Red Threads vs. RAD, Part Three

Adoption is a challenge. It is a challenge because we have absorbed many of the dominant culture’s truisms about procreation, children, parenting, and so forth. Society represents adoption as inferior to biological reproduction, and we absorb that. But I love challenges because they expand you, you learn, you end up in a new place from where you started. Who wants to stay the same person forever?

Anyway, I’ve been doing some reading on RAD, Reactive Attachment Disorder, and this may be the most challenging element to adoption. Because, basically, you want your kid to like you, to love you, to cleave to you, and all of that. And, often, they don’t. Or they can’t–their extreme fear of abandonment lingers, often latent, only to resurface after you have assumed the adjustment period has ended, and all seems to be going well.

I had assumed that once you get over the initial shock period of adjustment with your adopted child, most adoptions proceed swimmingly. Not true. Assuming you adopt an infant, there is often a relapse of some sort when the child hits toddler age–at 3 or 4. The child will often regress in terms of responsiveness, aggressiveness, and so on. They can suddenly act out. They can suddenly withdraw. They can suddenly act destructively, towards parents, siblings, pets, or objects. A level of violence and belligerence can appear that seems utterly at odds with what you have known previously of your child.

The solution seems to be some combination of “holding therapy” and biofeedback, with the theory being that it’s necessary to take the child back to infancy behaviorally–cuddling, rocking, bottle-feeding the child as if she was a baby at your breast, etc. That because she was denied this stage when she was truly an infant, it’s necessary to provide it to her even though it does not seem age-appropriate. That until this infancy stage is properly handled, bonding with your child will be very difficult.

One of the most interesting cases I read about was of a child who needed to pick up objects and carry them into the next room with her in order to walk through the house. She would discard the object associated with the last room as soon as she felt comfortable in the current room. I was so taken with this image of the child who associated objects with moving through space that I wrote a poem about it. Here you go:

The Adopted Child

She travels from room to room like a chain reaction,
moving objects between thresholds: spoon from kitchen

to den, book from den to foyer, dog leash from foyer
to bathroom, toothbrush to bed. Her attention to any one

of them lasts the time it takes recognition to settle in,
abandoning the last room’s remnant as soon as she trusts

the next set of floorboards, remembers the plaster. There
is almost always silverware in the sofa. She is Janus,

two-faced god of doorways and new years, wary
of progress—that old excuse to disrobe, to unbind.

Looking back, the god replicates himself. He laces the past
to his temples, she collects souvenirs. Her destinations

are no less provocative, her borders no less defined.
She has a clear sense that absence is what’s left

when she lifts a foot. Objects dislodge easily in her hand,
and what is there to do but carry them around,

grateful for their shape and weight, for their indulgence
as she straddles two worlds, on some level aware

that each token costs precisely everything.