how many hours before I need something do I have to start being nice?

Dandy's behavior was dreadful this morning, just plain awful.  At some point his sister asked me if we were going anywhere today.

Me: No.
Chickadee: I thought Dandy had Basketball.
Me: Well, we not going.
Dandy (bursting in): That's not fair.
Me: What do you mean?
Dandy: Yeah, I know I'm being bad, but I was planning on turning it around in time to go.
Me: Well it doesn't work like that.
Dandy: Why not?
Me: You can't treat people badly and then shape up when you need something from them.  That's using people. It's not okay.
Dandy: Well, what time should I have started then?
Me: Started what?
Dandy: Being good.
Me: Well, when you got out of bed would have been a good time.
Dandy: No, I mean, how many hours before I need something do I have to start being nice?

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Follow-Up

So, Dandy got up this morning and said that he didn't like living in my orphanage and that he would rather live in a home. So we talked about the differences in how family members treat each other and in how orphanage staff and residents treat each other. He could easily list off observable behavior that a mommy would do and that a care-giver would not do. He could not as easily list how a child with parents would behave differently from a child with care-givers, so we made a list. Now when I see him start down the wrong path, I can hand him the list and he can see where he is headed.

Behavior of a child with parents that he respects and appreciates and wants to be close to:
· Do good work all the way (do the whole job, the right way, the first time).
· Trust Mama and Papa’s decisions (don’t argue or contradict).
· Be trust-worthy (tell only real words, leave other peoples’ things alone).
· Wear a pleasant face.
· Obey.
· Respect adult conversation (stay out of it).
· Do your chores independently.

Behavior of a child with temporary caregivers that don’t really care about him and that he doesn’t really care about:
· Push into adult conversation.
· Contradict the adults.
· Give the adults advice that they don’t want or need.
· Manage the adult’s tasks, responsibilities, things, etc.
· Say “I will” but do a poor job or don’t do it.
· When an adult asked you do to a job, pretend that the adult asked you for a smaller job and do only that.
· Change or cancel adult instructions.
· Sulk.
· Argue.
· Yell at them.
· Storm off.
· Sneak.
· Disobey.
· Grumble.
· Snoop through their stuff.
· Take what you want.
· Plan ahead for the naughty thing you want to do the next time the adults aren’t around.
· If one says ‘no’ ask another adult.
· Bully and boss the other children around.
· Damage things on purpose.

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why I haven't been bloggin'

Read the two posts directly below this one, then multiply that times as many days as I haven't posted, and then you have some reason why I've been so quiet. And I don't even blog the worst of it.

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"If you don't like my orphanage," I say, "don't live in it."

Two weeks ago, Dandy went to sleep-away camp.  He came back in what we call orphanage mode.  In orphanage mode, adults are obstacles to be worked around or resources to be manipulated.  Maintaining relationships is a silly waste of time as is establishing and preserving trust.  In orphanage-mode, a child presents surface compliance and sneaks and steals and disobeys as soon as the adult is not looking.  And why not?  The orphanage adults are paid staff members -- their real lives happen when they are off shift; how would it benefit a child to be genuine with these transitory care-providers?  It doesn't matter if a child tricks them or sneaks things from their private areas or says 'yes I will' and then promptly doesn't.  It doesn't matter because the child's food will keep arriving at the same time, their activity routines will be unaltered (because keeping a child from a group activity means supplying a staff member to supervise them -- easier to just let it go).  Sure, they'll get a scolding, but that is a temporary annoyance.

(As an aside, people -- especially my Dad -- remark on how well my children handle scoldings.  This is not a good thing.  They endure it as they would a cloud of gnats: annoying, but only on the surface -- and forgotten once the gnats leave.)

Okay, so Dandy is in orphanage mode.  His behavior is defiant and willful and demanding and bossy and contradictory and deceitful and tricksy and mean and dismissive and pretty much dreadful to be around.  He is in a mode where he will do what he wants and does not care if we say "no" or if we have asked him to do something else.  He is treating us as disposable relationships.  He can't manipulate us into doing as he wishes, so he has dismissed us.  We exist to feed him and drive him around.

Not!

We keep trying to impose the family model on him and he will have nothing to do with it.  He smirks and gives lip service and then goes right back to his yucky ways.

So, for today, he wins.  For today, this is Suzanne's Orphanage. The staff member is grouchy as she doesn't like/didn't want this job.  The food is so-so as the cook is in a bad mood.  The activities are all chores as the activity director is also grouchy.  There is a lot of sitting-on-the-stairs-waiting-for-a-supervisor time.  It's a very boring drab life in this orphanage.

He complains.  He doesn't like this orphanage.  He liked the last one better.  Yeah, well, orphanages vary.  He doesn't like the food (unsweetened hot oatmeal).  He doesn't like the activities (stacking wood).  He doesn't like the matter-of-fact interactions with me, the staff member.  He doesn't like it here.

"If you don't like my orphanage," I say, "don't live in it."


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And before you all post asking me if he knows what his options are, yes, he does. We made a long list of how orphanage relationships are different from family relationships and he could recognize which one he has been living and we talked about how I've been trying for the last two weeks to live in the Family Way and he is rejecting it and that I can't MAKE him make a better choice but that I can choose what I do, and what I choose is to stop wrestling with him over it.

