Wake me gently and tell me you have missed me,
Touch my cheek and tell me that you love me,
Stroke my hair and say that I am yours.

Lift me from the bath and wrap me tightly,
Hold me on your knee and rock me,
Like I’m your baby girl.
Tell me I’m your baby girl.

Let me lie across your knee and purr as you scratch my back
And relieve my itchy soul.
My itchy soul.

Let’s play again!
Bandage my arm tightly and comfort my pain.
Stick a plaster on my little nail bitten finger.
And tell me you love me.
Do you love me?

Are you my mummy?
Tell me you’re my mummy, I forget.
In the night I dream you will die
And you will be laid in the dark earth
And I will be lost again.

Jamie was waiting for me in the kitchen when I got home.

‘I’ve missed you so much Mum.’

He held out his arms and there were tears in his eyes.

‘Is everything alright?’

‘I’ve had another angry.  Dad had to hold me.’

Rob appeared looking shell-shocked.  He reassured me that the weekend without me had been fine apart from the last hour.  As is so often the case the angries had centred on homework.

Refreshed and reinvigorated from an utterly lovely weekend spent with a friend, indulging in music, food and conversation I was able to take the long view.  I thought back to the day last week that I spent listening to Dr Margot Sunderland talking about art, storytelling and play as a means of helping children to process past trauma.  That evening I suggested to Jamie that we do some drawing together and that perhaps that might help to soothe away some of the angries.

‘I’m getting bigger and stronger,’ he said.

‘I wonder what the angries might look like when you are a big man?’ I ventured.

‘I’ll be fine by then,’ he mumbled unconvincingly.

He might be right, but I wouldn’t like to bet on it and I well remember Margot talking about unlaid ghosts and unprocessed trauma.  So we sat in bed together with a pad of paper and two bic biros.

‘How does the world feel to you when you are angry?’ I tried in a rather amateurish way.

The bic biro sped around.  A little stick boy appeared in the middle of the page with an upside down smile and dishevelled hair.  The right hand side was labelled ‘bad side’ and contained a host of figures holding pistols.  Bullets rained down on to the little stick boy. The figures were smiling, some were weighed down with devil horns.

‘It must feel lonely and scary to be the stick boy,’ I try.

‘That stick boy is me.’

A good side was added to the left hand side of the page.  It was empty apart from a well-formed picture of me with a big smile and wonder woman hair.  Between the stick boy and the good side appeared a deep and wide river.

‘There’s a 99% chance I’m going to go over to the bad side and a 1% chance I’m going over to the good side.’

It looked pretty hopeless. Then he drew an electric car, a new invention, which can cross rivers, but only if the percentages are more favourable.

‘I wonder how we can improve the chances that the stick boy can cross the river?’

He thought for a while and then wrote ‘Calm’ followed by the numbers 1 to 6.

‘We have to think of six things to bring calm.’

With each calm point he wrote down, the percentages were adjusted; first to 90% and 10% and then to a more encouraging 75% and 25%.  He wrote things like ‘listening to music’ and then ‘playing Lego together’.

‘It has to be together or it won’t work.’

He ended the list with ‘drawing’.  The percentages adjusted to 0% in favour of the bad side and 100% in favour of the good side.  This unlocked the magic car, which came across the river and brought the little stick boy to his mum on the good side.  With a final stroke of the pen, a big smile came across stick boys face.

A few weeks ago my adopted son Jamie, now aged 12, asked for a Playmobil fire engine for Christmas. The recommended age range for the fire engine is 4 – 8.  Despite knowing intellectually that his emergency service-based play is a way of ‘playing out’ his trauma, I’m ashamed to admit that I tried to put him off.  I was feeling worn down and frustrated by the endless toddler anger, baby talk and lower brain thinking and I’d mistakenly thought I could ‘grow him up’ with some old-fashioned ‘pull yourself together’ type parenting.  The following day he’d packed away all his Playmobil toys and demanded that I put them in the loft.

Fast forward a week and I was sat in a vast hall listening to Dr Margot Sunderland explaining the importance of therapeutic play and storytelling in helping abused and neglected children process their trauma.  The bag of tangled Playmobil emergency vehicles in the loft played heavy on my mind. Someone is trying to tell me something, I thought and tried to forgive myself for occasionally wanting life to be different.

