MY STORY – 2023 UPDATE

When I started this blog back in mid-July of 2014, the writing became a way of cathartically working through the pain of having an adopted child go askew of the law. Over the years though, the blog has been less about adoption issues and more about everyday life.

As I go into the 9^th year of this blog, I am acutely aware of how all of life is a constant flux of highs and lows. Sometimes the issues come from relationships; sometimes they come from health issues or job issues or internal struggles. What is certain though is that every person is going to be emotionally challenged; none of us are immune to the worry, grief and family drama that make up life.

Because of that realization, I am changing the introduction of this “Bitter to Better” blog to reflect the life-centered writing focus of the blogs of the last few years. We all need to keep striving to be the best person we can be, no matter what we are facing.

On a positive front, my adult daughter who had the run-ins with the law has been doing well these past few years. She has been out of jail for six years now, has married and holds a responsible job. To my knowledge she has kept herself on a path as a contributing member of society. When I started this blog, it is something I never would have believed would ever happen and I am delighted to say that I was wrong.

Lest my readers think I am finally at a place of perfect peace and quiet in the circumstances of my life, I am facing some “new” challenges myself. One of my adult kids stopped talking to me a year ago. I don’t know why and all efforts to reach out have met with failure. Another of my grown kids “came out” a few months ago as trans. I didn’t know that this was a struggle on the part of this person for ten years; I thought that person was content in their mostly quiet life. Eighteen months ago, I would not have believed that I would be working through the emotions of either of these challenges. I want desperately to face each of these situations with love and grace.

Life is so full of surprises. I continue to try to navigate the future with faith and hope. Some days I am “better”. Some days I struggle with feeling “bitter”. I will keep writing in the hope that I work through my own emotions to a place of peace, no matter the circumstances around me.

Bitter to Better Mom, January 1^st, 2023

(Original 2014 My Story)

Although co-owning a business with my husband is “what I do”, on a daily basis it fails to answer “who I am”.  The role that best answers that second question is very simply…mom to my kids.  I am mom to 5 kids, ranging from late high school to mid-twenties.  No matter how old they get, I will always view them protectively, as a mother hen watches her chicks.  Yes, the older ones have flown the nest now…just the youngest two are at home now, but I will always care about how they are doing.

Our first child born to us was a boy and we were excited.  I wanted the next to be a girl and bought a pink diaper bag, however ended up giving it away to a friend as the second was also a boy.  I was of course thrilled with the second boy … we did plan to have more children and knew we could have a girl later.  A couple of years after the second boy however, we started talking seriously about adoption.  Adoption is something we had talked about prior to marriage…if for some reason we were unable to have children we would adopt.  Now we had two boys and knew that within my husband’s side of the family, there had been no girls for over 100 years (yes, really).  We decided to look into adoption and because we wanted a baby girl decided to adopt internationally so that we would not compete in the US for babies with couples who were unable to have any children at all.

We looked at Asia for adoption because I thought Asian kids were cute.  Ok, maybe not the best reason for adopting from Asia but we had to pick somewhere.  We ended up adopting from Korea and interestingly, it was 9 months and 3 days from the day I first wrote the letter to the non-profit adoption agency to the day I landed in the U.S. with our new daughter.  My husband stayed back in the States to work and watch our boys.  My mother and I went over to Korea to pick up our new baby girl.  I will never forget the first time I saw my daughter.  Prior to the meeting the only picture I had of her had been on my refrigerator for weeks…a chubby cheeked little adorable baby girl with black fuzz for hair.  I had longed to take her in my arms, cuddle her and give her a kiss on her check…so of course the first thing I did when I saw her was to do that very thing.

My husband and I were experienced parents so thought we would be fine in terms of bringing an adopted child into the home.  As adoptive parents we were naïve.  An adopted baby comes into the new family with loss…way down in the deep recesses of the soul, there has been a ripping of the birth mother to baby bond.  The adorable baby we brought over had a deep wound that we were unaware of until years later.

Three years later, I gave birth to another baby…a boy of course.  About a year after his birth, we added our last child to the family when we went over to China and brought back a 2 ½ year old girl.  As she was 4 months older than our biological son, we developmentally had twins from that point onward.  Those two are the two kids still living at home.  As a side note, my younger daughter is doing well in all areas of life…she’s feisty and is determined to reach her goals.  We are enormously proud of her as we are the boys.

Sixth grade was where we knew there was an issue with our daughter however with the benefit of hindsight we can say that there were some signs earlier.  Even as a baby, she seemed to have nightmares.  She did not smile for probably 6 months after bringing her home…when she did start, she smiled a lot but realize looking back that it was another sign of something wrong that we missed.  There were some early signs of some compulsions related to food…of asking for food when we knew she couldn’t be hungry.  Finally I started asking if she needed a snack or if she really needed a hug and that seemed to help.  We also knew during the preschool and early elementary years that she was highly impulsive.  We used to joke that her “delayed gratification” button was missing.  We were more correct than we knew.  Lastly, we had some issues with lying however only years later we realized that the lies would fit the definition of “pathological”.

