When my husband and I were courting, ten (!!!) years ago, children were one of the things he was kind of vague about. Yes, he wanted them, some time in the future, probably -- but he was a little concerned about how non-abstract the children in my local life were, and how realistic my imagination was about our own potential children. He ended up proposing to me after all, but I'm sure if he could have seen a week in our household recently, he would have run for the hills!
I was kind of worried about his vagueness at the time too, but the test of time shows that God could not have possibly hand-picked out a better father for our three extremely high-needs children. I have been so amazingly proud of and grateful for him every moment of his two-week trip with us. He has been looking forward to the "adventure" of traveling to Uganda for a long time now, and it turns out that he spent most of his trip dealing with tantrums and poop and sibling rivalry and bedtimes and cuddles and choosing stories and taking baths and cleaning up paint..... and he told me he loved it.
His very first moment was a test of fatherhood. He was working his way through the airport after a 30 or 40 hour trip, and he was trying to find out where he was when two little bullets came crashing into his side, laughing and screaming and pulling at him. One was his son, and one was a little girl whom he had never seen before in his life and he didn't know would be there at all. Right away, he was down on his knees with his arms around both children, making them feel safe and secure with him. From that moment forward, he acted like just as much of a daddy -- with love and affection as well as clarity and discipline -- towards both children. That seems really obvious about adopted children not being treated differently, but the real challenge was that there was no time to build a relationship. Hibiscus entered it fully expecting a complete daddy, and so before he even had a chance to look at her or ask her about her favorite color or watch her with me, he stepped into the full relationship.
In adoption, there is something called a "honeymoon period," when the child (and parents) are both excited and idealistic about being together, and the child is eager to please the helpful new people in her life, and the parents are full of idealistic thoughts about raising children, and everyone is kind of on their best behavior. Maybe older children have been warned to be good for their new parents, or threatened that they will be brought back to the orphanage if they're not good. Maybe they're still shy. At any rate, many relationships start off with this pleasant period before everything else rises to the surface. In our case, because I was spending so much time with the girls in the orphanage, I think we entered and left our "honeymoon" before they even started living with us! In fact, the time when they moved in coincided with Hibiscus starting to test boundaries, and also feeling secure enough that she was going out of "emergency mode" and started to feel repressed feelings, and Daddy arriving as well. The poor child was an absolute walking disaster.
And Daddy walked right into it. He comforted her when she cried, and he held her down when she became so hysterical she became dangerous. At the beginning, this was several times a day. (NB: Apparently holding children down while they tantrum is a hot-button issue in adoption bonding. We did it not because of any philosophy one way or the other, but because she became so destructive she would hurt or destroy anything she could touch, the other children, or herself, and holding her seemed like our only option.) We've had to read books and watch movies and hear speakers and learn sooooo much about bonding and attachment, and I'm sure Mark didn't think his first job would be to full-body hold his brand-new daughter while she screamed and writhed and raged, for 10 or 20 or 40 minutes, until she finally wore herself down, and then they would read books and cuddle together. But that was what happened, and it did seem to mean that she began to trust that our boundaries could hold her, and to learn some techniques to self-soothe. By the end of his trip, she was only raging that badly about every other day, instead of four or five times a day.
I'm sure Mark has been wondering about what the streets look like and how safe it is and how we'll get around; even the mundane things are exciting in Africa. He did not expect to learn exactly how crowded and how few rules there are, while standing in the dark in the busiest section of Gabba Road, while we alternated holding Hibiscus up by her elbows while she screamed at the top of her lungs and tried to throw herself on the ground, or into traffic, or perhaps the casino on the other side, or anywhere but where she was. We were holding her by her elbows because she was doing that writhing-spaghetti-thing, but with 6-year-old strength and size, and there was literally no extra room on the ground to be laying that a motorcycle wouldn't drive onto at any minute. We alternated because the other one had to hold up Emerson, who also spent a while tantruming. We stood there waiting for a minibus to pick us up, but they were pretty full and also avoiding us like we had the bubonic plaugue. She eventually calmed down, and we eventually got home, but it was quite the introduction to the streets of Kampala.
But this is making it sound like Hibiscus is the only challenge! Oh no. Apparently introducing a 6-year-old who acts like a 2-year-old into our household, also turns the 4-year-old into a 2-year-old, leaving us with three 2-year-olds, only one of whom is small enough to carry around and hold like the ordinary kind. If you wondering where Buttercup is in any of these dramas, the answer is pretty much always that she was on my back. The benefit to a 2-year-old sized 2-year-old is that you can carry her everywhere, and she can't get into any trouble while wrapped tightly onto Mama. Actually, I think the older children would have preferred that arrangement as well, if Mama had three backs.
Everything Emerson ever knew about manners, common sense, or family rules, went straight out the window when Hibiscus was in the room. Every night at the beginning, Mark and I would look at each other with our pallid gray faces, and say something like "he has been under the almost complete supervision of a loving and firm mother, who has a masters in early childhood education for heavens sakes, for his ENTIRE LIFE, except for a few hours a week at an extremely inter-relational focused school with very wise teachers. She has been neglected, had to fend for herself, lived in several families and spent the last few months at an orphanage reinacting The Lord of the Flies, and is now expected to live with brand-new people who don't even speak her language. Can't we expect a LITTLE better behavior from him?! Isn't there ANY possibility he can act better than her?!"
