So many of you have written me private messages. Please know that I am trying to respond to all of you, but my days are very full, and I just can’t always respond to all of your comments. I read every message and comment you send, and am so very thankful for all of your support and suggestions.
Sometimes there are a few quiet moments during our homeschool when I can write or respond to comments and emails, but usually the only time I have to write is late at night when everyone is sleeping. It is an either or kind of thing. If I want to write, I have to trade sleep for it.
I am an intensely sensitive, reflective person and need a lot of quiet time. Writing is very therapeutic for me so I usually choose the writing over sleep.
That could be why I’m so tired.
Many of you have suggested Eliza may have some sort of sensory processing disorder.
I believe she does. She is sensitive to noise, and light. She is aware of sounds and often repeats them almost in a form of echolalia. She is hyper-vigilant during the day and at night. There is nothing that happens in our home that Eliza is not aware of.
She also constantly bumps me with her whole body. If I am standing at the counter, she almost rocks into me, and her ‘bumps’ are inappropriately rough. Many times I loose my balance or have to reposition my feet to stand up against her. She pokes me, again much harder than is appropriate.
I do not believe that sensory processing disorder explains it all though. The huge disparity between her spoken language and her written language leads me to think it could be a form of verbal apraxia. That would make sense. If you can’t express yourself through language, it would be hard for people to see anything that is deep inside you.
She certainly does not have difficulty learning. She is on Unit Two in the Rosetta Stone English course, and is doing very well. When we first started doing math, she could not add or subtract two column math, but already she is beginning to master that.
She learns very quickly and was in typical eighth grade in China. That is really tough for me to comprehend.
With that level of academic ability, it’s really hard to think of her in the significant range of mental retardation. I just don’t really think that’s it, but there is something that I just can’t figure out.
There is a significant social and emotional component to all of this as well. I would have to say this is where I see the biggest deficits. Socially and emotionally she is incredibly young, even in the very young toddler range.
A friend of mine who has also adopted a teenager from Eliza’s orphanage has shared with me that Eliza didn’t play with the girls, but rather with the boys. I’ve given this a lot of thought and observation.
Here she doesn’t play with the boys or the girls. She really doesn’t play at all. If she is connected at all here, it is with the girls, but it is clearly not a normal relatedness that one would typically see among sisters.
Thank you for bearing with me on this post. It helps me just to clarify it all so that when I have a chance to talk to the professionals, I have the right words to express what I am seeing.
I do have a question for those of you who are more familiar with orphanage delays than I am.
Could lifelong institutionalization be the sole factor in such severe social and emotional delays? To me, there has to be more involved than lifelong institutionalization for her to be so delayed.
What do you think?
I wrote yesterday about my experience in the clinical psychology realm. I have only recently begun thinking back to those days when I walked the halls of the institutions.
When we made up our lists of special needs I felt we could handle, I never gave my experience a second thought.
When I wrote that I knew why God had chosen me to be Eliza’s mother, I was only just then putting it all together in my mind. Those years of experience had seemed far away, and for whatever reason, I had been so caught up in living each day that I just hadn’t thought that there might have been a very special reason why God had chosen me to be Eliza’s mother.
Somehow that realization has blessed me and given me a deep confirmation that God did, indeed, plan this. This wasn’t a mistake. Perhaps others were deceitful in preparing Eliza’s file, perhaps others wrongly withheld information from us, but from the beginning of time, God knew that I was to mother Eliza and all of my life has prepared me for this most wonderful life’s work.
You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. ~Gen. 50:20
I was, indeed, meant to be Eliza’s mother.
And somehow really knowing that makes all the difference in the world.
What an awesome God we serve.
Blessings!
I, too, am a verbal processor, so writing it all out helps me to process. Keep writing. Keep sharing. Keep asking questions.
When we brought home our daughter from Ghana, she was extremely delayed socially and emotionally, yet “okay” on the academic side. My daughter had only been in the orphanage a year and a half, but I believe her social/emotional delays were due to the trauma of her childhood (prior to the orphanage) added to the orphanage situation.
Sometimes, we found, it is VERY difficult to even discern where our daughter is/was at academically, because she chose to “play games” during our schooling time. She wanted to control me, so she would tell me that she didn’t understand something . . . even if I had taught it over and over and over.
It took us 3 years of focused teaching before she would admit to knowing how to tell time. Seriously.
And, after 4 years of working on addition, subtraction, and the very basic multiplication facts . . . we put her in a small private school. Within ONE WEEK . . . she was multiplying 3 digit numbers with 2 digit numbers. Yes. She. Was.
She had “played” me for 4 full years. Consciously “playing dumb” in order to control mom’s time, mom’s emotions, the other kids’ school time. (I have heard of multiple other adopted children doing the same thing.)
We put her in school and she was immediately the star student. Oh. So. Hard.
I, too, was “meant to be her mom” for our Little Miss. It actually took a friend to point it out. 🙂 After being home 16 months, we discovered that the older brother had been molesting his youngest sister for many years: in the village, in the orphanage, in our home. Heart breaking and horrifying, to say the least. As we walked through the realization of her being sexually abused, a dear friend of mine pointed out that, “The Lord knew that she needed you to be her mom.” as I, too, had been abused as a child. Yes. The Lord knew.
Keep up the good work. Keep searching for answers. I would NOT accept the “mental retardation” at this point. I am shocked that someone could come up with an IQ so quickly, when she doesn’t even speak the language. 🙁
Hugs & Prayers. Let me know if you ever want to talk.
Laurel
mama of 12
Mama D.’s Dozen recently posted..Oh How I Love Cooking for a Crowd
Diane, I just wrote you a private email but there is a part of it I’d like to share here, in agreement with MamaD and in case it may be helpful to others:
…reading about Eliza is not the first time I’ve questioned the validity of a retardation diagnosis for a kid who’s possibly on the autism spectrum or at least has a speech disorder. Of course, I’m not a doctor and I don’t know what testing was done, but if part of it was an IQ test – how can an IQ score be a valid reflection of a child’s actual intelligence if s/he has a problem formulating or communicating answers? Intelligence has to do with abstract processing, but if you can’t actually express what you know, you’re not going to get a score that reflects your processing ability. That’s a failure of the diagnostic instrument, not a true reflection of ability..
…and I’ll add, even if they tested her in Chinese the above still hold true.
Hello Diane,
I work with developmentally challenged adults. Your daughter might be on the autism spectrum. There is such a wide variation in what people on the spectrum experience that unless a child exhibits very clear and typical symptoms, it is difficult to diagnose. One person might be non-verbal and appear cognitively at a two-year-old level but is able to read and write at a much higher level. One person can’t look people in the eye while another can. One person can’t bear touch or rough textures. Another loves to be hugged. Hyper-sensitivity can go along with this, although I wouldn’t rule it out as stemming from her orphanage experience. Flight response is often seen in older adopted children and that is part of the hypervigilance. I would definitely look into apraxia as suggested above and also into autism and ADD. I’ve just started reading your blog so I’m not sure how long your daughter has been home. My first son, who came home at 6, took over a year to get used to being in a family and really tested me for a while.