Toward the end of sixth grade, we realized our daughter was stealing money from us and then buying junk food at school.  We had been homeschooling prior to this and she was taking just a few classes at the school.  We immediately thought possible “adolescent eating disorder”, started her in counseling that summer and made a decision to put her younger two siblings into fulltime public school and homeschool her alone.  We again were enormously naive in our assumption that we could “fix” her and move on with life.  The plan was to have her home school for a year to take the pressure off her, counseling to discuss any deeper feelings that were leading to eating dysfunction, spend extra time with her then put her back into full time public school and life would be fine.  Wrong assumption.  Little did we know that we were starting down a slippery slide into a pain filled abyss for the whole family.

After a year of counseling it became clear that our daughter’s issues were more complex than we thought.   We also came to realize that food issues were actually a minor part of her dysfunction…that the major issue was actually the stealing.  The next step was to bring a psychiatrist on board who began to prescribe medications to help with anxiety, depression, etc.  Early on when kids are adolescents, it is too early to fully diagnose what the issues are so the apparent symptoms will be treated.

My daughter continued to steal between 6^th and 9^th grade… stole from us (parents), her siblings, the neighbors, friends, babysitting families, and from the church we attended.  As word spread that our daughter stole, I started to feel like we were a family of pariahs in the neighborhood.  Our neighbors were kind to us however more distant…or maybe it was me that became more distant, I’m unsure.

As the stealing became bolder, so did the lies.  She could look me straight into my face with innocent brown/black eyes and I could swear that this time she was truthful …but she wasn’t.  My husband and I began to joke somewhat cynically to help the emotional pain.  We would joke, “If she says the sky is blue, we look outside first before believing what she says.”

As time went on, some of the behavior got scary.  I have to be careful what I write here even though I am writing this anonymously.  I will just say we discovered that she had started going onto the internet to places she shouldn’t be and interacting with others online in dangerous ways.   We locked down the computers but with 5 kids, it took only a moment to leave a computer unlocked and she would get on it.

The day came when her behavior had spiraled down to such an extent that we knew we had to get her out of the house for the safety of the rest of the family.  She was 14 when we took her to a residential teen program that helps kids with addictive behavior.  It is a wonderful program and has helped many kids turn their lives around, however in our case, our daughter’s deep seated emotional/mental/behavioral issues were beyond the ability of this program to help her.  It did give us a 4 month break though to figure out what to do.

We hired an educational consultant to find a mental health residential treatment facility.  We originally started doing research on treatment facilities ourselves but realized we were trying to find a needle in a haystack in terms of the right fit for our daughter as different facilities have different focuses.  Our consultant helped us by narrowing that search to a few which we then checked out.

We pulled our daughter from the teen program, brought her home for a night then flew her to a residential program in Utah.  It was a month prior to her 15^th birthday when we took her there and we brought her back home a few months after her 16^th birthday.

The residential treatment program was an excellent program and gave her a vision for looking differently at life (create the person you want to be) as well as tools to handle problems functionally rather than dysfunctionally.  As we learned later though, using those tools is a choice.

Our daughter had 2 years of high school left when we brought her back home.  We had great hopes for her and for a while she seemed to be making a new life for herself.  She told friends she had been in treatment for depression and we were fine with that…there was that aspect also and there was no need to go into more detail as she was building a new life.

Over the next year though, I knew that someone was stealing and I was unsure whether it was her or my younger daughter.  My younger (also adopted) daughter stole from me and also from two friends in the neighborhood within a couple week period just prior to bringing my older daughter home from residential treatment.  To my knowledge, she had never done such a thing prior to those incidents (she has said “no” and I believe her) or since.  I believe my younger daughter tried on the persona of her older sister to see what it felt like.  The problem was that when theft started occurring, I was not sure who did it.  Finally after a year, just prior to my older daughter’s senior year, we had definitive proof that the older, not the younger, was behind the thefts.

My daughter’s behavior senior year, especially from December to graduation, was so painful, so dysfunctional that to look back on that time is like trying to relive labor…better to avoid going back there in the mind.  We did get her to graduation…barely…and it is my husband who gets the credit as he held her accountable for her classwork.

After graduation we gave her a month to find an apartment, a job and leave.  At the beginning of her senior year when we had proof that she was the one stealing, we gave her nine months warning that if her behavior continued we would be making her leave…and so we did.

We thought making her leave….get an apartment, get a job, pay bills…would force her to grow up and live an honest life.  So far, our daughter has done anything but live an honest life.  She has committed enough counts of felony theft to spend years in prison but no one has brought charges so far.  At 19, my daughter gave birth to a baby girl.  The above two statements are linked however to protect the wonderfully kind family that took her in as the pregnant teenaged girlfriend of their son and chose to forgive her behavior, I will refrain from further details.

As an update, my daughter abandoned her 7 week old baby back in mid-January, stole from the birth father to buy a one way airline ticket and left the state.  We do believe we know what city she is in and have had some contact but have very little information otherwise.

The baby’s birth father is young but “one in a thousand”, is choosing to raise his daughter and is filing for custody.  He lives with his parents who are helping with the baby and is “heads down” in college so that he can finish his degree and support his daughter.   I spend a half day each week babysitting the now 8 month old baby and I have to say she is absolutely adorable.  If it “takes a village” to raise a child, we the grandparents on both sides and the birth father are determined that this baby girl will grow up knowing that she is loved.

I have given facts in this section, however there are emotions behind those facts and it is the emotions that run in all directions, sometimes all at the same time.  It is the “working through” of the emotions that will be behind my blog posts.  Where to from here with the emotional pain?  I will be trying to therapeutically work out the pain by writing and by doing so will hope to help others.

Bitter to Better mom, July 2014