Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again...

The super-discerning among you will have spotted from the title that I'm a huge Fred Astaire fan. It has particularly come to mind lately, as I never think of myself as having good levels of perseverance. Oh dear. So where does that leave me when trying to teach, and model, a bit of resilience? A bit of willingness to keep trying when the early results are not great? 

I can talk the talk, as Cupcake recently demonstrated to me. I was making a really impressive botch of something on my sewing machine, and was about to blow. Cupcake slunk up beside me and stroked my arm. I told her I was in a bit of a bad mood because I'd made a mistake. She just laughed and said "That's OK Mummy, everyone makes mistakes. The important thing is to try again." I stared for a minute, listening to my words in her mouth, and my grumpiness seemed utterly ridiculous. "You're right," I said, picking her up. "Let's have a cuddle and I'll try again in a minute."

This newly opened mind has been deeply tested over the past few weeks and months. Unfortunately Cupcake has not been at all well, and there have been lots of doctors and hospitals and tests. We have a diagnosis now, and one of the aspects of the treatment plan is that she needs to be on an extra-low salt diet, pretty much for always. I don't know if you have ever looked but salt is everywhere. We already never had processed meals or takeaways, never had bakery stuff like sausage rolls. Where else to look to cut out more? Flipping everywhere. Newly out of reach foods include: cheddar (and almost all other cheese, soft or hard); sausages (Cupcake is almost in mourning); bread... Eep. Life without sandwiches. Or wraps, or pittas, or crumpets.

Time to dust off the cookery books and get experimenting. We already made bread occasionally, more for the fun of the process than the outcome. Was salt essential to bread? I was about to find out.

Version 1: Giant Fail

This is the Cottage Loaf from the Lakeland Bread Book. If you ever need a prop for a production of the Jack and Beanstalk, this would be excellent for the giant's table. You'll need strong jaws to eat it through. 

No matter what I adjusted (rise time, cooking time) I ended up with giant bland loaves that were OK-ish on day 1, but by day 2 were distinctly claggy to chew. Our bread consumption went right down - a fairly clear indicator that even toasted, this was not going to be our long-term loaf.

Version 2: Milked Dry

This is the Milk Loaf from the BBC food recipes online. I thought I'd try a loaf made with milk instead of water. The lack of salt had so far made for a fairly flavourless offering - I was optimistic that maybe milk would help. Hmmm. 

Well, it was less sticky to chew, and it had a bit more flavour, but neither of us was rushing for another slice. And this was fresh-baked bread, the house filled with yummy yeasty warm smells. We should have been ripping into it with glee. But we weren't.

Version 3: Fast and Fabulous

In the library, I came upon this book: Five Minute Bread. I was fairly depressed by this stage, at the lack of return for quite a lot of effort and time, in mixing, kneading and waiting for rises. I borrowed the book, full of scepticism. It reckoned you needed a couple of bits of kit - a bread stone to bake on, and a peel/paddle for transferring dough to stone, as it's very wet and floppy before baking. I had neither. I put the dough on a sheet of baking parchment, and slid that onto a hot thick baking tray to cook it.

Look at this beauty! It tastes, if anything, better than it looks. We race through the loaves. And here's the really good bit - you mix it all up (genuinely in the promised 5 minutes, including weighing) and you bake a bit as you need, keeping the rest of the mix In The Fridge All Week. So instead of a new loaf needing to either be a) de-frosted from last week's baking, or b) mixed, kneaded, risen and baked from scratch, ready about 4 hours after you were hungry, with this you just grab another bit from the fridge and about an hour later it's cooked and fabulous and fresh. Have I mentioned there is No Kneading? No? Well there isn't. Seriously, this is possibly witchcraft.

So, perseverance paid off. I feel proud of the loaf, but more proud of Cupcake and myself - we hung in there, we didn't complain when we ate some really bad bread (I never knew that could exist), and we made something good. You can insert your own metaphors wherever you like in this post.

Scaffolding

This post has been drifting around my head for weeks, but it wasn't until someone else gave me the word "scaffolding" that I was able to start to make sense of it. It all starts with someone telling me how well cupcake is doing, and how proud of her I must be. Both those things are true. But they often, not always, but often come with an undertone of "And now we can all relax and you can lighten up and stop worrying." Um. Except the reason we are coping better (some days) and cupcake is making definite progress coping with school (most days), is the massive shift I make to how I parent her and protect her.

