20 March 2006
only wait
The older children come home stressed, anxious, desperate to please. This is called the "honeymoon period." What you hope for is that it comes to an end. As long as they are in this state, you will not see genuine emotion.
Oh, they'll look cute and charming and adorable and even loving to any outsider. Even intimate outsiders. But you'll know.
Absent any indications of serious problems (signs of RAD, for instance), time is your most effective ally.
The more time a child spends in this strange thing called a family, the more comfortable he gets and the more he allows himself to trust its permanence and its investment in his physical, emotional, and psychological well-being. The more time he spends being loved, in short, the better he gets at being loved and at loving.
When I walk into the bathroom and find it flooded and the culprit chanting, over and over, like a mantra, "You don't like me, you don't like me," I know that the honeymoon is over. He's daring me to abandon him. He's daring me to admit that I've known all along that he's bad, that that is why his birth mom didn't keep him, that no one loves him and he doesn't care.
And he's doing this because, paradoxically enough, he is daring himself to believe the opposite of all that. He finds himself, in joy and terror, beginning to trust that I love him and always will. That he is worth loving.
And that is why when I hear the sing-song taunt, "You don't like me, you don't like me," flung at me by a boy wrapped in his post-bath towel, a boy who tonight even tried out refusing to give me a bedtime kiss, a boy standing in a half inch of water that he must have worked very hard at pouring out of the bathtub with that little cup he was playing with--that is why when I hear that taunt, my heart sings.
Oh, they'll look cute and charming and adorable and even loving to any outsider. Even intimate outsiders. But you'll know.
Absent any indications of serious problems (signs of RAD, for instance), time is your most effective ally.
The more time a child spends in this strange thing called a family, the more comfortable he gets and the more he allows himself to trust its permanence and its investment in his physical, emotional, and psychological well-being. The more time he spends being loved, in short, the better he gets at being loved and at loving.
When I walk into the bathroom and find it flooded and the culprit chanting, over and over, like a mantra, "You don't like me, you don't like me," I know that the honeymoon is over. He's daring me to abandon him. He's daring me to admit that I've known all along that he's bad, that that is why his birth mom didn't keep him, that no one loves him and he doesn't care.
And he's doing this because, paradoxically enough, he is daring himself to believe the opposite of all that. He finds himself, in joy and terror, beginning to trust that I love him and always will. That he is worth loving.
And that is why when I hear the sing-song taunt, "You don't like me, you don't like me," flung at me by a boy wrapped in his post-bath towel, a boy who tonight even tried out refusing to give me a bedtime kiss, a boy standing in a half inch of water that he must have worked very hard at pouring out of the bathtub with that little cup he was playing with--that is why when I hear that taunt, my heart sings.
