I.
Far From the Tree:
For a variety of reasons, it wasn’t until my second year of
college – when I fell in with a diverse bunch of women from intact families who
remain among my closest friends - that I realized that many families are happy
ones. Oh, I don’t mean perfect, but…in the balance…happy.
In retrospect, in a very real way it was I who caused the
unhappiness in my family unit. Perhaps if they’d had the knowledge we now have
around neurological diversity and Asperger’s syndrome (I know, I know, autism
spectrum disorders), they’d’ve coped better with my obsessions, my ideas about
justice and fairness, my literality and hypersensitivity.
My teen obsession with King Arthur, Queen Guinevere and the
Lady Morgan le Fay made me think I lived not just with the wrong family but in
the wrong era. What I saw as truth, honor and nobility was called “judgmental” or
“black and white thinking.” I informatively let my family know, on the regular,
what I thought of their [normal, neurotypical] values.
With more knowledge of differences my family might’ve known
how to address my deep feelings of betrayal at the alarmingly wide variety of
turns of events that felt to me like lies and injustice: if people didn’t do just what they said
they would, or bent the truth, or acted unfairly, or didn’t get the right consequences for
misbehavior I was devastated. But they didn’t, and we weren’t – happy.
We weren’t a natural match.
By now, most of us in my family have figured most of this
stuff out [Hi mom! Not your fault! Different era!], but as Andrew Solomon shows
at length in Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for
Identity, families with major internal
differences struggle to accept and understand each other.
Which brings me to my daughter. I habitually find myself
thinking as to how we’d be one of those normal (-ish) happy families if only
Z would just stop acting out.
Having been the “problem” in my family, I never want my
daughter to feel that way – consciously or unconsciously. I am sure she does, though. Here is one
little way I am trying to change that.
II. Holding
hands in the past:
Typically, we’d be walking along and Z would grab my hand in
what felt like a slightly aggressive way (maybe I’d be holding a bag or
package, or have my hands clenched together for warmth, or in my pockets),
because she’d decided she wanted to hold hands - pronto.
Then I, wanting to be a good therapeutic parent, wanting not
to be manipulated (because that makes children with reactive attachment
disorders feel scared, out of control and obligated to get even more
manipulative), would remove my hand from
hers.
After awhile, I would take her hand back, in an effort to
show her both who was in control and that I was happy to hold her hand.
That was our sad little pattern. It felt pathetic, like I
was/we were circumventing “natural” love and interaction with a series of
control-related scenes, vignettes of mini-failures of affection.
We went along like this nigh on a couple of years ‘til I
finally had a bright idea…
Solution? Grab her hand first.
Sweet.
III. Holding hands now:
The funny thing is, the more loving I am able to act in our
relationship -- in this case
essentially via pre-empting Z’s demands -- the more I feel…loving!
As with my revolutionary (to me) hand-holding
paradigm-shift, this loving-revelation might be a real “duh” sort of insight
for some, but for this Full Spectrum parent very little is obvious. So much
interaction is attributed to what feels instinctive, or comes “naturally,” yet
I don’t believe in my heart that such reactions are based merely on genetic
relatedness – or the lack thereof.
And another thing: People often assume I know what the
“difference “ is between how one feels about a child who was adopted and a
child who is biologically ones “own.”*
I don’t.
How can one distinguish between the love one feels for one’s
children except insofar as it relates to that child, that person, as him- or her-self? I love each child with my whole
heart, as anyone loves anyone they truly love…
What I do know: it’s challenging to parent children with
autism and children with attachment disorders for very, very different reasons.
It definitely makes you feel ALL the
feelings.
As to the rest, there are only more questions: What if my
child who was adopted had autism (somewhat similar to me) and my biological
child had an attachment disorder (relatively dissimilar to me)? Would I still
have the same reactions - the same instinctive understanding and empathy with
G’s autism; the same chagrin and desperation around Z’s attachment disorder?
For clues, I look at the way people react to each.
With G, some children are cruel, or merely “tolerant;” the
occasional adult is an ignorant so-and-so; mostly, once people get to know him,
they see his huge heart and adore him.
I see that some of Z’s peers are intimidated by her; but
most charmable humans are charmed by her and, eventually, yes, adore her.
As the major players in Z and G’s lives know, spend a lot of
time with either child and you will
encounter exasperation. The more attached Z becomes, the more she may test that connection; and G's listening and focusing skills are "developing at this time" (as they say on Vermont report cards). Chances are the adoration will continue apace. Plus,
occasional exasperation with children is…normal, right?
It’s hard to imagine Z would ever be compelled to pluck my
hand away from what it is busy doing because she wants to hold hands Right!
This! Instant! if she’d been in my arms
from birth. It’s taken longer to bond with a daughter who can be aggressive
(powerful) and manipulative (perceptive), than it did with my son, a helpless
newborn in the NICU. What love has
grown, though, is profound – perhaps the more so for being hard-won.
Every time I grab Z’s hand first it gives her some extra sugar and gives me hope, and, as
Solomon says, “Hope is the engine of social changes that mitigate disability
and difference.” **
Funny how that works.
Love,
Full Spectrum Mama
* Grrr.
