I do not make decisions impulsively. Actually, I think I do the opposite. I look at situations and try to consider all options and almost compulsively research them and play them out. I do like to talk about the things that come up, even if they do seem a little far out. I like to brainstorm and sometimes I get excited about some wild ideas that I come up with. J- and I developed a rule that I had to say it 4 times before he is allowed to start dissecting it. By 4 times, we both knew I was serious.
We had been considering disrupting the adoption practically since the beginning. We were assured that things would get better and the beginnings were always rough. We took this at face value and could see that the girls had regression and an anxiety-induced wildness about them that would get better.
Although I hate to make dog comparisons, we also remembered the few weeks after we got each of our dogs. We actually made phone calls each time telling the shelters that we weren’t sure yet that it would work out. 6 months later, we couldn’t imagine the idea of giving back our dogs. We had a joke that we wouldn’t try to give back our kids like we did our dogs and we have actually wondered if we lasted longer before disruption because of the experience with our dogs.
When considering disrupting our adoption, the first thing that I did was to get on the internet and research it. There were some great sites for putting disruption in perspective, seeing that it is relatively common for older children and seeing the reasons (that really resonated with us) that people choose to disrupt. Then I found forums. The first round that I found basically had people posting that anyone who considered disruption wasn’t a person fit to be a parent. Digging deeper, I found discussion boards on RAD kids that said, anyone who says that doesn’t understand what it is like parenting these kids. Finally, I found a board of seasoned, successful foster parents who had also had to disrupt adoptions for reasons similar to ours.
We had been told by so many people including teachers, social workers, medical service providers, etc what a great job we were doing. I was pretty confident that we WERE fit to be parents and that we were great parents to T-4. I also became more aware that we just couldn’t handle T-7’s special needs. To those of you that don’t know about RAD kids, this may sound horrible, but she is unlovable. The mantra of parents of RAD kids is “fake it until you make it.” Not only did we not want to fake it, we were having some doubts that we would ever make it.
The girls’ therapist had said a couple of things to me throughout my course of contact that stuck with me. Although it was impossible for me to integrate what she said immediately, it did stick with me. First of all, she (and several other therapists) had told me that it wasn’t always this hard to do fost-adopt. She saw T-7’s ADHD-ODD-like tendencies to control their sessions. She watched T-7 run down the sidewalk away from the adults that could keep her safe. She watched her move from one toy to another in the playroom with the play patterns of a four year-old. During an advising session, she told me that she thought I should decide how long that we would keep on doing this. She saw the havoc that it was wreaking on us and the lack of progress that we were making.
It was the contrast of the leaps and bounds of developmental progress that T-4 was making that really demonstrated how little T-7 was. Behaviorally, T-4 had actually surpassed her. Academically, of course, she had not caught up, but we saw her learning and growing cognitively every day when T-7 had stopped. She had never once been able to describe something that had happened during the day and rarely demonstrated being able to retain information learned at school for the next day.
More and more, we felt that we had been set up for failure from the beginning. Our social worker had advocated making our relationship fun and bonding, but T-7 wasn’t really capable of having fun, she always sabotaged it by playing “bad kid”. What we did feel that T-7 needed in the end was more of a “tough love” approach, which we weren’t really prepared to offer and is much more difficult to have when you have started out with a love-fest. The attachment books that we read suggested starting with a bare-bones and structure-based approach for your new foster kids, since it is easier to get less strict than more strict.
