ME, THE BOY, AND THE MONSTER

Over the Christmas holidays so far, I reckon our ‘nice bits’ to ‘hard bits’ ratio is probably about 70:30. Possibly slightly better, if you take in to account the fact that the hard bits are no where near as hard as they used to be. Last year’s Christmas ratio was about 20:80 at best I reckon, and looking back at the blog from this time last year  it seems T was going through a bitey phase as well. The worst we’ve had this holiday is hitting, and even then I think it’s only been once or twice. Gosh, it’s so weird writing that, when I think back to posts I’ve written in the past describing the CPV that was happening multiple times per DAY, for anything up to a couple of hours at a time. Some of this change can probably be put down to the simple passing of time, but there are a few quite clear things I can pick out that we have done, or are doing differently. 1. Working on emotional regulation. I’ve added a whole chapter on this in to my book (which - HURRAH! - actually now h...

I know it’s a bit early for the traditional ‘looking back over the year’ post, but I’m in a reflective sort of mood this evening, after randomly deciding to re-read this post which I wrote just after Christmas last year. Something strange and unprecedented happened this week in our therapy session; the therapist asked us to consider whether we could stop sessions for the moment, because we seem to be - touch wood - doing alright. Unfortunately Tickle hasn’t managed therapy for some weeks now, and it seems that he really isn’t ready for it at the moment, but as his behaviour at home is more or less OK our therapist seems to think that we should just get on with life for a bit, and then maybe come back later when he’s ready. It’s a strange idea, having fought SO hard to get in to therapy, and particularly because we both know that without it our family would have broken apart in a rather spectacular fashion... could we let go of this security blanket? And do you know, I think we pro...

I don’t know where this year has gone, but December has really snuck up on me. It’s just as well that Husband bought the advent calendars (including this incredible pork scratching one for me, who is not allowed chocolate!) as it would not have occurred to me for another few months yet. I’m really enjoying reading all the linked posts, and have discovered some great new blogs that I haven’t read before, so thanks everyone for posting! To add your latest blog post to the link up, scroll down to the bottom of the list where it says ‘You are next... click here to enter’ and click on the blue text. Then add in the title of the post, and the URL you want to link to - simple! After you’ve done that CLICK HERE to tweet me and let me know there’s a new post to read :)

Tickle understands birthdays much more than he used to. We met him for the first time on my birthday; we’d brought cake, and we shared it, and he sang Happy Birthday to me. That’s what birthdays were: cake and singing. Tickle moved in with us about a week before his sixth birthday. I still remember we had to practically drag him in to the toy shop to choose a present, and he literally pointed at the thing right in front of him. (He wasn’t that interested in the presents on the day itself, but he did sing to his cake quite a lot.) It’s my birthday tomorrow. Tickle is quite excited about that, because he knows there will be cake. I’m working early tomorrow, so as there won’t be time for presents in the morning we decided to do them this evening instead. Tickle was *extremely* excited about this, so much so that the excitement tipped right over in to getting really cross that he wasn’t allowed to open anything, and WHY NOT I GOT ANY PRESENTS?? He actually coped pretty well, sat on my ...

When I first started tentatively dipping my toe in to the online adoption community, reading other people’s blogs was a huge source of information, and gave me a real insight in to what life might be like. Please do have a read through the blogs linked here, and comment or tweet people to let them know you’ve read them - it can make a big difference to feel that you’re not just shouting in to a void! To add your blog to the list, click on the blue text below that says ‘Click here to enter’, and then add the title and link to your blog post on the next screen. Or tweet it to me @mummywriter and I will add it for you :) Once you’ve added your blog then CLICK HERE to tweet me and let me know!

Half term has been generally quite good. Today specifically, not so much (wake up at 2.30am....) but in general, much better than the summer holidays. We have been out together as a family. We have gone for long walks. Tickle has expressed sadness at the loss of our cat, and the loss of his scooter bell (level of sadness remarkably similar for both). The expressions of sadness have been appropriate and non-violent. Tickle has been swimming every day. He’s been to Gran’s, and has had a day out with Grandad and Granny Sue. He’s drunk hot chocolate, made funny faces, shared his crisps with a little boy he didn’t know. It’s been, dare I say it, almost... normal.

