much he wants his dad to take him to the movies. He said that his dad works so hard that he only has time to talk to him when he does something wrong. He wasn't accusatory - he offered this in a shy, gentle way. What struck me was how earnestly he longed for his dad to just ask him to the movies.

I think sometimes as parents of a teenager, it's easy to assume that they'd rather die than spend time with you in public. But that's not true, according to these kids. They seem to just want a break from official parenting, long enough to see that you really really like them. As one of them said tonight, "When we were using, we stayed out all night and all we thought about was what we wanted. Now we're all in here, all we want to do is get that next visit with our parents. All week, I just think about when I'm going to see my mom."

My Kid is not a Hot Potato

I'm bugged. Tonight we went for "family therapy" at the treatment house, only to be diverted into a group meeting with his treatment team, and faced with the possibility that he'll be expelled from the program.

It felt like an ambush,because this is a treatment house for drug addicted teenagers with "dual diagnosis"--in other words, co-occurring mental health issues. And yet, the subject of the meeting was T's behavior--he got into several "verbal altercations" and "punched a wall." We reminded them that he has a history of severe trauma, and a PTSD diagnosis, and that it wasn't too surprising that getting sober is producing some misbehavior. Forgive me for siding with my kid, but he's 60 days sober after several years of alleviating his traumatic memories with drugs, so if he loses his cool and punches a wall and calls someone a name, that is not a five alarm fire in my book.

Moreover, I get very tired of being preached at by "specialists" who don't take the time to learn his history, offer him some superficial palliative care, and then get angry with T when he doesn't change as fast as they'd like, and want me to side with them and tell him to get his act together. Their blame and anger were palpable. I spent the first fifteen minutes of the meeting counseling them and helping them calm down and recover their compassion for T. That annoys me. I understand exactly how challenging he can be. But if you think about his history, it is not that hard to stay objective and rational about why he is having difficulty, and get creative about treating him, without blame.

I am particularly un-cool with "specialists" who threaten him, by telling him that he'll be kicked out of their program, and may have to "go somewhere much worse." I probably don't have to tell the type of person inclined to read this blog why that is a bad idea for a kid with a long history of abandonment and multiple foster placements. Suffice it to say that ultimatums and threats generally don't work for anyone.

My kid is not a hot potato. He is not an interesting project to inform your graduate school paper until you begin to find his behavior challenging or unsettling and give him back to the system. He does not deserve to hear that the residential treatment program he chose for himself has now decided that he's too much to handle because he has trouble getting along with the other kids. We cannot continue to kick him on down the road and suggest that he find yet another program or specialist because his unique needs are just too much for his current provider.

If it were within T's capability to behave in a more civilized, conciliatory way right now, he absolutely would. Calling on one of my fave authors, Gregory Keck, I told them that I firmly believe that T is doing the very best that he can. At first they looked at me like I'm a fool. I repeated it. Then they looked at me like I am outrageous. They expected that we would be frightened and cowed by what they had to share, and they wanted to pass him back to us. We said no. We said, he's here voluntarily, to get help, and we want to work with you to get him that help. His behavior may not be good enough to meet your requirements, and in that case, let's make a transition plan to meet his needs. But let's not continue to talk at him and expect him to gain control of his behavior through mere pressure alone.

I also channeled one of my blogger pals, the Accidental Advocate, and, with her advice in mind, I proceeded to walk them through T's history and the THOUSAND AND ONE good reasons why a sober T might be facing some demons--and the thousand and one reasons why they are obligated to treat him. Thanks to T, I have finally grown into an adult who does not care if the other adults in the room think I'm a bitch--to assertive, too invested, too righteous. I am there to do a job, I am super-powered by love and attunement to his needs, and I will use every strategy I can think of to meet those needs.

By the time T came into the room, the lot of us were able to put on a united front. We let him know that he is frightening the other kids. We talked about the fact that it can be hard or impossible to gain control of your behavior if you are putting a lot of energy into avoiding difficult memories of your past. We told him that now is his chance to do the hard work to uncover some of the unconscious feelings that drive his behavior.

It pains me greatly to confront him in this way, particularly when I am surrounded and forced to ally myself with adults in whom I do not have complete confidence. Of course, he withdrew over the course of this conversation, and it went on much too long. The adults couldn't seem to stop talking at him. But he did listen and he agreed. He did not object to the suggestion that his current behavior is linked to a long-suppressed rage. His defiance melted away. He refused to speak to me afterwards, and asked to go to his room to be alone for awhile. Although it's painful to see him withdraw in this way, it also signals that we've hit upon the truth. I believe that it's appropriate that he should want to recover after such a conversation. Frankly, I think it's a little bit insane for a whole posse of adult specialists whom he has no reason to trust to think that a 17 year-old boy is going to hang out and talk about his feelings for hours on end.