‘The traumatic past won’t go into the past until it is remembered in the present’ said Dr Sunderland and ‘talking about the trauma is not like opening a can of worms because the worms are spilling out every which way anyway.’  I can attest to that.  Only the worms are more like vipers.

She talked about the power of play, storytelling, music and art in helping traumatised children to process their trauma in the upper, thinking parts of their brains and how it can be used to demonstrate that we, the trusted adults in their lives empathise with and soothe their fears, their grief and their loneliness.  As Dr Dan Hughes so wisely said ‘children who feel angry have to be helped to feel sad.’

This weekend my two children asked me to buy bandages as they wanted to play ‘vets’.  They spent the most part of two days asking to have knees and arms bandaged and taking care of animals in their clinic.  It was all about nurturing.  So often my children are trying to show me what they need and I need to have the humility to listen to them.

So now I have some work to do.  I’m reading Using Story Telling as a Therapeutic Tool with Children by Dr Margot Sunderland and looking through some of the art therapy materials she has produced.  I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to approach it yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

‘Have a lovely day.  Mum loves you,’ I say kissing him on the pen mark on his cheek, which he had refused to wash off during the bath he’d refused to have the evening before.

‘Whatever,’ he replies, shrinking from my touch.

I had woken up promising myself I would be oh so positive this morning and would put aside the events of the previous evening.  I had opened my daughter’s bedroom door to wake her up and been faced with a blackened, split banana on the carpet.

‘Jamie put that there,’ she said, ‘to get me into trouble.’

That’s the sort of thing which happens in our house.

At breakfast Jamie and Rose had competitively jousted about whose school served the ‘best’ school dinners.

‘We get fizzy juice,’ said Jamie.

‘Well we get Slush Puppy.’

‘YOU DO NOT.’

‘We do,’ she stated, shooting Jamie a certain look which we call ‘the eyebrows’.

‘MUM, Rose just gave me the eyebrows.’

‘Just ignore it,’ I’d offered helplessly, my optimism diminishing.

‘And why does SHE get to choose tea just cos SHE has friends coming over and I never get to choose and I want fish and chips for tea on Saturday and I’d better get them or …….’

‘Ten pounds is missing from my wallet,’ said Rob, appearing from the bathroom.

We’d all eyed each other suspiciously.

‘I wonder how that could have happened,’ I had trotted out from a text-book when what I’d really wanted to say was ‘RIGHT EMPTY OUT YOUR POCKETS NOW!’.

I’d trudged upstairs to retrieve five one pound coins from my bedside table, which I had kept there for dinner money purposes.  There were only three there.  Jamie had then quickly and suspiciously offered to fill the dinner money hole with his own pocket-money.  Plans of sock drawer searches and honey traps had flooded into my mind.  Sensing my panic over the time and my anger over the money, Jamie had then refused to put on his shoes.  We were precariously close to missing the school bus.

The ‘whatever’ stings me more than the previous evenings ‘I hate you’ but not as much as the ‘I’m going to kick you and watch you die’ of the week before.’

With children delivered to school bus stops, I laboriously gather up shopping bags and fester in a washy silence.  When I arrive at Morrisons feeling bleak and angry I open my purse to find it has been cleared of change.  I stand in a long, slow queue to buy a newspaper with a ten pound note so I can get a one pound coin with which to release a trolley which will not steer.  I seethe with irritation.

Everything in Morrisons annoys me.  The rolls of plastic bags are not kept by the loose vegetables where they are needed, but next to the already bagged bananas where they are not.  A lady stops, mid-aisle to check her list at length, oblivious to me raging behind her.  I wait patiently, then ask her politely to please move.  An icy stare.

‘Don’t take me on today,’ I think.

