After a great deal of thought, we decided we would have an Easter holiday this year. Not that we’re going anywhere, of course. Just that we’re taking a break from school work.
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The world outside our front doors has drastically changed over the course of this week! Which means a drastic change for us and for our kids.
Anyone else convinced they’re either dreaming or have entered a virtual world? Mad. Anyway, we decided to take the kids out of school as soon as the
schools closure was announced. We’re most of the way through Day One.
There’s been a thing going on, as there often is. The kid
has decided that he’d like to use the opportunity of the topic ‘Who Am I?’ at
school to discuss and display things from his birth family.
I don’t have an elephant in the room. I have a haggard,
spiky, gnarly terrifying dragon that stalks me everywhere. For most of my life, when expert
therapists have suggested that this is linked to my adoption, I have retorted
that it has absolutely nothing to do with that, thank you very much, and headed
back to my absorbing and much more
important Facebook conversation.
Now, I realise that the experts
might have been right.
This spring, our eldest boy will have been living with us for longer than he was at his birth parent’s. I was just thinking about it as I lay in bed listening to the rest of the family get up this morning. He came in for a cuddle and asked me when our next adoption celebration day would be. Clearly he’d also thinking about us and how long we had been together.
The boys had been with us for a couple of weeks when it happened. It had seemed to be going fairly smoothly (apart from thinking I had lost the eldest – top tip: never play hide and seek in a strange playground), and, permanent state of exhaustion aside, we were all adjusting to our new lives. Or in a state of shock… take your pick.
Do you know I recently sat in a child development centre waiting room and got asked by one of the secretaries to keep Liam quiet?
Last night my daughter awoke just as we were going to bed. She staggered into our room, disorientated, on the verge of tears. She looked as if she was struggling to get out of her own skin, twitchy movements, evident discomfort, flinching when touched.
We haven’t heard much of the birth family lately. Although our Christmas was difficult (thank God it’s over), it felt pretty ‘normal’, unlike previous years where the ghosts of Christmases past have definitely been stalking our rooms, clanking their chains and scaring the bejeezus out of us.
