Monday, September 24, 2012

In Which I Attempt to Share One Challenge of Adoptive Parenting

I'm going to try to straddle that line between "honesty" and "oversharing."  (My husband is already wincing reading that, right?  Hi, honey!)  I just bumped up against the tip of an iceberg, and it reminded me of how much we didn't know about adoption when we started all this.  Even reading up on it didn't really get through to me until I started experiencing it.  I read somewhere that adoptive families are more like traditionally formed families than they are different, and I wholeheartedly agree. But just as with culture clashes, or like the difference between second language learners and native speakers who struggle in school (to use two examples from my life) those areas of difference are important to acknowledge and address.  So I'm going to offer up one difference for you to ponder: we have to make guesses about our children's past.

We quickly realized that Inesa gets carsick a lot.  Pretty much any time she's in a car, she gets a headache.  After about half an hour, she also gets nauseous.  We resort to medication for longer trips, because otherwise she throws up. 

When she started school, she wasn't on an afternoon bus, because she's in ESL after kindergarten gets out, and there's a separate bus for that, and it took them awhile to add her stop to the list.  She found this highly frustrating.  I don't know if all the cool kids were in the bus line or what, but more than once she got downright snitty with us when we came to pick her up, because she wanted to be on the bus, dammit.  When they did finally add her two weeks ago, she was last on the route.  Since all the kids in the program take that one bus, it must go all over.  Even though we live literally 1.1 mile from the school, she was going to be on the bus 45 minutes.  We were worried, but she insisted it was fine--the bus doesn't make her sick, just cars, she said.  The first few days we asked how she felt, and she said she felt just great.  So we stopped asking.

Today, however, the driver called out at her stop, "She says she has a headache and her tummy hurts."  Sure enough, she was wan and miserable when she got off, and wanted some water and some down time when she got home.  She also asked us to start picking her up again.   Somehow I wasn't surprised.  Yesterday she got a headache in the car.  The car was not moving at the time.  The car had not been moving.  We were sitting in the car in a parking lot on a pleasant day.  This was not a motion sickness event.

Here's the thing:  I don't know if she gets carsick for all the reasons any kid gets carsick, or if she gets carsick because her body is remembering something bad about cars.  I don't even know what "something bad" might be.  It could be completely innocuous.  Or it could be the result of trauma.  I DO NOT KNOW.  This is where parenting adopted kids, especially older adopted kids, really is different.  I will never know their full past.  If something awful happened to her in a car, or if she witnessed something awful while in a car, or if she associates car rides with being removed from her home, we may eventually find out.  Or we may not.  Maybe she really just gets carsick.  But what else is going on that is influenced by pieces of her past that we are unaware of? 



2 comments:

  1. Aaron thought maybe it was because she hadn't been rocked as a baby. Perhaps a rocking chair at home would help her body get used to motion? Children hold many mysteries in general, but all hold the images of our dear Lord each time we feel blessed.

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    1. Interesting thought, you guys. We will try it. Anything that promotes cuddling and helps them re-create experiences they may have missed as babies is good for them, so even if it doesn't help the motion sickness, it will be a worthwhile thing to do!

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