Our Anger

So I was recently asked to write an article for a new magazine coming out in 2016 that centers around foster and adoption.  I guess I talk about anger a lot with Little Man, so much so that I was asked to talk about how we deal with anger.  

I thought I would give you a small taste of what I wrote.  I've edited out the first part because it's pretty redundant for those of you that have been reading from the beginning.

I don’t think any amount of training you get with your foster organization is ever going to be enough to prepare you. I mean, “real moms and dads” don’t have even that amount of training, but the fragile mental and physical condition of our foster kids is not something your average parent has to deal with.  The betrayal, the anger, the fear and the sadness is incredible. 

I don’t know what Little Man had to endure in the first 5 years of his life. I know that he is considered the difficult and not normal one by his bio mother.  I know that in order to get through his exterior and quirks, you must have patience.  Which is the total opposite of anger, in my book.  While I understand that anger is natural in all of us, Little Man seems to have an abundance of anger. 

He doesn’t like being told no but honestly, who really does?  It just seems that he needs to be told No a lot. He doesn’t have the capacity to not slow down in life.  He does everything 90-miles-an-hour.  He is bossy.  He is not willing to listen.  He does not want any help.  But on the flipside of that, he gets angry if I encourage him to pull up his pants and snap them.  He will half-heartedly try once and then get so mad that he can’t do it or that I’m pressuring him to do it.  He has gotten so frustrated by me trying to show him that he’s capable            that he has hit me.  Other ways he’s shown his anger is by tearing up books, ripping up puzzle pieces, tearing pictures off the wall and ripping them in strips and the one that always confused me, he ate the binding off two books.  ATE the binding.

Those are the not so subtle ways he shows his anger.  The more subtle ways he shows his anger is usually after school.  For the first two months, he attended a day care. Mostly because the school district we live in usually doesn't allow kindergarteners to be enrolled and not potty trained. He thrived in daycare in his social skills but nothing else. His anger was there but manageable. He would become nonresponsive at times, ignore me, and just check out, but he wasn’t being defiant. 

We also didn’t really connect on any level.  I feel like I was someone that filled a role and it just so happened to be a mother role.  I feed him, I clothed him and I sheltered him, but I wasn’t in a role of authority or even love.

When he started attending kindergarten, he would come home every day angry and tired.  I have the pleasure of walking with him to and from school.  The walk to school is bliss.  We hold hands and talk about what is going to happen at school.  After the first week, he stopped needing me to walk him all the way into the gym for breakfast or even the front door and by the second week, I couldn’t make it to the fence around the playground before he was “bye mom”.

But the walks home are torture for me.  I can usually gauge how hard our afternoon is going to go by his willingness (or lack of) to talk to me, walk with me or even be present.  Little man tends to range from tolerable to off the chart.  Tolerable will manifest itself in ignoring me and running ahead of me, but still looking back to make sure I’m watching him and following him.  The “off the chart” is when he won’t engage with me, look at me or even pay attention to know I’m walking behind him.  Those are the days where I can’t even bring him back into a good mood, no matter what I try between the two of us.

I know that I’m a safe person to take his anger out on.  I won’t hurt him, I won’t punish him inappropriately, I’ll still feed him, clothe him and shelter him, I won’t withhold anything from him because of it.  And what we do to work through his anger is specific to his needs and abilities.  Little Man tends to test those in his life.  He needs to know where he exists on their plane of existence.

I don’t know that I’m doing the “right” things with him to work out his anger but for someone who cannot express themselves, what we have works.  Between wrestling to just deal with the physical aggression he has or having dance parties to his favorite songs or going for a long bike ride; it’s all about getting those feelings worked out through his little body.  He can’t explain to me why he’s angry, I would argue that he doesn’t even know, but I can tell that once a wrestling match is over or we’ve biked thousands of miles (it feels like) my little guy is smiling.

The times that he is untouchable, I have learned to pull the “Amee and PaPa” card.  My little guys loves my parents and they adore him.  I also have the “Fi” card.  One of my closest friends is another source of love for him.  I typically can do a quick visit and that pulls him out of the black hole he goes into.  Admittedly, we don’t have too many of these days anymore, but I have it in my arsenal.

What I never realized is how his anger would bring out my anger.  I would never have known the amount of anger I have in my life if Little Man hadn’t been placed with me.  I get angry because he’s angry and I feel it’s unjustified. Or I get angry because he’s taking too long to do something or isn’t listening or is too loud inside or is ignoring…I could go on and on.  The time he decided to destroy half of his toys after he had gone to bed was a time that I knew my anger was at a boiling point.  I also saw in my Little Man’s eyes that this was what he was expecting…here comes the yelling, hitting and abuse.  I think this was the turning point for me.  I realized my anger was born of frustration; his was born of pushing me to act the only way he knew how to handle and was comfortable with.  The love and support I have been lobbing at him were unfamiliar and probably frightening.  What he was receiving was foreign to him and something he didn’t trust.

In that instance, I walked away.  I told him that I still loved him but that I was angry with him and how he had acted.  I tried to explain to him that he had done a bad thing and that it was not something I was going to allow.  But for right then, because it was late and he should have been asleep over an hour ago, I put him back in bed.  I told him I loved him and would see him in the morning.  The same I do every night.  In the morning, he had to clean everything up and then we sat down and I tried to explain to him why it was a bad thing he did.  What did he take away from our conversation?  Books are not for eating.  He repeated that for like 2 weeks every time someone showed him a book.  But what he didn’t take away from our conversation was that I did the same thing that was always done. I didn’t abuse the relationship we were building.

What I have learned is that my Little Man does not know why he reacts the way he does and he most definitely does not know how to stop the feelings of anger and subsequent actions he takes. I mean, how do you explain to someone that has never had a consistent schedule and unconditional love and support that he now has these things and doesn't have to test people?  The only answer I have is patience and love.  It is up to me to be the voice of reason in his head until he can learn to self-regulate and learns to deal with his actions in a positive way.

For myself, it’s a struggle. But I have friends and family I rely on (heavily in my mind). It’s still hard for me to not have that knee-jerk reaction to snap at him and scold him.  But that night of bookbinding eating and the eyes of my little guy; the look of sadness but acceptance is forever burned into my memory. I will not persist in continue the cycle of abuse. I also know that I don’t want to disappoint this little man in my life. I want to give him hope and assurance that he is worth fighting for and that he is worth loving.