Say What Did You Say?

Friday morning Hanna decided that she was not going to take her meds. No one is going to make a fourteen year old do what she does not want to do, so the unmedicated kid is pretty out of control, she created some chaos around here.She still would not take her meds yesterday and at that point we were discussing the idea of taking her to the ER. We finally chose not to do that because once there she would take her meds, no problem and then they would ask her what the problem was and she would say nothing and then there would be this "you must be the crazy ones, not her" and send her home. Finally this morning after two full days of crazy she took her meds. After they had been in her system for a couple of hours I had to ask her what that nonsense had been about.

Her thing for the past four years has been if I make myself bad enough, or destroy enough stuff then I can make you send me away. That has never worked out to well. We have always told her that no matter what she does we are her family, even if she can not live here. Well this morning the whole thing changed to if you really wanted me how come you did not come and get me when my other family was hurting me? I had to ask her to repeat that more then once because I could not believe that she was actually asking me that. This kid seldom talks about this stuff, she just hides it away and tries to pretend that it did not happen.

This is all pretty complicated stuff for the average person to grasp, but for a kid who thinks in a very concrete manner, does not understand time and place, and needs lots of repetition in order to figure things out getting the idea of how this all works is going to take some time. How do you explain the workings of child protection, the legal run around, the ping pong of multiple placements, and the fact that we did not even know that she existed while this was all happening?

We are thrilled that she finally asked us that,because it gives us hope that at some point we might get her to figure some of this stuff out. I am sure that we have lots and lots of crazy to deal with, but at least there is something in there to work with. We are going to have to simplify to the extreme and go over this to the point of exhaustion.

I can never truly understand all of the trauma my adopted kids have lived through, but I fully understand what parenting them in the aftermath is all about.