In early April, T-7 was out of control. She was having tantrums multiple times a day, arguing about everything, physically attacking Jeff regularly and even acting up with her teacher. We thought it was because of her upcoming birthday. After her birthday things got a little better, but not much.

The ramifications of her difficult behavior was starting to wear on us.  Jeff was doing all of T-7’s caretaking and I was doing most of T-4’s. We weren’t really able to take T-7 anywhere, because she would usually decide to stop minding us at some point and we would have to resort to carrying her to the car to leave.  We basically felt that we could not operate as a family, except for morning and evening routines and we could not successfully leave 1 parent with 2 kids.  Neither of us had been able to work at a level that is sustainable for our family.  The really scary part is that we saw no end in sight.

So, we were on the brink of a number of changes and we decided to let these new services settle in and see how things went.  T-4 had moved to a wonderful preschool that had wonderful effects on her behavior and development.  We had just switched our therapists to a program called A Home Within.   We also had a behaviorist coming into the home and we implemented a reward chart.  We were strategizing to get more results from our PCIT sessions.  All of our social workers had turned over and we hoped that the birth parent visits would change.  We planned to create a very stable environment for 3 months to see whether we could get our family to a sustainable place.

Our previous social workers advice to “Just wait, everything will get better,” was no longer believable. She had encouraged us to not consider a direction of medications and diagnosis. They just need love, stability and time.  She may have been right in the fact that in the first couple of months, it is too soon to tell.  But we knew that she could not say with certainty that things would get better.  We had heard too many nightmare stories of when they don’t. Not just in the media, but from people that we actually know.

We watched in awe as T-4’s behavioral  maturity began to surpass T-7’s. She was learning, growing and changing, while T-7 had been completely stagnant for 6 months. We noticed that T-7 could not walk by our side, hold hands, look in our eyes or play mutually satisfying games.  She squirmed away from receiving any touch, unless she was directing it.  She could not calm herself down or reflect on her own behaviors and relationships.  She did not learn, either. She was not able to recount anything that had happened to her during the day. It was as if experience and knowledge was something to have in a moment, but not to integrate. All of these things were confirming something that we had already suspected, that T-7 had attachment issues.

In the middle of April, we spoke with our friend B-, who has been our clearest advisor through this whole process.  She hooked us up with new resources that we needed to evaluate the situation. We had heard many different milestones referred to as far as when it started “getting better”.  Some people have said 5 months, some have said 1 year.  B-, who has two boys that had attachment issues said that for them it was three years. She suggested that we forget play therapy and go directly to an attachment therapist, forget any other appointment…this is the most important thing.  She said, definitely get meds for T-7 and start taking Excedrine PM myself.  She said that nobody really can understand what it is like to parent an attachment-challenged kid, that there were no rules other than not harming your child and that social workers and other parents would not understand.

So, we took this advice. We had a couple of appointments with a well-known attachment therapist, who felt that she was a clear case of Reactive Attachment Disorder (I am still not completely convinced of this, but I do think she has attachment “issues”). We began T-7’s psychiatric evaluation.  And night-time sleep aids were added to my managerie of bedtime companions (which has really helped).  I read my second Daniel Hughes book.  This all served to move us in a particular direction, that we had been looking for, quite frantically, for some time.  To some degree, these steps demoralized us. The book described to us how badly everything had been stacked against us from the beginning, following the advice of well-intentioned social workers and how misunderstood kids and parents with kids with RAD are.  The medication process was long and honestly, not that promising.  It made us realize how we have been hoping for quick fixes and that T-7 has years of healing still had ahead of her.

We began really reflecting on what we had wanted (and not wanted) and the ways that we had been misinformed about what we were getting into.   We started to think about what we were actually capable of.   We looked at our last 6 months and how hard we have worked and realized that we could not do that for another 6.  We remembered reading a book about RAD in the beginning of our process and clearly ruling that out in our own minds as something that we could handle.  So by the end of April were teetering on the edge of giving up.