I swing past the magazines looking for some light relief.  ‘My secret pain’ says the well-known and wealthy presenter and ‘why I’m so unhappy with my body’ says a super-fit, gorgeous athlete.  A loud, mocking, scoffing laugh sets itself free.  People look at me.  In expressing myself, to myself in a public place. I have crossed a line.  Perhaps I am crazy. Or drunk.  I might sweep the contents of the magazine shelf on to the floor and stamp on the fat celebrities and the thin celebrities and the suspected boob jobs and the fake tans.  I might abandon my trolley and stride off into the distance.  I am like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, the monster in me finally breaking free, bulked up by the sudden release of bottled-up frustrations.  I could cause mayhem.

Instead I dutifully stand in line and pay for my shopping.  I come home, eat a large bag of chocolate buttons and dance madly and alone in the kitchen.

As regular readers will be aware, the Donovan family have emerged from the perfect storm which threatened to derail our adopted family earlier this summer.  There are many factors which led to our collective rescue and beckoned in this prolonged period of calm, the prime factor was our Social Worker, Mel.  Here is a list of ten things which Mel did to pull us back from the brink of disaster:

1.  She listened, for hours
2.  She did not judge
3.  She said ‘I know how hard it is’
4.  She said ‘no one knows the measure of success when we parent children who have suffered early trauma’
5.  She said ‘you are doing a brilliant job’.  I felt like less of a failure.
6.  She insisted that we get some respite, from somewhere.  We accepted a very generous offer from a family member, set aside our worries and recuperated for five, sleepy days.  We emerged with more fight in us.
7.  She booked me on to a therapeutic parenting course.  Although I swallowed down tears for most of it, it helped me to refocus and it was a relief to be amongst people who know the reality of parenting a child of trauma
8.  I can tell her anything and she doesn’t flinch or judge
9.  She always has constructive advice to offer, no matter how impossible the problem appears
10.  She is always right.

Mel is one of the unsung heroes of social services.  Not only did she prevent us from disintegrating into a human disaster area this summer, she saved the state a significant amount of money, more than enough to justify her salary.

Our family have emerged into an extended period of calm and happiness which proves that Mel was right about something else:  traumatised children will kick back just as bonds strengthen and relationships deepen and if adoptive families can be helped to cling on during these stormy times, they may wake up to a beautiful day.

Last night, after two hours of wrestling with my adopted child over washing, teeth brushing and bedtime, I settled in to listen to Bringing Up Britain on Radio 4, with Mariella Frostrup and a panel of guests including Martin Narey, Nushra Mansuri (BASW), John Simmonds (BAAF) and Professor Julie Selwyn. The discussion mainly rolled on quite nicely and Martin Narey in particular did a good job of bringing the debate around to the realities of modern adoption.

So far so balanced.

And then Mariella started to make smirky statements along the lines of ‘aren’t we all a bit negative about adoption?’ and chirpily announced that she knows loads of people who’ve been adopted and they are all fine, upstanding, well-balanced individuals.  I listened to the shouting and banging coming from my own adopted son’s bedroom and imagined her adopted friends, nice, metropolitan media types maybe, probably having been adopted as babies and thought ‘what the fuck’s that got to do with it?’  I thought she may have been picked up by one of the other panel members for this lazy, self-satisfied journalism but she wasn’t.  If she was, it wasn’t broadcast.  Instead we were treated to a cocktail of ‘yes we are far too negative’, ’only a small proportion of families struggle with their adopted children’ and a chaser of ‘all children are like this’. (These are not direct quotations but you get the gist.  Players of Adoption Misinfo Bingo would have been close to a full house.)

Have we learnt nothing, have we not moved on in our knowledge and experience of child trauma in the past twenty years?  The children who are put in care and subsequently adopted in the main have been neglected and abused, big time.  And they don’t just shed the harm done to them, like a cashmere wrap, it is a deeply woven into them.  Many difficult behaviours they display are deeply socially, dinner party, unacceptable.  Raising a damaged child is at the minimum a significant challenge and for many of us a hard, painful, lonely, nerve-jangling slog.

I was left wondering why the really tough issues around parenting adopted children were glossed over so stupendously in this programme (it is after all a programme about parenting).  There is a natural tendency to look away from child abuse and its long term impact.  It is difficult and makes us feel awkward.  But sometimes we must look and examine, because it is the only way our children will get the support and understanding that they need. The over-riding reason for the gloss-job I suspect, is the need to recruit more adopters and the upcoming National Adoption Week.  We musn’t tell people what it’s really like because then they might not want to adopt.  We must instead gush and come over a bit sentimental and kitch.  There is a danger of mis-selling here and it benefits no one.