This is a link up with a difference - although most of what I blog about here is adoption related, this time I’d like to invite SEN bloggers to link up with me. Both of my children (one adopted, one not) have Special Educational Needs and I’ve learned a huge amount from bloggers and tweeters who offer their insights and expertise online. Please see below to add your blog, and CLICK HERE to tweet and let me know you’ve added it :)

We had to have our cat put down yesterday. She was only two years old, so it came as a huge shock to all of us. We are all coping with it in our own ways; Fairy is distracting herself with books and writing stories, I am crying buckets and welded to my duvet, Husband is musing about getting a memorial wind chime for our apple tree. Tickle, however, has been the biggest surprise. Tickle, is demonstrably and unashamedly sad. Tickle doesn’t spend much time interacting with the cats, but I know he does love them, and considers them part of the family - whenever we go on holiday he tells me he misses them, and he’s still not quite sure why they don’t come with us. But that’s not why I am surprised by his grief. I’m surprised because it’s a really big emotion, and he is allowing it to exist in his body without feeling the need to block it out or run away. When we first told him that Etta was poorly and wasn’t going to come home, he did run away. He ran to his bedroom, and shouted, scream...

Thank you to everyone who linked their blog up last time - it was great to catch up with blogs I hadn’t read in a while and also to read some new ones! This link up is a half term special, and it’s open for the whole week. Don’t feel you have to write about half term specifically, but I know in our house holidays are a difficult time and it would be good to hear how other people manage this! I’m trying something new this time and I’ve added a ‘like’ feature - I’ll do a shout out to the ‘top three’ posts with the most likes at the end of the week! See below to add your blog, and CLICK HERE to tweet me that you’ve added it!

This morning, as usual, I was woken up by Tickle shouting at Husband. When I heard Husband start to shout back, I thought I’d better get out of bed. Tickle had thrown a toy at Husband’s face (again) - though thankfully this time it was only a small one and didn’t do any actual damage. Tickle came to sit with me in bed for a bit. He didn’t like this much, which he chose to communicate to me by throwing his glasses on the floor, and then shouting at me because he couldn’t see. I got back in to bed and ignored him until he’d calmed down a bit. We had a chat. We talked about what was worrying him - school, as it turned out, or more specifically, one boy at school who he is worried about. This particular boy actually left school at the end of the summer term, and I’ve spent the last few months trying to help Tickle understand that he isn’t coming back ‘for ever and ever’. However, it seems like it hasn’t quite gone in yet, and he’s still pretty anxious about whether this boy will hurt h...

I recently conducted a small survey to find out how school teachers felt about the issues that looked after and care-experienced children experience in school. I am working on developing some resources to help schools be better equipped to deal with the issues, and I believe if I’m going to have any chance of getting the schools to engage with this, I need to have a good understanding of the issues from their point of view. I know what I  think the problem is, but first I wanted to hear what the teachers themselves had to say. The summary of results is below: What teachers are worrying about: The top three worries from the teachers who responded were behaviour, the difficulties that the children were experiencing, and the lack of support for staff to effectively deal with these. Behaviour  could be broken down in to three categories: - avoidant/withdrawn behaviour, including hiding, running away, refusing to engage with tasks, distraction - oppositional/chall...

This is a bit of an experiment for me, but I have been really missing the blog link ups that used to happen regularly on the Adoption Social, and on Full Time Tired, so I thought I’d see whether I could set one up. I really enjoy reading other blogs about adoption, so it’s very handy to have them all in one place! If this works OK I will see if I can do it regularly... Please enter your adoption blog links below! This list will be open for a week until 20th October.

My alarm is going off at 6.40am. I’m awake enough already to switch it off; not quite awake enough to hit snooze instead. Luckily, I have anticipated this and set a second alarm for 7am, which is when I absolutely HAVE to get up. I think I only woke once last night, to get up for the loo around 2am. I’m not sure if it’s my sleep apnoea or my age, or just stress, but I don’t often manage to get through the night these days. It’s unusual for me not to have woken again around half five, dragged to consciousness by the shouting in the next room. Perhaps Husband has done well at keeping Tickle quiet this morning, or perhaps I’m so tired I just don’t remember. We have been trying out something new lately, trying to teach Tickle that morning really doesn’t start at 4am, that his bedroom light stays off until 6am whether he likes it or not. We’re having mixed success. Well, I say ‘we’, but I really mean Husband, as he is the one who sleeps on a mattress in Tickle’s room. It’s been almost a y...

In recent times, The Monster has not got as much of a hold over Tickle as it once did. It’s definitely i still there, and there are times when I’m pretty sure he’s dissociating and doesn’t know what he’s doing, but on the whole he’s growing much more able to take charge of his feelings, even if it’s only momentarily, and even if he doesn’t quite know what to do with them.  The other day when he was cross, I saw him go to reach for my iPad, but he stopped himself. That’s great, I said. Tickle is in charge, not the Big Feelings.  Tickle was also in charge, so he tells me, this morning when he decided to throw *his* iPad at Husband’s face. He did it on purpose, he said, because he was cross, because he wanted the swimming pool episode of ‘Do You Know’ and it wasn’t on CBeebies. (Husband is ok, though he has a nasty cut just above his eyebrow, which did bleed a fair bit.) I’m just not quite sure where to put this, to be honest. We were talking with our therapist last we...

