Abandonment

I’m a little P’Oed at Sam’s birthfamily. They have for all intents and purposes dropped out of this life. With his birthmother this isn’t completely unexpected but his grandmother is acting decidedly weird. Okay this is the type of individual who would send Halloween cards with long letters written to her pre-verbal grandchild. She’s never been particularly reliable i.e. she never visits without “planning to visit” a minimum for 3 times (and ALWAYS cancels last minute). But she has been pretty good about sending him little things. Calling. Keeping in touch. He knows her and he loves her and luckily he’s too little to realize she’s dropped him. All of a sudden this Christmas she just didn’t send him a Christmas present. She called mid-way through January to say she had a new job and was moving and didn’t have an address or a phone number but would contact us when she got settled. Okay … silence. She had promised him a hockey bag (an expensive one that we didn’t buy for him (as we did for Kamryn) because she said she wanted to get it for him for Christmas). So not only didn’t he get a Christmas present but he’s now also the poor neglected child whose sister gets cool things that he doesn’t. Oh and his beloved grandmother has disappeared and not left a forwarding address.

The danger of him getting attached and then the person he loves doing this to him is precisely the reason we were planning to say no when his birthmother asked if she could call and talk to him weekly. She spoke to him on the phone once last year and asked after that if she could call weekly (her request was a text message that we didn’t immediately respond to because we were discussing our response. We would have wanted to discuss this issue with her rather than text about it given she’d only ever spoken with him once but we never heard from her again on the subject. She never phoned again either – not once). Things have been uneven for years but have gone seriously downhill since his birthday last May. She just didn’t send anything. No card, no letter, nada. Later I found out she’d been arrested so that kind of explained it but she wasn’t in jail she was out on bail (she still is) so go figure. No explanation. No contact. At Christmas she made contact (via text message) to ask where to send his present because she’d lost the address again. We tried to find out where she was so that we could send her something. She never answered that inquiry. When we called her cell phone we ended up speaking to someone who knew her but explained that it wasn’t her cellphone anymore. Okay… That was the last we heard of her. I’ve given up. She never sent him anything but really he doesn’t know her at all and she means little to him – she’s just an abstract concept to his 6 year old mind.

I made a calendar for her (and for his grandmother). Cost $50 and a ton of time and effort. They are sitting gathering dust. I don’t have addresses to send anything. I do the Calendars each year for both kids’ birthfamilies. I won’t do another one for Sam ever again (his were really good this year too). Waste of money and effort. I’m just tired of all the work that goes into just tracking down his birthfamily. I’ve done it for Sam. So that when he’s older he can have a relationship with his family but they don’t care. It makes it really apparent what we got him away from. It makes me sad. I quit.

I had a better day.

Despite outward appearances I'm not having any fun.

So I'm in Hawaii on business which is great. I got here on Friday so that I could have some time to adjust to the time difference as well as enjoy Hawaii a little. It really is awesome. I've taken some killer hikes and had some fun but day four and I'm DREADFULLY lonely. Hawaii isn't the place to be all by yourself.

Today was the first day of the seminar I'm attending. I'd looked forward to today all weekend because I thought I would meet some other course participants (they call us "fellows") and at least have somebody to have dinner with in the evening. However, it seems like a good whack of people on the course are from here and aren't anxious to hang out afterwards. The ones that aren't from here all pretty much came with someone or know other people and haven't really reached out beyond "oh, you're Canadian; bet it's cold there." I spent part of the day making small talk with people (I hate small talk) and a good portion wandering around on my own trying to look like I liked being on my own or hanging out on the margins of other people's conversations with no clue whatsoever about what they were talking about. I'm just not the "hi, how are you, would you like to hang out type."

Because of the time difference calling home isn't easy at all. I'd hoped to be able to use the College's WiFi to Skype with the kids at some point during the day and found out today that that is not possible (I miss them so much that this is a hard blow; it means I won't be able to talk to them until Saturday). Tonight I got back to my condo too late and missed my opportunity to Skype with Daniel. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things but I was really looking forward to it. I'm on the verge of tears but trying to hold them back just in case he logs on (which is REALLY a remote possibility at this point).

So ya it is possible to be miserable in paradise. Oh and I think I'm coming down with a cold.

Relatively Balmy

Everything is relative. I got up this morning and I couldn’t get out of bed. Well I was physically able I just didn’t want to. The weather channel said it was – 25 C out and after been spoiled with weeks of unseasonable warm winter weather I wasn’t ready to face – 25. Ugh! But the world must go on.

So I planned well.

My favourite black wool slacks.

A black turtle neck;

A stylish light cardigan (for fashion not warmth);

And socks, comfy black socks (certainly not a day for nylons!).

When it came time to actually go outside, then I turned on the big guns.

My well-worn but comfy black Helly Hansen fleece;



my Columbia hikers (with thinsulate!);



my knee length 600-down fill Land’s End Parka;



My super warm and long Gap scarf;

< sorry no picture; couldn't find one online, just picture long and grey and constantly shedding lint onto everything I wear but oh so loved >

And my super thick leather down-filled Kombi Ski mitts.



