We chose not to celebrate Gotcha Day.  I’ve heard that a lot of families celebrate that day.  But we decided our celebration would not be Gotcha Day, but the day our family was finally together.  The time between Gotcha Day and the day we arrived back home was more of a time of limbo.   It was a new life for them, and for Mom & Dad, but there are two more in this family, and we are all in this together.

We debated on how best to celebrate Family Day, as we have been calling it because we aren’t very creative.  I suggested going to the airport and biting one another (since that’s what happened a year ago today) but that was, after some thought, shot down.   We’ve decided just to hang out.  Maybe in future years we will have a joint birthday party for the boys and invite everyone (it’s about half-way between both birthdays!)  But for now, we are celebrating with a Facebook video and a Blog post.  (Really, we aren’t creative!)

We have a LOT to celebrate, though!   It has been a difficult year, no doubt, but all of those difficulties have given us ties to one another in ways we never could imagine.  As I type this, I am reflecting on what I was doing a year ago today.  I was on an airplane, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.  Shannon was somewhere else in another aisle trying to keep Ben in his seat, unsuccessfully.  Nathan was mostly sitting and talking in Russian.  I had no idea what he was saying, but I’m sure it was random observations that have not ceased, except during sleep.  It was a difficult week  as the posts communicated pretty well back a year ago.  I am the kind of person who doesn’t like facades, and I hate it when people pretend like everything is great when it isn’t.  (Go Holden Caufield!)

So this will tell of some epiphanies we have had, some helps; where we were and where we are now.

The first few months were torture, really.  We had two children in our house who a) hated us b) feared us c) feared us leaving them.  They had no idea what to do or think.  They couldn’t say anything because it was in Russian and we responded in English.  We had many problems that we later realized were not behavioral problems but language or development problems.  They don’t have a real age, which makes it very difficult to figure them out.  By birthdate, Nate turned 5 last month, and Ben will turn 5 in another month.  When we got them they could get dressed and were potty trained.  They could run, talk, and feed themselves.  Yet they were as uncoordinated as an infant who was learning to walk.  One of them spilled their drink EVERY SINGLE MEAL for at least the FIRST SIX MONTHS.  (We went to sippy cups).  Their thought process is closer to a 3 year old, and their ability to process information is that of a 2 year old.  They were the size of a 2-3 year old.  Yet we had trouble discerning this for awhile.  We were given a 3 year old and a 4 year old.  But that is not what we had.  Most of the struggles were caused by us, the parents.  I often responded to a 4 year old.  Yet I should have been responding to a 2 year old.  Now we know.

So let me describe them.  They are VERY different than they were a year ago.  And I suspect they will be very different a year from now.  They are both very different boys , from very different backgrounds.  They arrived at their respective orphanages for very different reasons.  And so the problems we have dealt with in them are both, well, very different.  (That’s my creative side coming through with that very heavy reliance on the word very.  It’s a very good word.)

Nathan is a child who feared everything.  He hated sleep, for reasons we can’t really understand.  And he really believed if he wasn’t good enough, we would send him back.  He still doesn’t sleep well, but it seems like he’s sleeping better than he was.  He used to rock a lot in the middle of the night but we haven’t noticed it much lately.  Our biggest problem with him is that he doesn’t cause any problems.

That isn’t normal.

I think that is for two reasons.  First of all, he lived in a magical place called Nathanland.  He’s the only one that lived there, and he was surrounded by things that he collects in order to escape from the life of the orphanage.  Gum wrappers, receipts, tires off of toy cars, and the coup de grave: drinking straws.  They serve for an escape.  They are his toys.  He would go into his room and just hang out in the closet and play with these things, especially if there was any noise (and with four kids and two dogs in the house and four kids next door… there’s noise in the house.)  It was his escape from life, it was the safe place he could go.  Nobody will hurt him in Nathanland because there is nobody to hurt him.

Except himself.

