1. We wanted to give it a good amount of time before posting our findings.
2. We've been busy and have had our hands more than full at home.
3. We've been actively pursuing professional help.
Week I
The first week of school seemed to go really well for the most part. Quiet Tiger's schedule starts at 7:15am when she gets up. She normally gets up on her own. We brush teeth and get her in the shower. Then dress and have breakfast. We head out to the bus stop at the corner at 8:30am and the bus arrives 10-15 minutes later. I know she is one of the last kids on the bus. School starts at 9:15am and releases at 3:45pm. She takes the bus home and she is also one of the last kids off the bus, arriving home between 4:30 and 4:45pm. After that, we enjoy a snack while she talks about her day. She unwinds outside in the sandbox or with a cartoon on Netflix while I make dinner. We eat at 6-ish, then it's bedtime at 7pm. No time for anything else, let alone breathing, on a school night!
But that first weekend things started to twist and turn for our Quiet Tiger. My boys and I usually camp out in the living room on weekends. They are too old to sleep in our room, so this is the next best thing. We've tried to include Quiet Tiger, but she cannot handle it (for reasons that are much too lengthy to explain). That Saturday morning was when it all began, when the twister that is Quiet Tiger started spinning. I heard her come downstairs that Saturday morning and get into food that had mistakenly been left out the night before. When confronted, she lied about stealing the food, despite being caught with her sticky fingers in her mouth and evidence of said sticky fingers in the bowl. When confronted, she goes to that far off place and starts raging and that's exactly just what happened. Uncontrollable RAGE. Just an hour or so later, I was folding up blankets in the living room and found my afghan with a huge, grapefruit-sized hole in it, right next to Quiet Tiger. I had used that afghan the very night before for our campout, so I can attest to it's being intact. The dogs had not been playing, wrestling, or anything that morning, and I could eliminate them as the culprits. Quiet Tiger has a history of destroying afghans (from her preschool days) and although she lied about it, we knew she did it. (The next day she admitted it.)
I sent an email to her school social worker to document what had happened because we quickly recognized the signs of the downward spiral.
Week II
The second week of school seemed to go well. Again, the weekdays are so jam-packed that there is hardly any time for bad behaviors to well up. But oh, the weekends....
The weekend brought on the spiral and we dealt with more crap. And this time I mean it. Quite literally. Crap. Insert poop emoji, except it wasn't funny. Not funny at all. Quiet Tiger began pooping in her pants. Just as she had when she was in preschool. She was not sick. She did not have a fever. She had not gotten into dairy or juice or anything that causes her uncontrollable digestive issues. She had to keep her wits about her, to keep control of herself, all day long, all week long at school and when the week was over, in the safety of her own home, she couldn't control herself, her thoughts, her anxieties any longer. She decided to find that control in her world by controlling her bowels. Oh, Jay and I were NOT HAPPY!
She did it once.
Then she did it twice.
That second time was so bad [grossness alert...], she played with it and smeared it all... over... her... room, and the mess was so bad I had to throw away her sheets. Not only that, the carpet was so trashed from her poop painting, I was forced to rip up the carpet in her bedroom. You can imagine my disgust. Plywood subfloors will be just fine enough for her until we can budget for new flooring.
Week III
Week three was supposed to be so much fun at school with a field trip at the end of the week to the apple orchard. But instead of the weekend spiraling out of control, our daughter started to spiral during the school week, pooping her her pants again.
Week IV
I learned that Quiet Tiger lied to her teacher about pooping in her pants, claiming it was a stomach ache. And then on Wednesday, she forcefully broke her glasses on the bus ride home from school. Keep in mind, those glasses are for school only and were supposed to stay at school. And Walmart optical doesn't do insurance, so we'll be paying for a new pair of glasses. That Friday, the teacher called me and told me that Quiet Tiger and a classmate argued with each other while they were in reading group. I believe the reading teacher's words were, "This was the worst I had seen in my career." Keep in mind that the other student was equally to blame, and I have no idea how long this reading teacher's career has been, but still deplorable behavior. And that weekend at the cabin we had more out of control behavior, more poop, you name it.
THIS MOMMA HAD HAD IT!!!!
I called our local pediatrician who is a fellow adoptive mom. One of her nurses called me back and told us to schedule an appointment with the doc (which I did) and also to call our insurance for a referral to a Child Psychologist who could further diagnose our daughter (which I did).
Unfortunately, the closest psychologists to us only work part-time and did not return calls or emails promptly. We met with the pediatrician on Friday afternoon as soon as the apple orchard field trip was over following Week 3 of school. I told the pediatrician that I didn't care if I came across as "THAT MOM," but that my husband and I had had E-N-O-U-G-H. I gave our pediatrician my goals:
1. Diagnosis
2. Medication
3. Therapy
I had to live with 1 out of 3.
I didn't get #1. Our pediatrician is knowledgeable of attachment disorders, but told us we'd need to seek not only a Child Psychologist but also maybe a Child Psychiatrist to diagnose our daughter. I told her I was waiting to hear back from 3 professionals in our area, but that we'd definitely get on someone's schedule for professional help as soon as humanly possible.
After some degree of pushing (and a brief breakdown complete with a few shed mommy tears) our doctor hesitantly agreed to #2 -- trying prescription meds. I'll write about this more in my next post because there is much to tell and much to share with you fellow adoptive trauma mommas who are in the trenches with me. It's a post I don't think you'll want to miss.
Number 3, therapy, may come with the help of that Child Psychologist. It has been a fight after fight after fight to get information from our insurance and our EAP. We had our first appointment today and I have to process and unpack all that is in my brain before I post about that!
Keep praying friends!
And stay tuned for my next post about medicating. Maybe what we are experiencing can help others.
