Here is the story of my Bug--I'll call him that because I'm quite grateful for the anonymity of this board. I'm an active blogger, and I've been wanting to write about this, but not doing it because I blog under my real life name and want to respect his privacy.
We (husband and I) adopted Bug from Cambodia in 1998. He was 10 weeks old at the time of his adoption. The director of the orphanage told us his birth story. He was the first, planned-for child of his parents, who were political activists living on a farm commune near Phnom Penh. In July of 98 there was a major election in Cambodia. Bug's birth father was shot and killed in a political activity. Three weeks later, Bug was born. 10 days later his birth mother relinquished him to the orphanage.
It's fair to say that there was neo-natal stress. His birth mother went from looking forward to the birth of her first child to losing her partner and her baby within a month. We don't know anything more about his birth family history or gestational history.
Bug spent 8 weeks in the orphanage, then we picked him up and brought him home. He was malnourished. He turned out to be allergic to the formula he was being fed. Initially, we thought he was deaf. He was totally non-responsive to sound. One day I waited until he fell asleep, then clanged two pan lids together in front of his face. He did not even flinch from the draft of the swiftly moving lids. The pediatrician he was seeing at the time told us not to worry now; if he were deaf there would be no treatment for it at this phase of infancy.
Two months later, I used the food processor to grind up some walnuts. He'd been asleep, but startled hard at the sound of the grinding nuts and started to cry. Huzzah! He was not deaf.
His development continued typically until he was 18 months, when he got a bad case of coxsackie including a secondary ear infection. His speech development stopped completely. By the time he turned two, he was diagnosed with an expressive language delay and received speech therapy and special education therapy under the auspices of Early Intervention.
When he was three, we moved across the country with IEP in hand. By the time I hooked up with the local Early Intervention group, he had met all the goals of the IEP, so he stopped receiving services from them.
Bug is a strikingly beautiful child. Silky black hair, eyelashes to die for, and an easygoing, charismatic personality that charms everyone. He's bright and has astonishing spatial abilities--after our cross-country move, he learned the local geography in about a week, started reading maps, and became our accurate navigator--better than Google Maps!
He spent three years in preschool. His teacher suspected some fine/gross motor delays and we sought treatment for those. However, he didn't improve much with the treatment and we abandoned it.
We held him back a year, so he was six at the time he entered kindergarten. We chose a focus option school based on constructivist education principles, which we felt would provide a better environment for our Bug. He thrived there until 5th grade, by which time the school had lost its founder/leader and gained an inept principal. Bullying became a school-wide problem. In addition, Bug had a teacher with anger management issues. I learned that his teacher yelled at the kids frequently and was known to have thrown a pencil at one of the students.
It was about this time that we started seeing the beginnings of the intermittent explosive disorder. Not a huge surprise: I figured that if his day-to-day authority figure was thinking it okay to yell, that Bug would, too. We also learned that he was failing math. His teacher told us he simply would not do the work, he'd space out in class. But he flew under the radar until assessment testing was done because he would not misbehave in class, he simply refused to work. Worst of all, I learned that Bug had become a part of the bullying problem in the school.
I applied to have Bug transferred back to our neighborhood school last February, about a year ago. The transfer was granted. It was really tough for Bug to switch schools in the middle of 5th grade. There was much screaming and yelling on his part. Luckily, he landed in the classroom of the best teacher in the school, and after an adjustment period, his grades improved.
At about the same time, we sought out a therapist to work with him. We were starting to suspect attention and anxiety issues. Through blind luck we stumbled into the office of a FABULOUS therapist who practices Collaborative Problem Solving. Our biggest complaint is that the therapist is so busy--he works in the school system as well as having a small private practice--that he could not give Bug the time that he really needs.
In spite of therapy, we continued to see explosive anger at home. Bug has been able to hold himself together at school, but comes home and blows up. We went for evaluation by a cognitive psychologist and a psychiatrist. The results of those evaluations were that we started Bug on medication for ADHD. We learned that he has a pretty high IQ, but does have some fine motor issues.
The ADHD medication (metadate) seemed to amp up Bug's anxiety. We added Celexa and Buspar to the chemical cocktail.
And here, my story becomes muddled, because Bug just got worse and worse, and my brain seems to defend itself by blocking out/compartmentalizing away the stress and difficulties. The gist is that the following behaviors started to emerge:
- Increase in lying
- Increase in deceitful/manipulative behavior
- Increase in video addiction
- Explosions became less violent--less furniture being thrown but more destruction of property going on. Bug has been disassembling our house piece by piece. Doorknobs, computer components: nothing is really safe.
- Increase in stealing--mostly our electronics. We are both dependent on computers to earn our livings, it's not feasible to live without consumer electronics. We took to locking them up. Bug took to lock picking.
- Increase in suicidal ideation
- Increase in aggressive behavior to his Dad--mostly verbal ("You're FAT!") but also head-butts to the stomach.
- Increase in magical thinking along with re-inventing history to suit his purposes.
- Display of no remorse for lying/stealing/deceitful manipulation.
- Increase in sleep problems. Bug could not fall asleep easily, would feign sleep, then wander the house at night. If he was successful at stealing an electronic device, he would watch YouTube all night. If not, he would eat in his room (forbidden.)
I know I'm forgetting symptoms here.
Oh--he's definitely hit puberty. His voice has changed. He likes to wear girls swim suits. Looking at his browser history is quite disturbing--he frequently searches on the terms "girls drowning" or "girls underwater". He told us last summer that he was having gender identity issues. He says he has resolved them now, and has a girlfriend at school, but he still does like to wear the girl's swim suits. He had stolen a bunch of them from a friend's stash kept on hand for guests who wanted to use the hot tub. We had Bug return the suits, and later he and I went to Goodwill and purchased some for him to have for himself. (I don't particularly mind if he wants to wear women's swim suits as he experiments with his sexuality; but I don't want them to be stolen.)
In any event, the final straw came 3 weeks ago when we were having a family meeting --using CPS techniques, even!--to discuss his continued attempts to steal our electronics. He told me that Dad (the primary caregiver) would physically abuse him while I was at work. "He shakes me like a rag doll. He punches me."
I responded that if this were true, we would be able to see physical evidence on his body. I asked him to show me evidence of the abuse. He pointed to a spot on his arm and said there was a bruise there. I could see no bruise. I said that we needed to go to a hospital and have him examined for evidence of abuse because if what he said is true, we would need that evidence documented so we could figure out what our next steps were. I said he'd be examined and probably x-rayed for evidence of bruises, contusions, and broken bones.
Bug backed down and said, "Okay, there's no physical abuse. But there IS mental abuse."
I do not and did not for a second ever believe that my husband abused Bug. However, because Bug made the allegation, I arrived at the conclusion that we were in way over our heads and needed a lot more help than we were getting.
The last three weeks have been a whirlwind of gathering paperwork, reports, referrals, blah blah blah and completing the process of placing Bug in a residential treatment facility.
And here we are. Day Two of our Bug in Residential Treatment Facility (RTF).
Thank you for asking, and if you're still reading, thank you for reading.
). He's in a safe place, getting help at a level that you could never duplicate at home. He needs to work on his stuff, and you need to take care of you.
Your signature is great.