Nevertheless, there are good people (one in particular) on his treatment team, and he has the possibility to get a kind of coaching there than we cannot provide at home. I told him I love him, I'm proud of him, I'll always be his parent. I hope by Saturday, he forgives me, because we have permission for his first outting, and I want to take him to the mall.

Thank you, fellow trauma moms, for understanding. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do, and if that makes you a bitch, then you're a bitchin' advocate mom doing her imperfect best in an imperfect world.

ADD and Attunement

After one of the readers of this blog recommended Gabor Mate’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, which had a huge influence on me, I picked up his other book, Scattered. It describes the dynamics of early infant development and Attention Deficit Disorder. As I noted before, I resisted an ADD diagnosis for T for a long time, because it seemed to be the diagnosis du jour and I have a prejudice against medicating kids. While I still hold the belief that psychiatric medication should only be part of a treatment plan, I see now that I was wrong about ADD. Properly explained, it strikes me as a useful lens for helping kids like T and their adoptive parents get creative about addressing and sometimes repairing gaps in their emotional growth.

Besides the science, Mate is a lovely writer. I enjoy passages like this one, about early infancy:

Attunement is necessary for the normal development of the brain pathways and neurochemical apparatus of attention and emotional self-regulation. It is a finely calibrated process requiring that the parent remain herself in a relatively nonstressed, non-anxious, nondepressed state of mind. Its clearest expression is the rapturous mutual gaze infant and mother direct at each other, locked in a private and special emotional realm, from which, at the moment, the rest of the world is as completely excluded as from the womb.

Mate draws a connection between the disruption of the mother/infant bond and Attention Deficit Disorder, which he says might just as well be called Attunement Deficit Disorder. In other words, if the dynamic of attunement goes awry, the prefrontal cortex may not develop normally, resulting in later problems with impulse control and emotional regulation.

When we were taking our foster/adoptive parent training courses, I remember that the teacher said that we must become “attachment experts.” She meant that we needed to find ways to help them create the tight bond with us that is at the root of the parent/child relationship. I hadn’t thought about attunement, and learned only by trial and error the practice of trying to remain calm and receptive in my mind so that T is able to sense that I am available to him. It also took me some time to learn that such bonding is mostly nonverbal, heavily dependent on eye contact and physical proximity. I watched Tim and T play checkers last weekend, and it was obvious that it had a more direct affect on T than any conversation could have.

Mate also writes about the fact that the dance of attunement and attachment is up to the infant, not the parent. The infant engages and, when he becomes overstimulated, withdraws. The parent is the one who needs to match the baby’s rhythm so that he learns that she is able to perceive and respond to his state of mind, and, thus, that he is understood. I found that useful, and true of T in my experience. In the beginning, we learned quickly that we needed to be available, but not assertive, and let him come to us and go away again according to his own needs and tolerance for intimacy.

It has proven to be absolutely true that it’s only when we are nonstressed, relaxed and open-minded that T is able to calm himself. In fact, living with a kid like him can be revelatory, because he senses any stress or unhappiness that we might be trying to bury sometimes before we are even aware of it. He is like the canary in the emotional coal mine. If he tells me I need to calm down, or that I’m getting angry, he’s always right, intuiting a change in my rhythm that I haven’t even noticed yet.

When one of us is displeased with his behavior and shows it, he often becomes very agitated. Last Sunday, during our family visit at the residential treatment house, he and I had a small disagreement and I made an expression of displeasure, which sent him into a tailspin and he spent the next half hour anxiously checking my face and trying to re-regulate. That kind of separation anxiety might seem tragic, but mostly it just strikes me as a sign of where he's at in his emotional development. His anxiety strikes me as a lasting indication of what he learned about life’s harsher realities, and a sign of the vitality of his surviving instinct to connect.

It’s tiring sometimes to interact with such intensity, in somewhat the same way that the constant needs of a young child can be exhausting. It can also lead to somewhat awkward situations in public; some people are taken aback by such a tall child interacting with his obviously non-biological mother with infant intensity. We don't really care though. We are busy bonding and filling that deficit of attunement.