Catherine Ellen Mei | Adoption & Fire

The Perils of Discipline

August 31, 2010 By Wendy 5 Comments

Three….what can I say about being three years old? Well, testing boundaries, rules, and independence sums up the age pretty nicely. We have passed through the threshold of summer, usually our difficult months, pretty easily. I thought I was going to pull out my hair a few times but all and all, we haven’t had too many scuffles. Catherine is a good kid but like most preschoolers she is getting good at testing her mother and father. For the most part she listens but we do have our battles, one of them being cleaning up at the end of the day. Actually, cleaning up at all. She dillies and dallies and dawdles until my blood pressure is way, way, way above normal. I have tried a few tactics but none of them seem to hold out for very long. I have tried timers…worked for about a three days. I have tried positive reinforcement by putting hearts on her chart. When she gets 7 hearts she gets a small prize. That lasted about a week. I have tried negative reinforcement by taking away her beloved silly bands but that doesn’t work either.

This child baffles me. It seems like whatever form of discipline we try it just doesn’t work. For example, when it’s clean up time we set the timer for 15 minutes. If she doesn’t get everything cleaned up by then she doesn’t get a heart. That used to motivate her. Now she will say, ‘I don’t need a heart.’ I kicked it up a notch. She gets her 15 minutes and if she doesn’t have everything cleaned up, I add another 7 minutes to the timer and if she still doesn’t get everything cleaned up then I would take away her silly bands. Well tonight, 15 minutes passed…’I don’t need a heart’…set the timer for 7 minutes….5 minutes in she was taking off her bracelets saying, ‘I don’t need my silly bands’….I then got so exasperated that I told her I was going to send her to bed without a story or her beloved panda bear. She then retorted with, ‘I want to go to bed.’ By that time she was done cleaning up. Needless to say, it’s been a few days since she has gotten a heart on her chart.

There are other a couple of other issues that we have battles over and it seems that negative and positive reinforcement does not work. She only goes to ‘time out’ now if she has done something serious and even that doesn’t seem to sway her. Like I said, she really doesn’t get into trouble very much but these daily battles over smaller issues I am having a hard time trying to figure out how to navigate. If rewards don’t work and taking away an item or a privilege doesn’t work, what am I supposed to do?

Thoughts??

Filed Under: Catherine Ellen Mei, Headline

Point of Grace

June 30, 2010 By Wendy

It seems as if my daughter has entered back into a difficult phase in her development. She turned three in May and I noticed that she started transitioning into this tumultuous time a couple of months before her birthday. While I understand no child is a complete picnic to parent, it seems as if I have an especially feisty, spirited child. It has taken me this long to adjust to her personality and just when I think I might have it somewhat figured out, she throws me a curve ball. The sweet, easy-going girl all of sudden sprouts an attitude and a temper to boot. To put it mildly, most days are rough. Most days one or both of us ends up in tears. Most days I wonder if I was even cut out for this mothering gig.

Last weekend both John and I had a not-so-proud parenting moment. Our church was having a family day at a local wildlife park. We piled in a little tram that would give us a tour of the park and allow us to feed the animals as we rode around. John, Catherine and I sat in the same section as the pastor’s wife and her daughter. Now, mind you, Catherine has been to this place several times and loved it every time. But for some reason, this time she was a bit more subdued. She also insisted on crawling all over me, standing on me, writhing around and just all in all would not give me an inch of breathing room. I finally made her sit on the bench with John and the pastor’s daughter. She absolutely refused to sit next to John and started sitting on top of the other child. I assertively told her to sit in the middle and to give this girl some room. She shot me an evil look and shook her head. I shot her ‘the look’ back and she still refused (I guess I have not perfected the look just yet). I didn’t want to make a scene in front of everyone, but especially not in front of the pastor’s wife. I calmly reached over, still giving her ‘the look’ and scooted her over. She then conveniently started having a temper tantrum, which for her, is crying as loudly as possible. Luckily she doesn’t throw herself on the ground. I tried every which way to get her to stop. I threatened, I ignored, I counted, I even told her she was going to scare the animals but none of these tactics worked. And usually they do. So, here we were stuck in this tram with a fit throwing three year old who would not calm down and John and I acting like total lunatics trying to get her to stop. I was completely embarrassed. Once we ended the tour, instead of having a picnic lunch with the rest of the group, we quickly hauled our still hollering child back to the car and took off back to the house. I was fuming!

Unfortunately, we have had a lot of these melt-down moments lately. For some reason they are really difficult for me to handle. Most of the time I try to ignore the tantrums and the incessant whining but more times than not she gets the better of me. I try not to show it, because I don’t want her knowing she is pushing my buttons, but secretly I start getting angry and frustrated inside. And that is when I detach. It’s hard for me to switch gears quickly like she can. The weird thing is, in most life situations I can switch gears quickly, but for some reason with her I can’t. Maybe because I have never been in the situation where we go from a 10 on the frustration level back to a 1 within a 15 minute time frame….several times a day. It takes me a while to recover. What ends up happening is that I get caught in a loop of having a good time, getting frustrated, feeling withdrawn, feeling okay, getting frustrated, feeling overwhelmed, feeling even more withdrawn, feel at peace because she is napping and then we start it all over again until she goes to bed.

