Flash Back to Nam

Oscar awoke last night at around 10:30 screaming in a way that I had not heard from him for a long time.  I’m not sure of the reason; perhaps it’s his new molars – perhaps it’s the fact that he banged his head on my desk – perhaps it was just a tough night.  What I am sure of is my reaction.  Of course I immediately tried to comfort him to get him to stop crying.  What bothered me about my reaction was what I was feeling – or more accurately, what I wasn’t feeling.  For the first time in many months, I felt the same detachment that I experienced when Oscar and I first became a family.

It’s occurred to me that I didn’t really write about what went on when Oscar and I first met.  There’s no way I’ll ever forget it, but I thought I might share it since there are bound to be other first-time parents who will go through this as well.  To preface, when I was preparing to bring Oscar home, I read the attachment books sure that this just wasn’t going to be an issue for me.  Sure, I’ll buy a sling and wear the baby, but I’m going to fall in love with him immediately and obviously he’s going to be crazy for me.  Ha.  So wrong.

Within seconds of meeting Oscar (who started crying the instant he saw me), I knew we were in trouble.  I wasn’t expecting the “mommy, where have you been?” moment, but I also wasn’t expecting what he threw out there instead.  He immediately peed all over my leg/lap.  Following this, he hit at my face and introduced me to the scream that will live forever in my mind.  I felt so numb.  Here I had been waiting so long to actually meet him, had abandoned everything (including the right to reenter the country until he got a visa) to go get him early and he wanted nothing to do with me.  Things did not get better after our G&R ceremony.  We got into the van, I unpeeled the six layers of clothes he was wearing to change him and he immediately started screaming again.  He screamed until we were a few miles away from his province, and then he fell asleep on my chest.  Miraculously he continued to sleep until we arrived in Hanoi, where the real screaming began. 

For the next three days we spent a lot of our time in our hotel room.  Well, room(s).  After the first night, the hotel manager explained to me that they were going to need to move us to another room.  A room far, far away from the majority of the hotel guests.  Fair enough.  I wouldn’t want to have been next to us either.  Eventually I found that the only way I could quiet him was to walk through the streets of Hanoi.  We walked a lot those first 10 days in Hanoi.  He never uttered a peep while we were out. It was just when it was the two of us alone in our room that he realized he was stuck with that woman again.

I remember talking with my parents at some point during the first few days, while Oscar screamed.  My dad said that he would be over this phase in a few days.  I knew when he said it that that wasn’t going to be the case.  This wasn’t some quick transitional phase where he was grieving the loss of his nanny in the orphanage.  This was something far worse.   The worst part, though, was that it wasn’t just Oscar who was having a hard time.  I truly felt very little for him – well, I felt a lot of frustration, and I felt horrible for him.  But that’s basically it.  I felt like I was babysitting someone else’s poorly behaved child.   Aside from the frustration, I just felt detached.  Detached from what I was doing, detached from him, detached from myself.

After the first day, I stopped even being surprised at how bad it was.  I knew that if this didn’t snowball into radical attachment disorder, it was likely to get better.  Eventually.  I just didn’t know how long that was going to take.  I would look at the clock on the bedside table and want to cry when I would realize that it was still morning; that we had hours before he slept.  Of course I couldn’t cry because I was completely numb (aside from the ever-surmounting frustration I felt).  All in all, the numbness was probably a good thing.

I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that these were the darkest days of my life.  Worse, even, than when I was getting divorced.  And that was not a happy period for me.  I don’t know when things started to get better.  After ten days, our hotel manager in Hanoi told us that they didn’t have any more rooms available.  He suggested perhaps a trip to Nha Trang would do Oscar some good.  The heat and the sea air and all that.  He happily made the reservations, and off we went.  Things did improve there.  Not so much that we were the happy family I had hoped, but at some point the screaming dissipated a bit and he even cracked a smile sometime after we had been together three weeks.  

What I found was that the “experts” are right.  Attachment is a journey (at least for some of us).  I don’t remember exactly when I stopped feeling like Oscar’s babysitter and felt like I was his mom.  I’m not sure when I stopped “faking it ’til I felt it.”  There was no defining moment for the two of us when we looked besottedly into each others’ eyes and realized we were meant for each other, although there is no question that this is the case.  It’s always been a bit more challenging than that.

I’ve thought long and hard about whether it’s appropriate to write about this.  I love my son more than anyone in the world; I would hate for anyone (especially him) to think that that was not true.  I have felt, for a long time now, all the things I expected to feel for him when we first met – and far, far more.  It’s just that adoptive (or prospective adoptive) parents read all of these blogs with the happy pictures of the happy babies, and it seems like very few people write about the moments that are less than idyllic.  For us, attachment has been the most difficult issue in adoption.  The physical challenges that Oscar has as a result of his institutionalization I believe will likely be corrected more quickly than the emotional issues he faces.

When we were leaving Hanoi for the last time, a little more than two months after we became a family, I ran into a woman with her newly adopted daughter.  She sported the same shell-shocked look that I had when I first met Oscar, complete with the distant 50 yard stare.  We talked for a while and I told her that it would get better.  She just automatically shook her head back and forth.   Like there was no hope.  And I completely understood what she was feeling.  What I know now that I didn’t before I went through this process is that attachment disorders are far more likely to be of this subtle (comparatively speaking) variety instead of the radical attachment disorder type.  Would reading something like this have made our process any easier?  Probably not.  What it would have done, though, was make me remember that I wasn’t alone.  Make me realize that I wasn’t a failure.  Make me understand the worst of these problems would pass.  Maybe someone will read this and be able to reflect on this in the future in the unhappy event that they’re faced with these problems.

January 23, 2009 Posted by Oscar and Etta's mom | attachment, Oscar | 10 Comments