I read that in the special needs world, the vocabulary they use for this is "scaffolding" - the superstructure we build around children, to create an environment in which they can cope. All parents have things they do to make life easier for their children, especially very young children. Perhaps you make sure you always have their favourite cup or soft toy, perhaps you adjust the timing of activities around meals and naps so the routine gives them stability. But more than likely, these kinds of concerns and efforts start to taper as your child grows older. It was a sobering experience to realise that, in all likelihood, I will not be tapering off the structures I build for cupcake. As she ventures out into the wider world of school and early friendships (or at least, regular encounters with other children...) she needs more of that protection, not less.

We do things in a certain way, in terms of tone of voice, words used, doing things together, not forcing decisions or the pressure of choosing. We actively use regression, encouraging some baby-type time for more nurturing when emotions are running high. We rock (lord, do we rock) and I'm always looking for more rhythmic fun things to do, to help cupcake learn how it feels to regulate her body and feelings herself. (By the way, the teeterpopper is great for this.) I have just donated my old, comfy, massive bed, and bought a much smaller one - entirely so that I can fit an upholstered rocking chair into my bedroom and rock my child when she can't sleep. It took me ages to find one that is the right shape for me to do this cradling a nearly-five year old, as their legs tend to be a tad longer than allowed for in traditional "nursing chairs".

Designing the scaffolding is a matter of trial and error, testing out recommendations from other adoptive parents, medical or psychological professionals, books, online forums, and occasionally just mad ideas that occur by accident (who knew that sucking an ice cube can help reduce anxiety?). Rescue remedy chewy stars have also been deployed regularly, so that cupcake calls them "magic sweets". We have one each when all the other mechanisms are not getting us any closer to being able to leave the house with our emotions more or less in balance. As I get more practised at keeping all the scaffolding in place, we both look a little more like we're coping. In fact, I am doing everything I was always doing (and more) but I am better at  making it invisible to the outside eye.

And all the while, I am hoping like crazy that the scaffolding doesn't collapse, that it will be enough, that these supports will be temporary, like a stake allowing the trunk of a tree to grow strong without being beaten down by the weather.

My deepest hope is that one day I will be able to gently release the stakes, and she will stand tall and free from all the fears that closed her in.

Two days left

I am not quite sure how it happened, since it has been looming on my horizon for months, but somehow it has slunk up on me and <boo!> it's only two days until school starts.

Hardly earth-shattering, but it is for our little world. For this is cupcake's first ever "first day of school" and we both need a very deep breath and a tight hold on each other's hand. It has been an extremely rocky build-up over the past few weeks. With my adoptive-parent-sleuth hat on, I eventually unpicked it all and realised cupcake was convinced that when she started a new school, she would have to start another new family. After all, that's what happened the last time she left a nursery - a week later, she moved from foster care to me. All of her known people, places, smells and routines were gone at a stroke. Of course I had reams of notes to try and re-create laundry smells and daily patterns, but it's just building a handrail over a huge hole, isn't it? Better than not having something to cling to, but hardly the same.

I am stunned at how much she remembers of that as a sequence, given how tiny she was. But it was definitely what she was thinking. When I did a bit of artless wondering out loud, "I'm wondering whether these big feelings inside are because you're worried when you start big school, other things will change too? And I'm wondering whether we need to remember together that this will always be your home, and I will always be your mum?" Her eyes screwed up tight and she asked me whether Miss X, her new teacher, was going to be her new mummy. So much hurt and fear inside such a small, worried head. She has been clinging onto me like those woolly monkeys you see wrapped onto their mums. If she had a tail, that would be holding on to me too.

I think she half-believes me that we're stuck with each other for good. But it's the one and only reason I am looking forward to term starting - then I will be able to prove to her that we come home again. In the meantime, she is too anxious to want to leave the house at all. Or sometimes she wants to try, so we head out for a walk, but the panic kicks in when we get to the bend in the road and she can't look back and see our house any more. No amount of rocking, stroking, soothing and singing can do more than damp down the fears for a bit.

The absolute last thing she wants for these next two days are escapades or special treats. She needs everything the same, no excitement (because that feels too close to fear), and days that are as close to completely predictable as I can manage. And I can do that, and I can soothe her and carry her fifty times a day if she needs it. But it makes me hurt for her, for yet another way that she's showing me her world inside is so different to what you'd wish for any child. I have to believe that every day is another tiny fragment of building her a new foundation, even if I can't see yet how to put them together.

 

Clouds on the horizon

No, not those ones (although I am very glad that last week's temperatures have dropped far enough that I can no longer fry eggs on the kitchen floor). Emotional clouds that, if this were a cartoon, would spell out "SCHOOL" in white fluffy letters. Sigh.

Cupcake goes to nursery three mornings per week. Settling in was wobbly but moderately OK, and she's been very steady there since the autumn. But, uh-oh, here comes school. I was trying to focus on the fact that the school has been unbelievably sensitive and brilliant in their advance planning, so it feels like a good nurturing place. 