I started thinking about how difficult this time with her is right now, and I began to notice a pattern. It seems that a couple of months before she has a birthday (mind you we have only had three of them), she starts getting cranky and her difficult behaviors usually lasts throughout the entire summer months. Last summer was horrible and so was the summer before that (but I chalked that summer up to her just being home). Now here we are into our third summer and every…single…day is a battle. I am thinking that it has to do with her developmental milestones. I hear rumors from other parents that their children were difficult during these stages. I have to believe that this is the same for her as well. With this belief in mind, I have to do several things: fake it until we make it, allow both of us to have more breathing room, take more time for myself, give myself a time-out when needed, pray, pray, pray, and give more grace to both her and to me.

This parenting gig is way, way harder than I ever imagined it to be. I am not perfect. My daughter is not perfect. My husband is not perfect. I am trying to learn a bit more patience and to give us all room to fall. I am getting lots of practice time right now. I know I am going to need it even more in about 8 years when she enters her pre-teen and teen years. Oh, I don’t even want to say that out loud.

Filed Under: Catherine Ellen Mei, Headline, My Life As It Happens, featured

She’s Not All Mine

June 15, 2010 By Wendy

There have been many times where I have heard new mothers talk about their newborn child by saying, ‘He’s so beautiful and he is all mine!” And every time I hear that phrase, it hurts my heart because I cannot same the same about my daughter. I can only say, ‘She is so beautiful and she is not all mine.’ I look into her lovely brown eyes, and kiss those dimpled cheeks, and squeeze that little body of hers, and I can’t help but be reminded that she doesn’t fully belong to me.

When I look into her eyes, and at her face, and as I watch this little girl change and grow right before my eyes, I can’t help but try to picture what her birth parents looked like and I can’t help but wonder about their personalities. My funny, opinionated, life-loving daughter is not all mine. She also ‘belongs’ to those first parents. I may be taking care of her, raising her, loving her, teaching her, and living this life with her, but her story begins back in China, where her mother gave birth to this baby and if only for a mere few minutes, our Catherine was her child. She could say that Catherine was all hers. However, due to some circumstance, Catherine’s parents gave her up to be cared for by an orphanage and sending her on the pathway to having two sets of parents.

I often wonder what Catherine would have been like as a little, bitty 3 year old living in China, had her family had the option to raise her. Would she have the same sense of humor? Would she be inquisitive? Would she be creative? Would she be a spit-fire? Would she not like vegetables? I have to say that, yes, she would have had this vivacious personality because I am pretty sure that her mother and father have some of those traits as well.

There are so many moments in the day when I hold her, or she says something funny, or when my parents say much I was like her when I was a child and it feels like this child came from me. It feels like she is all mine. But I then remember that there are two other parents in her life, thousands of miles and many countries apart, that have a piece of her too. They are connected by DNA but really I think they are connected way more than that. I feel pretty positive that her birth family still thinks about her and that in the very fibers of who she is, that she remembers them too.

It hurts my heart that I can’t say that Catherine is all mine. I’m not saying this for you to take pity on me for not having my own biological child, I have always wanted to adopt. It hurts my heart as an adoptee, knowing that the time will be coming when she is going to realize that she has a huge hole in her heart that I cannot fill; and that hole in her heart is caused by her story that started in China and then ended with my husband and I in the United States. Hence the fact that she is not all mine and hence the fact that there will very likely be a point in her life where she feels torn about her identity and I have to be ready to handle whatever emotions or opinions she might have towards her adoption. I have to care for her by opening my ears and shutting my mouth. I have to care for her by letting her explore where she came from and even possibly look for her biological family.

I say that I feel ready for all of this but I am not sure any adoptive parent is ever really ready. While it hurts to love a child that isn’t ‘completely’ mine, I am just so deeply honored that this child was given to us to protect, to love, and to care for her all of the days of our lives. We made that promise twice while we were in China. And while I took those oaths, I was never really promising the government, I was promising her family left behind. It’s so sad to say but, she is not all of theirs and she is not all of mine. Yes, she is her own person. But, as a parent of an adoptive child, I realize that it’s not about us. I can wish all day that she is all mine, but the choice to adopt was a decision that I made and followed through with no regrets. When we make the decision to adopt, we are getting a child who will have two stories to own and that is darn important.

Filed Under: Adoption Shmoption, Catherine Ellen Mei, Headline, featured

{3 Years Old} Photo Shoot

May 18, 2010 By Wendy

Every year, shortly after her birthday, we do a photo shoot of Catherine to try and capture her personality at that certain age. This year we decided the beach would be a perfect place to take those photos. We did manage to get a few good shots but Catherine is so enamored by the beach and with water that I wasn’t able to get as many as I would have liked. She is too fast for me. I am not one for posed shots because she doesn’t do well with that type of photo taking, plus sometimes she look too posed. And since I am trying to really capture her spirit and personality, just letting her go for it while I try to capture it on camera is what I like to do best. It is much harder though because most of my photos of her are of the back of her head! Here are a few that are my favorite.

Filed Under: 2010: Memory Making, Catherine Ellen Mei, Headline

Birthday Tradition

May 6, 2010 By Wendy

While we were waiting for Catherine, I thought often about how we would honor her birthparents. I read many ideas from other parents and adopted children, many of them were very good ideas. I felt that the best way for our family to remember her mother and father in China was to release a balloon with a written note on her birthday. We have done this since her first birthday, so this was the third year we have done a balloon release. This is the first year that Catherine released the balloon on her own. Even though she doesn’t understand the significance of this tradition/ritual, it was important to me that she was the one to let the balloon go.