That’s why we systematically attacked and destroyed Nathanland.  It was hard.  It was a special place for him.  But he doesn’t live in this life by himself.  He has a Father and Mother who love him, and will sacrifice and see to it that he joins us.  Because having a Family is infinitely better than being alone, even if it is all you have ever known.  It may hurt, but that’s part of life.  A life of ease is not a life.  It is a shell of a life where living is not happening.  Nathan is beginning to live now.  I think sometimes he tries to go back, but he sees… that place isn’t nearly as good as this one.

The second reason for the lack of problems is that he really was afraid we were going to send him back.  There was an instance early on where he got into really big trouble for lying.  And he was terrified that he was in trouble.  But I explained that no matter what, we would never send him back.  He instantly stopped crying.   The fear of this didn’t go away until just a couple of months ago.  He finally realized that this really was real.  “I not go back to groupa?” he asked Shannon back in July.  “Never.  You will never go back to your groupa.  You have a Mom and Dad now.”  And it clicked, and he understood, and for about a week he said, “I never go back to groupa,” about every hour or so.  He has been a different kid since.

Benjamin is different.  We might even use the word special.  He is on the edge.  He isn’t quite special needs, but then he is kind of special needs.  He is in therapy, and we use many of the same techniques and treatments as we do for an autistic child.  But he isn’t autistic.  He has a perfect memory (Shannon put on a shirt and he said, “You wear-la that shirt when you pick me up in Russia,” and he can tell us what he ate on the plane, and describe things that I don’t remember until he describes them.)   Ben is different in his day-to-day life.  Most of us operate on multiple speeds.  (Happy, slow, sad, tired, angry, pre-caffeinated…) But Ben is on three.  This is a HUGE improvement from the beginning where there were only two speeds.  At first his two speeds were “I am being chased by an ax murderer” and “I’m asleep.”  There was NO in between.  He was in a constant state of not just anxiety or even fear, but sheer and utter terror.  And sleep wasn’t really an escape.  If he heard a noise in the living room while he was “sound” asleep, he would be in out of bed, down the hall, and in the living room- and I’m not exaggerating- in under 2 seconds.   For the record, his three speeds now are “Asleep”, “Danger: High Voltage”, and “Sweet Benny”, and mostly we get “Sweet Benny.”

My wife is the  master of observations.  She is the kind of person who will have a “feeling” about something, and be entirely right.  Usually I think she’s crazy when she brings these “feelings” up, yet I have learned to accept them as just being true.  Some of the observations she has made are:

1) Ben can’t handle full moons.  We always say that there are crazy things that happen during full moons, but Ben becomes a different person.

2) Ben can’t handle new situations.  This actually is common for adopted kids, especially out of an orphanage.  So many that it isn’t a keen observation she made, but she did make it and it is true.  And Ben tends to take things to an extreme.  (Flying on an airplane was new to him, as was being with new parents, and spending a week in Moscow, and yes… he really did bite me all the way from New York to St. Louis.)

3) Ben can’t handle weather fronts.  If the temperature changes, Ben can’t handle it.  And when I say these two things, many will say, “Oh yes, I know.  I have  classroom full of kids who just can’t keep it together when a cold front comes through.”  But trust me.  Ben isn’t like that.  When a front comes through I would rather have that classroom.  Any day.  “Extreme” only touches the surface.  The exception to this is:

3) Ben doesn’t have a problem in a group setting.  This week he had some major attacks: Full moon, going to his very first parade, a major cold front, and colors.  Yet his teachers at Mother’s Day Out said he was a great kid.  It came out once he got home.

4) Ben’s stomach doesn’t work right.   We say he’s “allergic” to colors, especially Red and Yellow dye.  But it isn’t a real “allergy” (I’m a pharmacist, so trust me on this one), yet they definitely affect him.  A piece of candy is usually okay, but much more than that and he looses his ability to reason.  He also does this sort of “extreme fidgeting.”  They seem to trigger something that just exists in him as it already is.

