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Happy Valentines Day! How appropriate that this day of love should fall on a “Love Thursday” for all the bloggers here!
Love is quite a concept to contemplate, especially when parenting children with challenges. It is more than the flowers, candy, cards and red hearts that adorn this holiday. It is more than the noun or adjective that it is often used as.
Love is most assuredly a VERB. And as LuLu would tell you from her recent grammar lesson: Love is an ACTION VERB, not a state of being. We refer to it as “being in love”. But that “being” is more than likely a state of infatuation.
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I was most assuredly “in love” with LuLu from the postage stamp-sized picture I received of her with her referral papers. She was beautiful, and I was in love with the idea of being her mother. That infatuation propelled me across the world to retrieve her. Super Dad relates that he’s never seen me as excited as I was on LuLu’s adoption day. My memory is walking into the orphanage and down the hall to the “guest room” (the only air conditioned room in the 100 degrees + building). As we passed another room, I could see LuLu through the window. Super Dad had to literally drag me away from the window. I was on a mission…
But as convinced as I was that I “loved” LuLu from the start, I had no idea what I was in for. I don’t believe the true lessons in love happen until you are given situations where loving someone becomes an active, and difficult, choice.
And in parenting LuLu, that didn’t take long. First there was the fact that she absolutely wouldn’t (couldn’t) sleep more than about 2 hours at a time. So, it didn’t take long before I became even more sleep deprived than I had when raising a newborn. I went into “new mom” mode, napping when she napped. But eventually I went back to work, and both LuLu and I were perpetually sleep-deprived.
Then the 3-hour tantrums started. There was no speech developing, and there were numerous other clues that things were wrong, wrong, WRONG. It became apparent that I was going to have to SHIFT my expectations and give up the dream of the child I thought I loved and really love THIS child with all the action of a parent whose child has disabilities.
LuLu’s attachment problems didn’t make this any easier. She was traumatized and not about to trust another adult, especially me…the woman who just wanted to LOVE her. So, on top of the sleep deprivation, the perplexing tantrums, the frustration of not being able to communicate with her, she was rejecting me daily. It was definitely love put to the test.