I’m aware that I am probably part of a self-selecting group: adopters who struggle.  Adopters who don’t experience problems raising their children are more likely to get on with life and less likely to seek the solace of twitter, message boards and blogs like this. Have a look around though and there are lots and lots and lots of us. Mariella’s friends are self-selecting too.  I think there were nine or ten of them.

I don’t ask for full technicolour, weeping and wailing over the travails of raising traumatised children, there are triumphs and joys along the way for many of us.  But I’ll let you into a little secret: you know how there are things which are no longer socially acceptable to say, politically incorrect things which jar?   ‘All children do that’ is one of those.

This week on the Rob Brydon show I heard Dr Brian Cox explaining the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which I think is otherwise known as entropy.  I was not paying full attention as I was, at the time, trying to repair a school rucksack, not yet two weeks old, with a tapestry needle and some flimsy cotton.  I realised that in fact what I was trying to do was reverse the inevitable process of entropy.  Had I had access to an industrial sewing machine I might have made a better job of it.

I am not a physicist and so forgive this donkey explanation, but entropy is basically the process of things cooling down, breaking up, losing form, spreading out. It is an ice-cube melting in a glass of gin, autumn leaves being scattered by a breeze, it is a pile of dirty laundry and a sink full of washing up.

Of the five items usually housed in my son’s PE bag, only two came home at the end of last year; a pair of trainers and a pair of shorts.  He searched at school for the missing items, possibly, but despite being named they did not turn up, that was until I had posted a cheque for £49.50, at which time the sweatshirt reappeared.  I don’t know which part of entropy was demonstrated by the random reappearance of the sweatshirt, but it was too late to get my money back.

My son is a human entropy attractor and should be studied by science.  I am the main counter-entropic force in his life and I can tell you swimming against the second law of thermodynamics is frustrating and expensive.  The pencil-case is another example.  Every August I put together the most elegant and complete set of writing-related tools into a clean and tasteful pencil-case.  As a lover of stationary, I marvel at my triumph.  ‘Look what I have gathered from the outer reaches of WHSmiths and Rymans’ I say to myself.  I then pass this gift to my son and have high hopes for the preservation of the pencil-case and its contents.  But every evening I reach into the school bag and look inside the pencil-case and a piece of my heart withers and dies.  Pencils are not only worn and in need of sharpening, but lacking in lead despite being sharpened at both ends, rubbers have been pulled off, marmalised and rolled into grey bogey balls, some pencils have been SNAPPED IN HALF.  I cannot bring myself to report on the health of the geometry set: it is too painful.  A red pen has carelessly bled over everything.

‘Your child will need a ring binder for science this year’ said the note from school. Not only did I have a ring binder, but I filled it with clear plastic wallets, for extra-entropy protection and put inside the homework which we had just finished shouting at each other over.  I put the folder inside the ripped school bag and allowed myself a small flutter of satisfaction.  The folder, despite counter-entropically displaying his name, has not been seen since and the homework, now overdue, has to be done again.  It is a matter of time before a drinks container leaks or a forgotten banana weeps inside the bag and over its entire contents.

I remain resolute in my counter-entropic efforts but I know that at some point in the academic year, probably just after christmas, I will accept defeat.  I will find a dog-eared piece of paper, a chewed biro and write ‘Sorry Miss, the second law of thermodynamics ate the homework, the school tie, the trainers,has eaten everything’.

School can be one of the most challenging areas of life for an adopted or looked-after traumatised child.  It pokes at all the things that these children find the hardest of all; listening, focusing, concentrating, peer relationships, being judged, tested, cognitive skills, behaviour systems, change and the list goes on.

