Maia forensics

I have been trying to put my finger on how Maia's experience at the orphanage has made her different from other children. Part of me resists this--she is a child. Why can't I use the wisdom that 50 plus years has given me to reach her, no matter what?

Answer: because I'm not that wise.

Since I'm not that wise, I make mistakes, and so, one of my preoccupations has become Maia forensics.

What Kristina and I are trying to deal with, I think, are the consequences for an infant of spending the first 22 months of her life without someone there to take care of her, and just her, when she needs it.

It's not just a void. It's whatever thoughts, expectations and emotions Maia built up around the adults who were in her life during those 22 months--the caretakers she had at the orphanage. As shaped and complicated by the fact that those persons were not trying to be parents, as Kristina and I are, but caretakers. They had their own welfare to consider and could not have risked investing too much of themselves in any child, even one so engaging and cute as Maia. Especially one so engaging and cute as Maia. "Caretaker" couldn't have been just a job title for them, but a persona--an emotional adaptation to the need to provide food, shelter, security and caretaking without becoming too attached to the engaging, loving little beings seeking that very attachment from them.

When Maia is angry at us, she will say, "Go away!" Kristina and I always react badly to that--it feels like rejection. But as I think about it, it's a perfectly natural thing for her to say because, in fact, her caretakers did go away on a regular basis. If nothing else, they had to have been pulled away by their routines, their need to move on to the next child or situation, or to make room for the next shift. "Going away" is something that she had to have gotten used to with adults, even those she most liked. Coming from her now, it sounds like an angry reminder to us of the limitations of our roles: "Go away!" It's an assertion, too, of independence that has some kind of history of hurt behind it. "Go away! I don't need you!"

We know she doesn't really want us to go away. But how do you get through the "go away" moment?

Another difficult moment is when she's onstage--in the spotlight. She doesn't like it. My guess is that she was taught not to like it and that the experience probably had unpredictable and ramifying consequences for her that were often unpleasant. Singling out any child for special attention must have been problematic for her caretakers from a social control point of view--it would have upset the balance among the children, have introduced jealousies, rivalries, competitions and maybe also have led to (or depended upon) too great an investment by the caretakers. An investment like favoritism. Or some special and, in the circumstances, inappropriate fondness.

The top picture is of Maia dancing with a friend at her birthday party this past Friday. Just before the chain of events that had led to the little dance, I had tried to get Maia to let me take a photo of her with her crown on (a birthday child gets a crown at her school). The result is shown by this next picture--Maia turning away, denying me the photo, just as I was about to take it, and taking the crown off of her head.



What happened after this picture was a kind of "Maia gone wild"--darting about the room, seeing what kind of trouble she could stimulate, all of it exaggerated, and unlike her "normal" self--the self she portrays when she hasn't been forced into the discomfort of the spotlight.

On Saturday, it was raining. Maia and I usually go to the park on Saturday, but I suggested that we go shopping at a nearby mall instead. She liked that idea. I asked her what she wanted to go shopping for. "Tape," she said. We had run out of the scotch tape we use to hang her drawings.

"Anything else?"

"Bubbles," she said. So we got those things. And this is Maia blowing bubbles in the carport the next day.









Just a beautiful, playful little girl, having fun with bubbles in the driveway.

For the first few months after she came back with us, she would wipe her face vigorously whenever I kissed her--like she was scrubbing off the kiss. She would usually use my pants to do that. "Not yucky, Maia," I would tell her. And then finally one day she said, "Not yucky," after I kissed her. And she hasn't wiped off a kiss since then.

I think that was something that she had learned at the orphanage, too--to reject too much affection, both for her own emotional protection and that of her caretakers.

I want her to keep some of the qualities you see in that first photo of her dancing with her friend--her charisma, spontaneity and playfulness. But under her control. Like in this picture with two sisters at the park on Sunday:




John, Monday, July 17, 2006