And I'm sure it is. But Cupcake has given me a little flash of how hard the change is going to be for her. Her keyworker has been on holiday for two weeks and got back today. The first week she was away, Cupcake had a series of big falls, every single session. She's not the world's most co-ordinated child, but this was unusual and I put it down to hyper-anxiety about her keyworker's absence. The second week she told me she didn't feel well a lot, and said she didn't like nursery any more. She was superficially calm but asked for me often during the sessions, which hasn't happened in a long time.

It all really came out today, I'm guessing in a rush of relief that her keyworker was back today. She didn't want me to go at drop-off (so I didn't until she was OK), and I've just rung to check on her. She has needed lots of cuddles and has been talking a lot to her keyworker about "mummy come back soon?" and "mummy got lost?" As I wrote this down, I realise some of this is quoting directly from one of her books (Bedtime Billy Bear). I know this doesn't mean these aren't real fears for her though, even if they're coming out through someone else's words. Gulp. 

It's down to me to show her I can carry these fears with her, and slowly carry them for her when she'll let me, but I just need a little time on my own now to cry a bit - life should not be this scary or hard when you are three.

Filling the Cup

In my head today, I was really judging someone for being so negative when nothing was really so bad in their life. My speech (still just inside my head) was getting pretty eloquent and self-righteous, when in a moment of clarity, I decided to apply the same critique to myself for a moment. It wasn't very comfortable.

Here are the bare facts of the past few days:

1. Cupcake had a head injury
2. I've been out without Cupcake approximately 5 times in 12 months (all "after bedtime")
3. I'm feeling tired and a bit isolated

But I could, with total honesty, put those things into this context:

Cupcake's head appears to be perfectly fine today; we had a great GP consultation that was really reassuring, and even though monitoring her overnight was physically gruelling, it is a genuinely tiny price to pay for the peace of mind that she is safe and well.

There were a lot of people who agreed to be in my semi-official support network before I adopted, but I've struggled to ask for help from them. Really, the only person who can change that is me, and I need to swallow some pride and accept that for now, I need to ask for favours from people without being able to offer much in return. These people are good people, and they will have known it would be like that when they offered. I have been a bit of an idiot.

The cup is as full as I choose to see it. Brimfull of friends, happy memories, potential joys, and hands to hold if I need them.

Low-hanging fruit

A year ago I wouldn't have been brave enough to go picking fruit with Cupcake. (This seems like a natural and sensible point to explain that I'll be calling my little girl Cupcake in these posts. Doubtless when she's older she will find that unbearably saccharine and laughable, but remind me to tell her then that it could have been a LOT worse. Mini Tart? Well quite - I thought not.)

Anyway, fruit picking. Why would that take courage? Well, I didn't trust myself to be able to cope with Cupcake's possible ... what shall I call them? Anxiety attacks almost, if a three year old can have those. I wanted so badly to know I could comfort her, contain her fears, make her world feel safe. But I wasn't sure, and she knew it. I learned more and more of her triggers, and slowly she showed me what helped her.

We went fruit picking today. It was great. It was quiet (most people still in school or work, or perhaps not trusting the breeze pushing dark clouds across the sky). Cupcake, as predicted, was very taken with the idea of carrying her own little "basket" and marched straight off to fill it. She turned out to be an asset in spotting ripe prime berries, as the ones at her eye level would be overlooked by most adult pickers, being around their knee-height.

Here are just a few of the things that would have sent Cupcake into a spiral of genuine fear previously: wide open spaces, doing something new, touching a gooseberry, eating a strawberry, being more than a few steps away from me... I could go on.

Here's what bothered her today: a musical carousel (and she still decided to have a go on it, after watching for a few minutes to check it out). She alternated between striding and running up the grass between the fruit bushes, she ate far more strawberries than she carried home, she got a bit grumpy when I called to her to stay within sight...I loved it. Now, what am I going to do with all the gooseberries?

Begin at the beginning

Many times every day, I wonder about our beginnings. How important are they, our very early days? Days we have no control over, days when we are at our most vulnerable, days we won't remember.

On the road preparing for adoption, there was time to read and read and read. Early brain development, the effect of pre-natal trauma, the impact of neglect and the possibility of healing... It's all fascinating when it's still abstract. And then suddenly, very suddenly, it's not a set of floating concepts any more. Those ideas are firmly tethered to a tiny body sleeping fitfully in the newly decorated child's bedroom, and the vulnerability takes my breath away.

 

The sheer vastness of the courage it takes for this child to put her hand in mine... that moment of touch is a privilege. She has absolutely no idea how precious she is.