I'll start with an update on Jaelah. Ah, little Jaelah can only be described as one step forward and six steps back. She is a little girl with such anxiety, such behavior, such fear that sometimes it can drive you mad and other times it can make you cry....I've said before that we have seen countless professionals and this is what they thought
Could it be neurological (which we had an eeg to determine and results are inconclusive) Go figure
Could it be temperment, being spoiled for 16 mths, etc?
Could it be anxitey/anxious stuff? Yes, yes, yes
Could it be attachment? Yes, yes, yes
Her behaviors are out of control some times and her reactions to situations are so puzzling and not ok that it drives you crazy. We have slipped back to a pattern of fear, anxiety, did I say fear. She's having trouble going to unfamiliar and familiar places again and is now having trouble when others come to our home. She's begun to want to be held all the time again and feel anxious over things that would not make a typical kid anxious. She''s behaving in ways that puzzle you and ways that are downright scary at times. She can be fine one minute and screaming and thrashing the next. She has me so nervous all the time that I can not relax and enjoy. She's a kid who needs so much, yet all we do for her is never enough.
Honest alert......all this has made me feel inadequate, fearful for her and our future, and sometimes I struggle with doing it every second of every day. I am angry for how things went down in Korea...how her FM wouldn't share any info and how the handoff was so so traumatic. I'm angry that our agency won't believe this had anything to do with what we are now seeing. I'm angry at myself for feeling this way about a program that I love, one that made us a family. But I can't help but wonder what life would be like now if Jaelah had seen her FM accept us.
We know all about attachment and anxiety "stuff". We've read all the books and gosh have lived it for 5.5 months now. But all the things that we have been told to do are not working and that scares me. This little girl definately feels insecure, and fearful that we will all disappear as her other family did. And no matter what I do doesn't help her and I'm sad for that.....imagine feeling all these things for so long and never really seeing the steps you wish you could see.
And when others try to play it off by saying things like "she's just a girl", while that may be true, there are so so so so many other things at play here that its sort of like a knife in the heart for us. Because we know the severity of the issues we're facing....and we worry about them all the time.
We are still seeing our IAP, and EI, and her and I attend a playgroup at EI once a week. My head knows that I'm doing EVERYTHING possible for her, but my heart feels like a big time
failure!!!! Honestly how could you not????
And for those curious......Jaelah is sleeping in her own room, in her own crib, by herself, all night. Which is a huge step I know!!!!!! And believe me, after the trying days we are so so thankful for this blessing!!!