I originally wrote this post on my previous blog, but I’ve reproduced it again here (slightly updated) as I was flattered to discover someone had linked to the original blog post (which has now been taken down). ——— I wrote a post about attachment some time ago, mainly because I was fed up with the massive mis-appropriation of the term, and the lack of understanding surrounding it. Unfortunately this sort of stuff is still around everywhere you look, so it's worth having a quick recap with some of the key points of what attachment is, and what it is not. Attachment  is  a descriptive term which denotes a dependant relationship, i.e. the relationship a child has with a care-giver. Attachment  is not  a term for the relationship you have with your partner. (I have heard of people being given 'attachment questionnaires' by Social Workers to determine what their attachment relationship with their partner is like. While this may be useful on some levels to...

Tickle is very definitely at the ‘why’ stage. It’s not uncommon for children to go through this, although normally they get it out of the way a bit earlier. In Tickle’s case, sometimes the “Why?” is a genuine ‘why are you saying that / I don’t know what you mean’ - and sometimes it’s an angry “WHY?!!” (are you still going on at me?!) We’ve had a new ‘why’ question this week: why did Birth Dad hurt me? That’s a trickier one to deal with. It started off in the car, just the two of us, on the way back from the dentist. Tickle asked for a ‘chat’, which is his code for ‘there’s something on my mind that I need to talk about’. We had a chat. It lasted all the way home, all the way through dinner, and all the way in to bed. I didn’t really know what to say, so mostly I was honest: “I don’t know why he hurt you Tickle, but he shouldn’t have done it. It wasn’t your fault, and it was wrong. Grown ups are not allowed to hurt children. I don’t know why he hurt you.” Eventually he said “I don’t...

Christmas was never going to be easy, but this year has been the hardest yet. Tickle has been in therapy for a couple of months now. He’s doing really well; by which I mean he hasn’t run out of the room or hit the therapist. Yet. He seems to have understood what therapy is all about - sometimes when he’s having a manic moment at home he will say he wants to go and see our therapist to talk about his ‘wobbly feelings’, but he hasn’t yet got to the stage where he can actually do this during the sessions. We knew it would get worse before it gets better - but we knew that in the same way that we ‘knew’ it would be hard work adopting a child. It’s obvious, but you don’t really fully ‘get’ it until you’re in the thick of it. Tickle at the moment is probably as bad as he’s been in at least a year, if not more. Although, when I read that back, it’s not entirely fair, as in a lot of ways the progress he’s made is still apparent. He can play independently for most of the day now, whereas ...

I used to have a different blog. I started it up when we were just starting to think about adoption, when I discovered that actually I *could* get pregnant after all, but just couldn't do the growing a baby part any more. The first miscarriage came out of the blue, I didn't even know I was pregnant. The second was expected, but no less painful. I started my blog mostly to keep my friends and family updated with what was going on - much easier than having to talk about it over and over. Writing has always been cathartic, and blogging has helped me immeasurably over the years. But now it's time to move on. I've closed the old blog off (although I haven't deleted the posts), for a few reasons. Firstly, because it felt appropriate to move on to a new chapter when Tickle's adoption order was granted. Secondly, because the old blog forms the basis for my new book, so it seemed inappropriate to charge people to buy a book when they could read a lot of it on the inter...

Tickle's Monster has had a severe aversion to sleep for quite some months now. Tickle already has melatonin to get him off to sleep (for which we are eternally grateful) but keeping him asleep is quite a different matter. For most of the summer Tickle's internal alarm was set to 4.30am, and once he was up, he was up. Some days were better than others. Some days he would play in his room (relatively) quietly, or watch cartoons on my iPad. Other days he would stand by the side of our bed and scream. Or he'd hit us until we woke up and talked to him. Or he'd bang his head against our bedroom wall. This half term Tickle has had a meltdown of epic proportions. I'm not quite sure what triggered him; perhaps it was just the fact that he'd got settled back in to class with a really supportive teacher, and all of a sudden school was disappearing for a week. Perhaps the fact that he's just started therapy didn't help. Perhaps it was just the phase of the moon....

"Me, the boy, and 'The Monster'" is a book about what it's like to parent a traumatised child. It's a raw, honest account, and it's borne out of my own experiences as an adoptive mum. Living with trauma is HARD. It's hard for the kids, and it's hard for the parents. I'd like to stand by your side, and tell you that you are not alone, that there are things that can help make things better. In the book I'll explain some of the basics of your child's brain, how it's been physically shaped by trauma, and how it relates to your day to day experience of parenting them. I'll also explain what attachment *actually* is (clue: it is not what the social workers on my prep course told us it was), why it's important to you, and how to tell when someone is trying to fob you off with the old 'but they've obviously got attachment issues so that's just the way it is' thing. I first used The Monster to help my daughter t...