Two steps forward, one step back...

I confess I hit a bit of a low point today. I only want to share this because I believe it will help others who have unrealistic expectations of how quickly they believe they'll hit an adjusted phase with their newly adopted children. Also, before you proceed, I want you to know I had a great night's sleep this night and felt like a new person, and had a new vision of hope by the next morning!

I'd worked hard to plan a field trip for our family (and my niece and nephew) before we left for China. This might be the fourth time we've attended the Inland Pacific Ballet's presentation of the Nutcracker Ballet at Claremont College. It's become a tradition, which includes lunch and then a visit to an old-fashioned candy store. I was excited to get Joy to this presentation since she is a dancer and scored high in her ballet portion at her school.

In the end, I don't believe she was very impressed. She told Max that Chinese ballerinas are much better than American ballerinas. She has not been very impressed with American cooking (although I need to remember that she was already a picky eater in China). The candy store didn't go over very well, because she absolutely detests sweets. When you start to think about it, so much of what we eat is so sweet - even apple sauce, and a beef stew I laborously made was sweet because of the corn.

When we got home, we needed to communicate because she wanted us to cut her hair. I tried to ask her some questions to understand what she wanted. She rejected the Babel fish translation and the expensive hand held translator we bought her, saying she didn't understand the Chinese it produced. When we tried to work on English, she wanted to give up.

It didn't help that Layla, our dog that Joy has tried so hard to warm up to (eventhough she is not used to pets at all and a bit scared of our menagerie) mauled down a crow in the park this day when Joy was holding her leash. Joy was traumatized by the crow's imminent death.

I cried this night.

I told Max it feels like "transition" in birthing, when the mother loves her baby but doesn't believe she'll be able to get it out of her body. Max corrected me and said it's more like "postpartum depression". The family has waited so long for this baby and the mother has had visions of how wonderful it will be when the baby is here. Then the baby comes, and the mother is sleep-deprived, the baby isn't nursing properly, and the whole family's life is in upheaval and mom feels out of control. Max had the proper comparison.

There has been a recent interesting discussion thread on a yahoo group that discusses adopting older children from China. Some parents shared how they learned that in the orphanage the children's academics were not totally supervised. That if a child didn't feel like going to school, they could just stay "home" and help with the smaller children. I feel that I have identified this occasional unwillingness to persevere when things get hard in my beautiful daughter.

I want to add that today is just two days after this low experience I've explained. Can I tell you that already in two days she has made such progress in terms of her English, and her perseverance? Because of inaccesibility to a computer, we didn't start our English until 9pm. I've tried to keep our work in bite-size pieces so it's not discouraging. Do you know that she wouldn't stop for 1 1/2 hours? I was wanting to leave (I sit with her while she does it) because I had so much to do - but she wouldn't let me leave. She wanted to be absolutely sure she was pronouncing everything correctly. I am SO proud of her!!!

Oh, I almost forgot her wonderful quote which I roll over in my mind whenever I need to. The other day Faith was asking her if Joy misses her best friend back in China. Before Joy could respond, Faith said, 'Because you could go back to China to be with her". Joy responded, "Yes, if my family comes with me". That was as good as gold!!!