Meltdowns

Maia has been having meltdowns, lately. It's not that she's ever not had them and they've just started, or re-started. Instead, they seem to be getting more frequent and intense.

I've been reading again about "reactive attachment disorder," and I think she suffers from that. It may not be as strong as it is in many children who have spent a significant amount of time in an orphanage or foster care, but it's there. The evidence is the manipulativeness, the rages over small frustrations, the insistence on control and doing everything herself, the selfishness and refusal to share, and the hitting, defiance and passive-resistance.

She can be infuriating when she acts in these ways because it's so outside our experience (mine and Kristina's) and understanding. IAnd confess that I haven't dealt with the meltdowns as well as I might have.

One night when she was between us in bed and kicking us for no reason other than that she wanted the bed to herself, I grabbed her roughly and pulled her out from between us. I think that Kristina thought I was going to throw her out of the bed, and I truly felt like it but wasn't going to do that. Instead, I carried her over to her bed and put her on it. Later, she got back into bed with us, but keeping Kristina between us. She was crying her angry cry, making as much noise as she could. I told her that I would count to ten and then she would have to leave the bedroom if she hadn't stopped. She did stop.

I have to remember that the meltdowns are really our opportunity to intervene in her development and change it. Thinkgin about the meltdowns in that way makes me feel better because it gives me a constructive way of considering them, but it also makes me feel almost as though I've wasted the last two years.

Last night, she had another one. She had wet the bed (she still does that on occasion), and Kristina had taken her to the shower. But she stood in a corner, yelling, and wouldn't take off her panties and shorts (she likes to sleep in shorts) or let Kristina do it. I was firm but not emotional with her and so was Kristina. We finally got her undressed and cleaned up.

That was a good meltdown, I guess.

The picture is from May 10, 2004--3 days after we had adopted her. I know that she cares about us--I can see it in her face. That's the bridge between us. We need to bring her across it.

John, Friday, June 16, 2006

Almaty

In another blog, a mother who also adopted from Kazakhstan talked about missing that country. That feeling has remained strong in me, too, so I thought I would post some pics of Almaty and of Maia at that time. She was then twenty-two months. She was so little.





This is of the mountains along the southern border of the country. We were traveling by train in an easterly direction from Shymkint to Almaty. The mountains are magnificent. They separate Kazakhstan--and the countries south of Kazakhstan--Uzbekistan, Kirghizstan, Tajikistan, and other countries, too--from India, which is sort of due south, and China. Kazakhstan is a huge country, stretching from Turkey to Korea. It truly combines the Middle East, Europe and Asia. You can see it in the food, architecture and the people themselves.



I took this next set of pictures from our hotel room. I think I was facing south. This is of an opera house. Compared to Shymkint, Almaty, which used to be the capital, is a very sophisticated city. It has a more European feel to it, even though it is deeper in Asia than Shymkint.



The structure to the left is a hotel; it included a casino. The tower is a television tower. Sometimes, Kazakhstan seemed a hodgepodge of conflicting elements. When we first deplaned in Almaty, there was a person holding a sign with the single word, "Halliburton," written on it. There was a large contingent of businessmen from China at our first hotel in Almaty. They were there to buy oil. We spent one breakfast talking with one of their party, a very personable young man who spoke impeccable English and described a little of the differences between his life and his parents'. One has the feeling that Kazakhstan, with its oil wealth, is caught between competing corporate forces from the West and the East, and is being force fed a strange diet of MTV, Mercedes, LG appliances from Korea, and cash from everywhere.






Everyday life in Almaty features lots of parks. This one was across the street from our hotel. The pic below is of a play area in a very large park--several acres at least--about a mile from our hotel. The children and their mothers were having fun with a seesaw.




Almaty is a very beautiful city. The streets are wide, and there are often strips of trees and shrubs between the sidewalks and the main road. Such use of space gives Almaty the feel of a very old city, too.





Like the mother who stimulated this, I also don't know why Kazakhstan continues to have such a hold on my imagination and sentiment, but it does. I would very much like to go back there with Maia and Kristina. I owe a lot to the place. Maybe it's as simple as that.

John, June 13, 2006

Assessments

A month shy of Maia's fourth birday, we've had our first setback--she wasn't accepted into the pre-k, kindergarten and elementary school we had wanted her to attend. They cited language--she's behind, noticeably, I guess.

And yet I can't help but think they missed the boat in rejecting her. When I got home today, she wanted to play "learn words" with me. We started with truck, and she correctly inferred from the sound of the word that its first letter is "t" and last letter is "k."




Assessments are such odd things.

It's been hot, the house we're staying in (while our own is being remodeled) is hot, and tonight at dinner, Maia said, "Everything is hot. The sun is hot, the house is hot, the food is hot. Only the salad isn't hot. The salad is cool."

That seemed a reasonably well articulated account to me.



Later in the dinner, I talked about bringing the lawn mower from our house to this one to work on the yard. "We need an elephant," Maia said. "An elephant can pull trees." There are a lot of haole koa shrubs here, and I think that's what she was thinking of. "An elephant!" I said, "What would we name it?"

She thought a little, and then she said, "9-1-1!"



I don't know. I think part of it is that she has a hard time performing for anyone but us. She wouldn't respond at all to the person who interviewed her for that school. Whenever she's had to perform at school or in her hula group, she freezes up. Can't do it. And yet as I write this, she's doing an entire hula performance for us, complete with the chanting and all the foot and hand movements. I know she's not making it up because, back in the day, I used to dance myself. A whole performance for us, but not one movement while on stage--not including the one hand movement that I think she purposefully did backwards. A little passive resistance. Can't deal with attention focussed on her. It's like who she really is is a secret.

It's the orphanage thing, I think. I believe that it's hard for her to show her talents to anyone but us.

And now you.

John, June 12, 2006.