One of the big decisions which carers and parents of traumatised children face is which type of school will be the most suitable for my child.  I chose our son’s first school based on the fact that it was within easy walking distance and the head seemed nice.  It was a small village school.  Things did not turn out well.  Jamie was often in trouble, did not respond well to the behaviour systems and made some very unwise relationships.  His trauma was interpreted as naughtiness and a lack of discipline by some parents.  There were complaints.  It was a difficult time and not made easier by living and being educated within the same community.  We eventually moved him to another small village school some distance away, which I knew to have knowledge and experience of working with traumatised children.  It was an overwhelmingly positive experience.  He was accepted, his needs were understood and dealt with patiently and with empathy.

Our daughter, who is less traumatised but nevertheless presents with some attachment difficulties thrived as well in this small school, early on.  So far, so good.  But as I came to learn, a child who is slightly ‘different’ can stand out in a small school particularly one in a mainly middle-class area.  She gradually became socially isolated and this was not just the work of other children but parents as well.  She would find herself the only girl in the class not invited to her ‘best friend’s’ party, the same friend who would then beg to come to our house to play.  She suffered a whispering campaign.  She was called ‘weird’.  Towards the end of last term she filled in a questionnaire.  One of the questions was ‘how often to you wake up and not want to come to school?’.  She ticked ‘almost always’.  She told me this with tears in her eyes.  She is a robust child who doesn’t like to expose her emotions so I knew we had a problem.  This was all despite the school handling attachment issues professionally and the staff providing fantastic support.  I suggested to her that she think about changing schools.  She nearly bit my hand off.  Within a couple of days I had visited our local middle school, a large secondary school-like set up which takes children from nine to thirteen and had put her name down.

She has only been at her new school for five days.  She went in bravely, not really knowing many children but she come home every day with the biggest smile on her face and yesterday said ‘I’ve had the best day ever’.  The school have rung to tell me how pleased they are with her, that she has made some lovely friends and appears happy and enthusiastic.  It was the best news.  I know there are likely to be bumps in the road but this is a great start.  She needed to feel part of a gang, to have a wider choice of friends and to be accepted for her enthusiastic and sometimes eccentric and artistic ways.

I have learnt along the way that school has a large impact upon the lives of our children and upon life at home.  It is important to get it right. And if a school doesn’t get attachment and trauma, then you will be forever swimming against the tide.  However a small village school, whilst having a safe, family atmosphere can sometimes be too claustrophobic, too tight, not accepting of difference.

So we now have two children, in two completely different school systems.  Raising traumatised children is never straightforward least of all when it comes to education.

I have taken a break from blogging over the summer holidays.  Frankly, just getting through the almost seven week holidayathon is as much as I can manage and in the time it takes to type in the password into my laptop a fight will have broken out, a child will have shut the cat in a drawer and another child will be stood over me screaming ‘Mum mum mum mum mum’.  So I have been digitally absent.

Hard though the holidays have been, I was fearing they would be catastrophic. I was dreading the swearing and shouting, the breaking and throwing, the fighting and arguing.  Getting through a weekend of this is bad enough.  Seven weeks is a serious endurance event, with no medals at the end.

However.

At the end of the summer term, something quite magic happened.  Son no. 1 received some painful and difficult therapy.  He got into the car after the therapy session and remained pleasant for the entire journey to collect his sister from school.  He was pleasant to his sister, he was calm and lovely all weekend.  Rob and I remained on edge, primed for the next fightathon.  But son no. 1  coped well with the last week at school and was reported to be ‘a joy to spend time with’.  The holidays started, usually a flashpoint, and he remained calm and happy.  I started to relax, a little.  We went on holiday to France.  There was lots of travelling involved, it was bound to be awful.  But apart from a couple of incidents he was in the main part calm and happy.  I read four novels.  I haven’t been able to read on holiday for eight years.  Rob and I relaxed a bit more.

We are now limping through the last few days before the start of the autumn term.  Rob and I are both feeling under the weather with something vague and tiring.  The past eighteen months have been very very hard.  Our bodies are enforcing rest and recovery.

I don’t know what the next year will bring and I’m not quite ready to think about it.  But we’ve survived another summer holiday. Now surely it must be time to go back to school.

Last weekend my son experienced an episode of what he refers to as ’Red Brain’ and called his father a c**t.  He called him a w****r as well, but it was c**t which propelled us to the apex of offensive language and which left Rob feeling, well, rather mentally beaten about.  Once Red Brain had died down, Jamie was mortified that he had directed this language at his dad.  But the words had been said: the toothpaste was out of the tube.