5) Ben is great when he’s great, but we are able to predict when he’s about to “go downhill.”  There is a cycle that occurs before spontaneously resolving.  We’ll call it the “Benny Triad.”  He stops eating regardless of his hunger, he sleeps poorly, and he tries doing things he isn’t supposed to do.  I include that last one because it is not just a part of “being downhill,” it’s actually part of the cycle because the more he is told no, the less he eats, and the less he sleeps.  We aren’t sure where it starts- we suspect sleep, but then we don’t know what causes him to not sleep sometimes.  Even when he’s tired.

At first we only had the “Bad Ben”  I’ll refer to “Bad Ben” as “Poobah” because when things get extreme, he starts mentioning Poobah.  Long ago I said I wanted the “Real Benny” back- not this “Bad Ben.  Who is the Bad Ben?” and he said “Poobah”.  This week has been an exceptionally difficult week, and he brought up “Poobah.”  Does it mean something in Russian?  I don’t know.  It’s a mystery. I hate Poobah.

But I can deal with Poobah.  We have discovered triggers, understood how much our responses affect him, forced him to eat food when he isn’t hungry (all kids have a weakness and we figured his out…), given him medication (we’re pharmacists and we have no qualms about this sort of thing, and after finding a couple medications that we found one that was literally life changing), and altered sleeping arrangements (via sleeping in a room alone and a weighted blanket and fan and room darkening curtains).

I’ve discussed a lot of the bad.  Partly because I want others to know why my wife is too tired to wear makeup most days, and partly to let others who are adopting know that there are others going through unpleasant things as well.  There’s all these blogs that construct these perfect little adoptions where everything is great.  They only share the “good stuff.”  The happy times.  But like I said earlier, life is about living, not “being happy.”  (Those who are happy are those who are blessed.  Those who are blessed are those who “hunger and thirst for righteousness,” and that is not a painless process).

So I want to say, the boys are really good kids.  The longer they are in our home, the more they are playing with both one another and with the older two kids.  The troubles we experienced were in the beginning non-stop, then after about 3 months we started to have a good day every once in awhile.  After another 3 months we had more good days than bad.  And now we have a bad day every once in awhile.   Most of the bad behaviors just sort of disappeared, and when we look back and reflect we realize that nobody has been bitten in quite some time.  Ben no longer pesters the dog (after being bitten for pestering- it happened early on and it was our first hope, since we saw for the first time he could learn from his mistakes).  We are no longer told we are “little” because he is angry.  Nate no longer screams like he got his leg pulled off just because someone took a toy away from him, nor does he stalk that person with the toy for hours.

We are a happy family.  But that isn’t our goal, and I want to make that clear.  We did not adopt these kids because we were lacking something in our lives.  We had our perfect family- a boy and a girl- just like we had planned even before we were married.  Our goal- at least of the parents is not happiness, but righteousness.  I want to be like Jesus, and every time I see Ben or Nate or Sam or Erin fight against me, I see myself fighting against God.  I have witnessed first hand the results of being without a father from these two.  Many problems we encountered were because of my own pride and my sin- not theirs.  It’s been hard lessons, but we are in this for the name of Christ.  Not ours.

The bible says we must be  adopted into God’s kingdom as sons of God.  And I have seen so many parallels between God’s sovereignty over us as I have examined adoption.  God elects.  These boys had no choice in the matter.  We chose them, and no matter what we are not letting go.  We will rebuke, chasten, and love them unlike any other person.    And we do love them.  It sounds odd to some that somebody wouldn’t instantly love a little orphan who has come in to their family.  Trust me, those people have never adopted.  But in reality in the beginning we didn’t like them at all.  It took a lot of self examination and realizing my failure to love them had nothing to do with them.  It had everything to do with me.   Yet I can say that I do love them.  I am their father.  They are no less my children than my other two children.

We wouldn’t trade this year for anything.

And we can’t wait to see what the future holds.