the big move

He is gone, I’m sure. I’m really convinced that he might be someplace too hard to come back from. His eyes are empty, and look only straight ahead. They are looking right through whatever is right in front of him. I lean down and embrace him. I crouch and pull him on my knee. I repeat what the new teacher has just repeated twice herself. He stares through her forehead. I whisper, hoping a change in voice might help him to hear. “I bet you’ll be able to remember your new teacher’s name! It’s the same as mine” I say. He says nothing.

His thumb is rubbing back and forth back and forth in the middle of my hand. It is starting to get harder, it actually kind of hurts. I repeat my quiet whispers with a little tickle on his chin. I go further, “Tieran, what’s my name?” trying to help him understand this new woman has the same name. He continues the piercing gaze through her to the kids in the background, and says, “Heather.” My heart sinks. He never calls his biological mom by name. Usually, she is mommy, and I am mom. Or she is mommy heather. Honestly, she is not a common topic. But never just heather. And I have certainly never been called that. I say, “What?” and he repeats it, his voice like some strange cartoon character. It reminds me of that crazy monotone mouse (is it a mouse?) who wants to take over the world. It is totally devoid of emotion. It’s like he’s a robot. He continues to rub his little thumb back and forth. I say nothing of the mix-up, and just hug him tighter. I give him a second, and then say, “tieran, this is Sarah, your new teacher.”

The therapist has been trying to get me to leave tieran for a bit now, encouraging me to help him “integrate” into the new place quickly and painlessly. Painless for whom I wonder?

I eventually leave him in his catatonic state and go to the intake for the new residential treatment center. It was ridiculous. They grilled me on paperwork that I didn’t bring because they were supposed to get it from their evaluation center, where we already did this whole spiel a month ago. All the while they are asking me about which medications he took and when he started and stopped them, all I can think is, “is he gonna come back?” I am honestly more comfortable with my little tornado of a boy than this emotionless-monotone-frightened-to-the-point-of-frozen one. I am scared that this is the last straw. That he is now believing that internal working model of “if I’m bad enough, I just get kicked out…” I am desperate to go find him. Hours later, when I am released from the pointless and painful intake, I find him in the “castle” that he now lives in. He is already bouncing all over and having a hard time following directions. I help him unpack a few things and make his new bed. There is a jungle theme in his room. A cute mural that makes me devastated over the beautiful little room we prepared for him so long ago. The room that has been emptied out of everything but a mattress because of his destructiveness.

I am envious of this place. They have so many more people. So many folks to back them up, to tag out while “out-waiting” him, which is the basic prescription for attachment disorder. Give him the choice, and then wait him out. The problem I have is that they are good at their jobs, but their jobs aren’t enough. Their job doesn’t include tucking him in and hugging him several hundred times a day even when he doesn’t act like he wants it. The night before, he and I had one incredible hour together. This might sound ridiculous, but it has been ages since we’ve had an hour like that. He was scared to move. Scared that the reality of his past, his pain, his choices are actually meaning something. That we might mean it when we say that he has to start trying to do better. I think he realized it wasn’t up to us anymore. That it wasn’t just about controlling us, but that now others were determining his progress or lack thereof. That he is, in some ways, losing the battle for control. He was scared. He let me mother him. It had been so long.

He didn’t do it the way most four years old would. He said he didn’t need hugs, and then proceeded to spend the hour saying, “if I did such and such, would you have to give me hugs then?” and I said yup, I think so. So we went through, oh goodness, if you scratched your nose right now, I’m afraid I would have to give you three hugs and twelve kisses, and he would scowl. Then wait for me to turn my head slightly, and scratch his nose. I slathered him with as much love as I could muster, which is so much more than I ever though possible. All I can pray is that is enough to hold him. To hold him through the fear that looks like hyperactivity. To hold him through the misbehavior and aggression and lying and the big fight he feels he has to fight. Until the next time I can scoop him up and whisper in his ear that he is special and he is loved. I sort of experienced secondary catatonia after leaving him. He was back to talking and looking and taking it all in. but I am just as afraid all the time, as he was in those moments when his little body just checked out. What if this love isn’t enough to bring him back?