During Jamie’s next therapy session a few days later, the esteemed Mr R, Social Worker and specialist in all things child trauma-related, enquired about how the previous week had been.

‘Jamie’s Red Brain came out shouting and screaming and he called his dad some bad things.’

‘Is that right Jamie?  What did you call your dad?’

The hood went up and all he could manage was ‘dunno’.

‘So Sally, could you tell me what Jamie called his dad?’

I am no prude and am fond of a good swear now and again but to use the ‘c’ and the ‘w’ words in polite company is well out of my league.

‘Go on, say them,’ said Mr R.

‘Well, he called Rob a w****r and a c**t.’

I folded my arms and blushed.  Jamie looked at me from beneath his hood.  It was a look of disbelief.

‘Oh I see, so Jamie, you called your dad a c**t and a w****r?  That’s big stuff.  It doesn’t get much worse than that does it?’

Laughter.

‘My guess is it’s difficult to hear those words and they make you giggle a bit don’t they?  Shall we hear then again?  C**t.  W****r.’

More laughter. My spirit momentarily left my body, as it does when life becomes too bizarre and it suspects the involvement of mind-altering drugs.  It floated around just under the ceiling and spoke to me.    Yes, there really is a social worker in your sitting room saying ‘c**t’ and ‘w****r’ over and over.  Your son is laughing as though it’s all a big joke.  Your life has jumped off the tracks.

We then moved on to the crux of the matter.

‘So how much further do you need to go before mum and dad give up on you?’

I winced at the directness.  Jamie rolled himself into a ball.

‘Sally, I’ll ask you.  How much further will Jamie have to go before you give up and put him into care?’

‘I’m not going to give up.  It’s bad news for Red Brain, but Rob and I are very determined people and Jamie part of our family for good.’

‘Did you hear that Jamie?  Mum says she’s not going to give up on you?’

‘Dunno.’

‘We’ve got to deal with Red Brain haven’t we and it’s a team effort.  We have to help you learn to deal with your anger, because you’re going to grow up and have relationships and maybe have children and you don’t want Red Brain to be around for that.  I’ve worked with lots and lots of children like you.  You’re not on your own.  And I can tell you that things will get easier.  You’re a clever boy.  You’ll be able to work out this difficult stuff, with help from your mum and dad and me.’

Silence.

After the session Jamie and I went to collect Rose his sister, from school.  He talked all the way, about children he knows who are living for one reason and another without their parents.  He talked about how sorry he was that he called his dad such terrible things.  He said over and over how much he loves us all.

The past few days have been the calmest the Donovan household has experienced for months.  As advised by Mr R I have checked in with Jamie regularly, so he gets the message that calm behaviour doesn’t mean he is out of mind.  During a quiet hour I decided to take some time for myself.  I brewed a pot of tea, sank into the sofa, put my feet up, opened the Saturday newspaper and there, in all its fully spelled glory was ‘c**t’.  I marvelled at the offensive verbal synchronicity going on.  I hvae experienced times when the same word crops up in lots of different situations, over several days, as though the great up above is trying to tell me something.  I remember ‘toothbrush’ one time and ’sandwich’.  But ‘c**t’?

The coverage of the John Terry trial showed the nation that it is apparently quite the most usual thing for footballers to call each other this in the heat of the moment on a Saturday afternoon.  Where Terry came unstuck was in allegedly calling Anton Ferdinand a ‘black c**t’, thus bringing about a charge of racial abuse.  Terry’s defence that he was merely repeating back and questioning words first uttered by Ferdinand was a clever one and yet to my mind had the whiff of a school boy excuse about it.  It introduced just enough doubt and the judge found Terry not guilty.  It is not clear where the verdict leaves football and it’s efforts to clean up the game and tackle racism.

Right and wrong are a little less muddied in our house.  Jamie is learning that his past may be a reason for his red brain behaviour, but it is not an excuse.  There are consequences for using that word which don’t include being put back into care.  At least he didn’t try and excuse himself with ‘but John Terry …..’.