(Okay, my friends reading this in the calm of the day, I know there isn't really any chance. I know that regression and competition is completely normal at this stage. I know this is a huge challenge for him, and he's only four years old, and he has his own difficulties anyways. I know that in my head. But once he's in bed, you just have to say it sometimes!)
She's been at an orphanage where the older kids constantly slap the younger ones to keep them in line; Emerson learned at play dates when he was one and two years old never to hit other children, and he doesn't. Well, it would be one thing if Emerson fought back after being hit, but in the first few days he initiated just as many fistfights as she did. (Luckily, they both are total wimps and generally come screaming to a parent at the first opportunity, instead of actually getting into a knock-down-drag-out fight. I'll write that down now, because I wouldn't be surprised if those are in our future!)
Table manners were a similar casualty. I've read things like expecting older adopted children to have very poor table manners, but that you'll probably want to save that battle (um, I mean "lesson") for later -- which I agree with in theory, until BOTH older children start stuffing so much food into their mouths so they can blow it at each other, or smearing yogurt all over their entire faces and then starting in on smearing each other. So we've started fighting about (um, I mean "teaching") table manners from the beginning as well.
And it was Emerson, not Hibiscus, who created the Fruit Fiasco, which actually is a precurser to several other related fiascos. Apparently, his idea of having a younger sibling, is that she can do toddler-like things and no one will be to blame for it. It's true that we don't hold Buttercup to the same standard of behavior, such as expecting her to clean up her own messes or use prediction to figure out that leaning on the chair will cause it to tip over backwards. However, Emerson has yet to learn that if he tells Buttercup to do something naughty, and she does it, he bears some amount of responsibility for the situation. Possibly ALL the responsibility. For the Fruit Fiasco, they were finishing dessert while I cleaned up and Daddy tried to get Hibiscus ready for bed. He was doing a great deal of laughing and clapping and whispering, and I turned around and found that Buttercup had thrown ALL of the fruit from her plate and ALL of the fruit from Emerson's plate ALL over the entire living room. A very large amount of screaming followed. Not mine, actually, but that's more because I'm just not a screaming type of person, and not because I'm particularly proud of my parenting that night.
And Buttercup. At least her bonding process involves ordinary things like smiling and cuddling and playing "I Had a Little Pony" knee-bouncing games instead of merely proving that a parent won't let one commit suicide in traffic. She has her own special contribution to the local chaos, however. Pretty much, whenever her older brother and sister are at the height of their emotional deluge, except in opposite directions, a parent will turn around to find that Buttercup is "helping" out by pouring water all over the table, or has turned over an entire large container of something that was clean a moment ago, or has observed the packing process well enough to have removed everything from the backpack in question. Her coup d'etat is a well-timed potty accident. Last night while I made a quick run to the grocery store and both of the older ones were mid-tantrum, Buttercup apparently surpassed herself by both pooping on the floor, and once cleaned up, promptly stubbed her toe bloody as well.
I don't mean to imply that all of Mark's trip has been taking care of one disaster or another. He has gotten to meet many people, some of whom were interesting and some decidedly the opposite, and we've gone to some interesting places. Kind of like real tourists, except kind of not. Most real tourists don't need to worry about being back at their hotels by approximately 5:34 in the evening, lest their crowd turn into a bunch of pumpkins -- that is, hysterically screaming pumpkins who punch all their neighbors. (That was a lesson we learned somewhat after the tantrum-in-the-middle-of-the-street incident.) Also, when real tourists book tickets to a cultural dance, they merely count the heads of their party and request that number of seats. They don't have to qualify that half of their party has to nap and not throw any tantrums or run away in public for the rest of the day and try and guess how many of them will succeed. And when they leave for the dance, they might simply walk out the gate. Our Daddy was trying to get out the gate fast enough while prying off not one but two screaming and clutching children. Actually, one of them was clinging to me, but I have more experience and a harder heart when it comes to leaving crying children, and I made it out the gate first.
This is then followed by very ordinary Ugandan drama like the driver and car not showing up and his phone number turning into random music, and then finding a special hire cab in the village, who says he knows where he is going but he doesn't, and meanwhile he tries to cheat you, except mid-way back his car breaks down and you are stuck in the middle of the suburbs with a bunch of children as midnight approaches for an endless time, and he decides not to argue about doubling the agreed-upon price. And if you are wondering who all the children are, they were not our drama prince and princess. They stayed with the neighbors, and the neighbor boys came with us.
And day in and day out, Daddy dealt with everything. The joy and the frustration, the tantrums and the laughter. And through it all the kids felt loved and confident and protected, and they created positive memories of what a family means.
And now Daddy is on the airplane, and I have two children who are either sobbing or drawing pictures of our whole family together, in hopes (mine) that it might be a coping mechanism. That; or fiddling with my phone, throwing bits of rice cake at their sister, demanding ice cream forty-seven times in a row, or climbing on top of my clean laundry. And where is the third child?
She's on my back.
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