I didn’t wear a hat to avoid hat hair but I put up the hood on my parka and cemented everything into place with my scarf. To get to work I park my car at a Park-and-Ride and then have to hoof it over a fairly long highway overpass to grab a bus on the opposite side. It’s a cold walk on a regular - 10 morning. Last night, after watching the weather forecast, I lay in bed trying to figure out a way around having to take that route. This morning, I looked like an Inuit warrior but I was so toasty warm. The cold never touched me. I’ve been colder (honestly) when it’s been +10C out.

Everything is relative. Given the choice between being too warm or too cold I’ll always take too cold. You can ALWAYS put on another layer but you can only take so much off.

The whole city is one massive fog bank. There is ice fog everywhere. It’s très cool.

Sam

I guess I need a Sam entry. Yes, I have been avoiding it, not wanting to say to much on an essentially public forum because as we’ve discussed in the past there really is no anonymity here.

I will share that yes we got a diagnosis of ADHD (with an emphasis on impulsiveness) from the psychologist. That’s not really a mystery – spend an hour with Sam and it's pretty obvious. There were some surprises within the diagnosis as well though – some promising and some a little disheartening. Let’s just say that Sam has some innate strengths and abilities that should help him manage the deficits he has. He’s quite a complex little guy.

His psychologist is excellent. I really liked her and wish that we could continue to see her. However, she doesn’t do counselling only evaluations and doesn’t feel that, for ADHD, counselling does any good anyways. Still there are questions I still have and as we try different strategies at home and at school it would be most helpful to be able to bounce ideas off someone. One the other hand I have no idea how we’d pay for it all. We maxed out our insurance just getting the evaluations done (there is some spare capacity remaining but not much so I better not crack up this year!). For instance – something small here - Sam has a real facility for puzzles and he really enjoys doing them. I think it might have to do with immediate gratification which he really needs but I don’t know. I’d like to discuss this with the psychologist and get some confirmation (not that its really needed as its pretty obvious) that this is an activity we should focus on.

The psychologist recommended a cushion called a “sit-fit” for Sam to sit on at school as a way to make it easier for him to stay in his chair (something that is a BIG challenge for him). So he went to school with it yesterday with strict instructions that it wasn’t a toy and that if he continued to disrupt the class his teacher would take it. Don’t know how that worked out but no notes from the teacher and hopefully after the newness wears off he won’t focus on it so much (he was a little off the wall excited about it which was worrisome).

We haven’t received a full written report yet from the psychologist. She promised it for the end of this month. We have an appointment with our primary care physician to discuss medication in February – it has been recommended and if our doctor agrees, we will go forward with medication. The pressure is off a little though not because of the overall diagnosis but the little things I learned about Sam. Things indirectly related to the ADHD that I thought he did consciously and now I see and understand that he has absolutely no control over. Things that the psychologist has given us some tools to deal with and others that just understanding that the deficit is there have helped me find creative ways to deal with them.

I think Daniel is still in a dream world though. I just don’t think he gets it (and the two of them are going to drive me round the bend if he doesn’t he doesn’t get it soon). He just rides Sam for every little thing he does wrong – and boy that kid can pile up offenses quickly. Rather than stressing the positive he ALWAYS begins with the negative, which isn’t helping a little boy who comes across as a braggart and a bully but in reality has very little self-esteem. I’m not a saint either and parenting a child like Sam isn’t easy but its obvious that Daniel’s methods aren’t working particularly well so I don’t understand why he persists. I’m trying to get him to read some of the books the psychologist recommended but I feel a little like Sisyphus here. He’s just not a reader (in our entire relationship I’ve never known him to read a book cover to cover – even ones he’s sought out himself; he just never finishes reading them). Small victory in getting him to read a book that we got for Sam (he had to read it to him) called “Mon Cerveau Besoin des Lunettes” (My Brain Needs Glasses) – great book for kids with ADHD by the way. It’s hard to find in English (it was originally written in French – woohoo! a resource in the required language for once) but definitely worth the effort.

As an aside, one of the things we did learn in all the testing is that Sam is definitely a francophone. His receptive language skills in French were ranked at the 8.3 year old level while his English was at the 6.0 year old level (he’s 6 ½) also he doesn’t learn abstract concepts like language easily so working in English (his second language) is not advised. Unfortunately, it's REALLY hard to find resources to help kids with ADHD and some of the other problems Sam has in French. All the support groups, peer sessions etc. are all in English (even the testing materials are hard to come by). Surprising in a city a profoundly bilingual as ours but definitely the reality. It's a little frustrating.

Anyway, we’re fine. Sam is fine and will be all right. It’s going to be a challenging decade (and beyond!) though. And yes, having a diagnosis makes things a lot easier (I no longer feel like a nut case, still a bad parent sometimes but not a nutcase one. ;))