This is a picture of Liam, when he was known only Ao Zhuang and he had no family to call his own. He looks pretty good in this picture, some chub on the cheeks, a little hair on his head...but this picture was taken right before he went to surgery for his cleft lip repair. As his mother, I have been able to put a few things from his story together and all I will say here is that he had to have intensive care from an American non-profit foundation called Love Without Boundaries to help him gain the weight necessary to meet the safety requirements for surgery. And then things get crazy for this little guy...healing homes and foster care and back to the orphanage to wait for months for some strangers to come pick him up....not an easy start on life, not by any stretch of the imagination. But he came home with us and we all did the work and we started to see this wonderful boy emerge from the trauma and the wreckage of his beginnings.
He just fought and fought and worked hard. And believe me, he had to work hard. He was cleft affected with an open palate that affected his speech, he was adopted at a time where the brain looses its first language before it begins to acquire the new language, he had no idea how to do anything but survive in an orphanage and now he was expected to fit into a family, he had to undergo surgeries...even though he now had a family, still life was tougher on this kid at that young age than most people ever have to face and we were seeing this great kid emerge and thanking our lucky stars that he was our son.
And time passed...we have faced may things together as a family since Liam has been with us. All of the regular, garden variety stuff that families face but also all of the stuff adoptive families take on; questions about birth families, bad dreams, feelings of abandonment, stress and anxiety that link directly back to the loss of your first family, issues of being a post-institutionalized child...but most of these things were about emotions linked to abandonment and birth families. Little did I know he was struggling with something else, something just as elemental and fundamental to the human spirit, something that post-institutionalized children deal with but I thought Liam was unaffected by because well...here's the deal:
I knew as an adoptive Mom going in, adopting an older child (Liam was 22 months old when we met him), that one trigger issue might be food, and it was initially. We would have to watch this kid like a hawk or he would cram so much food into his mouth, that he would choke himself because with a 4th degree cleft palate he could get LOTS of food in there- like lots. I had to out him on an infant regime of being fed, every two hours or so- I still had him on a bottle, with snacks. I also fed him first, before anyone in the house, so he would see that he was going to get his share. I let him sit near me in the kitchen while I was cooking or on the counter so he could be around food more. I would give him little baggies of small snacky things to carry. My plan worked and gradually his food anxieties left and he stopped cramming food into his mouth and stopped inhaling his meals and stopped trying to fight Ev for food. And eventually he became relaxed about food and a really good eater like Ev, he will eat what he needs and pass up on things, even say, "No thank you" to dessert if he is full, he will just stop eating anything if he thinks he has had enough, he can tell you what healthy foods are versus junk foods and prefers the healthy stuff.
The other night at the dinner table when Liam asked me how much a human could eat at one time and I answered him with a technical answer that he didn't like and he got serious, alarm bells started going off in my head. (klang! klang! klang!) I asked him why he asked me that and with his answer I fell into a rabbit hole of heartbreak. He said that sometimes he thinks about eating up the whole world, all of the food in it, all of the trees, all of the cars, all of the houses, drinking up everything but then leaving just one slice of cheese to eat later. I asked him if he knew why he thought about this. His answer was sure and immediate, he told me that he has dreams of being hungry, "hungry, mama, very hungry and thirsty and not being able to find food or drinks and no one helping me" These are the moments my friends when I would almost trade being an adoptive parent with anyone, because to sit there and realize fully the pain and trauma your children have that you are almost incapable of healing for them is absolutely unbearable. I inhaled deeply and tried, the best I could to gently help Liam face, head on, the reasons why he was having these dreams, why he was feeling this way and to reassure him that he would never, ever again in his life have a hungry day-not as long as I was his Mama (and how long am I going to be your Mama? -forever! he shouts in response). This too, is hard, to take their past and put it into words, to SAY that facts right into their sweet faces, the faces that make up your whole world. But I know no other way. Truth, communication, love, togetherness-these are the things I hope will be the things my children need from me to make a bridge from that past through this loving now to a bright and blinding future.
*Liam knows that I was going to write about this, I talked about it with him and he gave me his permission. He thinks its ok for people to read this because he knows that we have lots of adoptive friends and he thinks this might help someone.
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