Kids Don’t “Bounce Back”

Kids are not resilient, they don’t bounce back. I hate hearing those phrases.  When people say them I give them a look that is between a grimace and a smirk.  We say these things to make ourselves feel better about our decisions.  We say these things because we don’t know what else to say. We say them, because we hope that our kids will just snap out of it.

My opinion is that kids absorb, retain and recycle the pain, fear and grief that has happened to them. They relive the pain when they are sad about something else. When their anger is triggered, the rage that follows has nothing to do with the current squabble but everything to do with situations that happened weeks, months and even years ago.  Children may act okay and be successful in many ways or they may act out and wear their pain on there sleeves.  When adopting a child with a traumatized past we do not know just how our kids are going to process that trauma.

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If you are in the adoption process please think over my words. Kids who have been through adoption, whether at birth or as an older child, have had some trauma.  This trauma will have to be dealt with someday at sometime.  I was mistaken to think that the fist year would be the time to deal with the trauma. It took over a year of having the girls home and counseling to bring a lot of our issues to a head.  It feels great to be addressing the issues as I believe my girls have begun the healing process.  It is also the hardest things I have ever done because to help others heal you have to heal yourself first. Healing hurts.

I will share an example of a decision Hubby and I made that we thought was a wise one.  We had been told that Mita was eight years old and she didn’t know her birthday.  To keep our birth order for our oldest bio child, we decided on a birth date that put Mita a few months younger than Meg.  We were told that this was a good decision and we were content with it.  After landing in the US from Ethiopia, a security guard asked Mita how old she was. She said nine. Hubby and I looked at each-other and quickly said, “No, she is eight”.  I think we told  ourselves that she was confused with her English.  We didn’t think about it again.  We celebrated her ninth birthday last February without a thought.

After some counseling we were told that one of the biggest issues that Mita has is that we changed her age and she feels like she was not what we wanted, so we had to make some changes with her.  WHAT!!!  Where did that come from?  We did everything we were told to do. How did this happen?  One quick exchange at an airport over a year ago and now we are dealing with this choice that we had made.  In keeping up with what we were told by others and not listening to our child we caused more pain for our little girl.

Some decisions we make as parents may be good and some not so good, but as parents we have to make decisions. We have no choice.  We need realize and address that our decisions have consequences that sometimes aren’t so wonderful.  We need to deal and work through these consequences and remember that our children do not bounce.

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