I’ve finally caught up on my writing (and J- has helped!) We have 5 lengthy entries written and will be posting them over the next week of so (rather than backdating).

The last week of April, we’d had it.  We realized that everything we were doing at that point was out of desperation. Trying to find a way that would get through to T-7, trying to see if we could find a way to make things work.  We didn’t have a long-haul perspective on this and honestly, we simply weren’t willing to deal with serious behavioral problems and attachment issues.  We never had been.  And we were really tired from having dealt with them unexpectedly and unprepared for so long.

We did a whole lot within a few weeks to implement changes specifically directed toward kids with attachment problems, as I previously discussed here. Some ventured into a brick wall (no changes to birth parent visits), some happened (we split their rooms, started working with an attachment therapists and began doing what I would call “attachment parenting”, and began the psychiatric evaluation), and it became clear that some were just going to be a very long process (attachment work and getting meds).  We were hoping for immediate change. We didn’t get it.

Actually, T-7’s behavior only seemed to get worse as T-4 got better and we got better at controlling things.  J began timing her “meltdowns” at 20 minutes.  The severity varied, but they did happen regularly, no matter what happened in between.  I am not sure if this got worse or if I started to notice it more, but she was increasingly adverse to affectionate touch, although sometimes she asked for a hug, usually as a way to control the situation in some way.  I was decreasingly able/willing to ignore her talking back and arguing and we were getting along very badly.

So the last Tuesday in April was the big therapy day. We had an appointment with the attachment therapist in the morning and PCIT in the afternoon.  Attachment therapy went reasonably well.  T-7 exhibited some of her difficult behaviors, which the therapist unsucessfully tried to deal with. When we spoke with her later, she felt that T-7 had a clear case of Reactive Attachment Disorder. She also said that she realized what she saw in T-7 was the tip of the iceberg.

I wrote a bit about the PCIT therapy session on that day here. We added Barbies to the mix of toys that we played with and got a violent reaction from her. She screamed at me and attacked me because I didn’t allow her to control the play with the dolls.  What I didn’t write about was the trip home from therapy that day and how it became the last straw. The one that broke the camel’s back.

It became clear that we were not going to get any successes out of therapy that day, so eventually the therapist, M- came in the room to calm T-7 down and put the toys away.  T-7 immediately ran down the hall and out the building ahead of us. She was out the front door when we were about halfway down the stairs.  From then on, she began a game of “running” away from us.  She took off down the sketchiest street in Berkeley (while staying in our sight) and began talking to strangers and doing just about anything to distract herself from what she was doing.

We decided that I should get in the car and begin driving off to see if she would get upset and want to get in the car. Didn’t work.   I parked around the corner out of her view and J- and M- also moved around the corner. When T-7 came around, Jeff grabbed her and took her back into the therapy office. After a while, he brought her out of the car and put her in.  She was fully capable of getting in and out of her carseat and using her seatbelt (which was definitely a turning point in our ability to control her for her safety), so she wasn’t about to stay in the car.  We needed to get home for the sitter (and T-4), she he ended up holding her hands together and walking her home, while she screamed and bit him.

While I was driving home, I saw a police car. I had actually considered calling the police earlier, so I went ahead and grabbed them. I am not a big fan of cops, as you can probably figure out, but I knew this was going to be the only way to diffuse this situation.  As soon as she saw the cops, she stopped strugging and began crying and hid behind J-.  They talked to her for a few minutes trying to calm her down and eventually told her to get into the car.  She did immediately as she cried, “But I don’t want to go to jail.”

Ever since the incident that I had in December, I have been terrified of somebody calling the police on us. We have had a few instances where both of the girls have caused problems in the car and we have had to pull over. Since T-4 could not get out of her carseat, it created a natural safety restraint. T-7, on the other hand required someone to hold her.  The last time we had taken them to visit their birth parents, we had to stop several times and T-7 had a 45 minute tantrum in a parking lot.  Needless to say, I was very self-conscious to know that my caucasian husband was restraining and walking with this 7-year old african-american girl in our mixed neighborhood. The saving grace was that when she screamed at him, she did call him “dad”.

For me, this day was a dealbreaker.  It had become clear that even the not-so-quick fixes would take a long time…years.  I knew that it was beyond me to handle these public situations that T-7 got us into and I wasn’t willing to have J- deal with them either.  I was not willing to parent this kid and it was time to say “uncle”.