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limitations

You know, if my child had no legs, people would not come up to me and extol the virtues of running and how beneficial it would be to him and question why I won't let him do this normal lovely activity, why I won't let him be normal.  They would see that my child could not do this normal thing and that it wasn't because I wouldn't let him, but because there is some intrinsic limitation built into the way the child is made.

Yet, I get this all the time from well-meaning relatives: when are you going to let him got to school? when are you going to let him do this and that? wouldn't it be fun for him if he could . . . ?  But no, he doesn't get to to all that because his mean old mother arbitrarily says 'no'.


What if he doesn't get to do all that because he unravels when we try things like that? What if he doesn't get to do that because he is opportunistically sneaky and we have to keep an eye on him all the time? What if he doesn't get to do all that because even one week of sleep-away camp set us back about 9 months to a year in attachment? What if the reason his life is limited and not normal is not actually my fault?  What if I am constantly trying to expand his world and running into the clear message that he can't handle it yet?




What if I am grieving all the things my child doesn't get to do and be and experience and you walk up and extol the virtues of running to me?







Yes, some of my relatives read this, and yes, I am responding to something you said or did.  Be at peace though; I know your one suggestion was well-intended and seemed reasonable to you.  And if your suggestion was the only one, I wouldn't be reacting, but I am carrying a large basket of friendly suggestions that are all clearly oblivious to the fact that all those good things you want for our son, we want too.  All those desires that you spend 20 minutes on? We spend hours on.  We weep over them.  We grieve.


We are not, however, the source of his limitations.  We are the repair squad.  It's a yucky job and we are doing our best.  You can help us by stopping with the assumptions that if we would just get out of his way he could be a typical kid.  We are doing all we can to help him get to be a happy kid, but there are a lot of obstacles -- most of which you know nothing about -- none of which did we put into place.

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Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Why is it a Disorder?

This is an excerpt from a conversation I am having with a student about his research paper on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  What do you think?


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Also, and I am just thinking out loud here, why is this a disorder?  My children (adopted from a Siberian orphanage) both carry PTSD diagnosis.  Really bad things happened to them.  Their brains responded to the stress by changing and my childrens' lives will be forever impacted by it and not in a good way.  I get that.  But why is it a disorder?  The brain behaved in a perfectly normal way.  Doesn't the word disorder mean that something is not working as it should? But in my opinion, if a person goes through trauma and is not impacted by it they have the disorder.  I guess I'd like it to be called Post-Traumatic Stress Normal Response.  Yes there is still the nightmares and the cold sweats on a trauma triggers and the weird immune system.  I guess I think that this is normal. 

Put another way, if you expose your skin to flame you get a wound, and later a scar.  If your brain is exposed to trauma it gets a wound and later a scar.  The scar is real, certainly.  And it is bad news, no doubt.  But is it a disorder?  I get fussy because it seems to me that there is a slight implication that my children -- and servicemen and women -- are not handling the stress appropriately, that their Post Traumatic Stress management is malfunctioning (disorder), yet I would say that my children are perfectly normal.  ANY child exposed to this would have some freaky after-effects.  Their Post Traumatic Stress management is spot-on, just as the scar tissue is over a burn.  Service-people that come home altered are showing their scars.  Acknowledge the scars, nuture the person, but don't tell me they are disordered.

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R.I.P. Holly Chandler

April 9, 1996 to July 9, 2010

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Parsley

Was lost.  But she is home now.  I'll just leave her picture up because she's so pretty.

We got home at 3 am from a family reunion.  Pictures some other time.  Must nap.

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Never a dull moment

Nothing quite like a live bat in your kitchen sink to get your heart racing in the morning.

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The Hunger Games

Imagine a totalitian dictatorship that uses Reality TV + Roman Colosseum style bloodgames + elements of Shirley Jackson's short story The Lottery to control the masses, and you have the basic conceits of Suzanne Collins' young adult novel  The Hunger Games, a book I started (and finished) last night.  I recommend as a co-read.  Read it with your child, and have a rousing discussion about civil liberties and the proper role of government.

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Best Lost Recap

Here is the take-away message, courtesy of Shannon at Rocks in My Dryer: "Pssst, if you are a single girl reading this? Farradays and Sayids are complicated and intriguing. Desmonds make you feel all swoony. Sawyers look great in jeans. But you know what? Find yourself a Jack, girlfriends, and marry him." 

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Lost

Remember in the movie The Sixth Sense how the shrink, in denial of his own death, created a false reality and carried on until he was forced to acknowledge and accept that he had, in fact, been killed?  I think that for the Losties in the sideways flash there is something similar happening.  Christian Slater said that they created that place in order to find one another.  I think the sideways flash is a concocted (with some help from Elanor) reality, and that when they realize this they leave it; but not for a new place, but just to return back to where they should be, which is the island.

So in my understanding, the Sideways Flash Reality is canceled out, and the Island Reality is real.  Which leaves Jack and Ben and Hurley and Rose and Bernard and the dog on the island, and Miles and Sawyer and Kate and Claire and Lapidus and Richard (no longer immortal) flying away. And pretty much everyone else is dead, most of them from blowing up or exploding.  Wait, where's Desmond?  I don't recall.

Interesting how pulling that plug out of the mysterious light sort seemed to cancel out Richard's immortality and  Smokey's invincibility.

So many questions left unanswered . . . here's one, just for fun:

Isn't the statue on the left the same one that Mr. Eko's friends stuffed with heroin?  And what was Smokey up to when he was inhabiting Eko's brother and moralizing with him?  Just sporting?

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