Coming Home

This is a continuation of Zeke’s story. I’m writing a bit about my family here, which is rather difficult to do. It feels like a betrayal of sorts, but it is not. Just as Zeke’s story is our story, my parents’ story is mine. We have all changed over the past many years, as is usually the case, and I hope sharing what happened in the past in no way detracts from who I know them to be now. They have regrets, but I do not. All that happened was God’s sovereign plan and I am thankful for it. If you’d like to catch up on Zeke’s story, go here and here.

We were finally able to leave the hospital, but had to stay in-state until the Interstate Compact agreement was signed, so we took Zeke to the coast and enjoyed a few days alone with him while the girls were at home. The guilt of choosing the adopted child over the others had already begun as we had to miss our middle daughter’s birthday. Given the gift of sass, she still reminds us of that and I have to admit it still makes my heart hurt when she does. Thankfully, the agreement came through early and when Zeke was 23 days old, we could leave North Carolina. We said a tearful goodbye to his birth mom and returned home.

The first few weeks were a whirlwind. Family and friends wanted to meet him, so in true southern style a dear friend threw us a Sip & See. It’s akin to a baby shower, but everyone comes after the baby arrives home, sips sweet tea and sees the little one. We started settling in to life with a newborn, finding joy in buying all the baby things we had just given away or sold in our garage sale a few months prior. We also had many doctor’s appointments and with them came our first smack in the face with what we could soon encounter. Our infectious disease doctor told us bluntly that HIV was the least of our worries. With a child exposed to drugs and alcohol, we were looking at a lifetime of psychologists, medication, behavioral therapy, and most likely prison. Our baby was a month old. We both walked out of there wondering what on earth her problem was, but looking back, we got it. Statistics don’t lie. They aren’t bigger than God, but they don’t lie, and we knew we could be facing a mountain we didn’t know how to climb.

Around the time of his actual due date, reality hit and hit hard. Our sweet little baby stopped sleeping. And eating. And he started crying. All. The. Time. There was nothing we could do to soothe him. We started going to lots of doctor appointments. He had blood in his stool, so we figured he had an allergy to his formula. Great, let’s get him on an amino acid formula we thought. That will do it. Nope, he still cried and refused his bottle. He would go hours refusing to eat anything and yet we knew he was hungry. It got to the point we had to physically hold him down and shove the bottle in his mouth. He would suck it down in seconds and then scream again. It was literally non-stop. Day after day. Night after night.

He wouldn’t sleep more than a few hours at a time. Every night, he was exhausted, so we would get him to sleep, only to have him wake a few hours later and scream. For hours. Every night. He would sleep if being held, so that’s what I did all day because he hated the carrier. Everyone told us it’s just colic. Their baby had colic too and he’ll grow out of it. He’s fine. It’s normal. I’m certainly not an expert, but I have two older kids and have been around lots of other babies, and this kid was nowhere near “normal”. But we kept on keeping on. Week after week, month after month, it was the same. I started seriously considering a career at McDonald’s. I figured I could really make a go of it. The girls could go to school and Zeke could go to daycare with all the money I’d be making at my new gig.

Those first two years are like a dense fog. I know what happened in part, but I do not recall all of the details. In fact, there are many years of my life I literally do not remember. I have a friend who can practically recite entire episodes of the Brady Bunch from her youth and I cannot remember entire chunks of time growing up. Not that remembering the Brady Bunch is at the top of my wish list, but birthday parties and Christmas celebrations and school teachers and visits with grandparents, those things might be nice. But nothing is there.

I grew up in a very volatile home with an alcoholic father who was raised in a home with an alcoholic father and a mother who had 12 other kids. He had no skills to be a parent or lead a family. In some ways, he was still very much a child himself. I had a mother who got married too young and didn’t know how to cope with the life she was now living. She was my stability, but she was also spread too thin, trying to keep her marriage together, raising three kids, and working full time. I had an older brother who was adopted and whose violent behavior my parents didn’t understand or know how to handle. Now we are fully convinced his birth mom drank, but 48 years ago, this was not a recognized problem. My parents pretty much did everything wrong in how they disciplined him and it only escalated, which is really sad and tragic in retrospect, but they had no ability to do otherwise. How could they?! You can only act on what you know and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder was pretty much unknown in the 70s.

Then there was me. I was the one who tried to be perfect. The good student, the one who didn’t cause trouble, the one who obeyed the rules so I would be loved and not cause more turmoil at home. But trauma / extreme stress has a way of showing itself even when you try to hide it and one of the ways it does that is by blocking out events. It can be a sweet gift, actually, and in many ways I believe the Lord has spared me much more pain by taking those memories from me. But it also means years are gone, never to return.

That is what it was like the first two years of Zeke’s life. Memories are gone. I remember big events in hazy pictures, but the day to day is a blur. I know we went to many, many doctors and therapists. We got very little sleep. We tried anything and everything we thought might help, but nothing did. We prayed the Lord would heal him, but in his wisdom, he chose not to. We tried occupational therapy to get him to eat. (We quit after the very young, very inexperienced therapist told me to give him whole blueberries at 9 months, because he must just not like baby food, and by the way, he’s well within the range of “normal”.) From there, we researched sensory processing disorder and tried brushing and joint compression and stripping him naked and anything else we could think of. We tried working with a behavioral therapist to help him regulate instead of raging when he didn’t get what he wanted when he wanted it. Immediately. We tried disciplining him. We tried not disciplining him. We tried screen time with therapeutic apps. We tried no screen time. We even tried homeopathy.

We listened to countless people tell us what we should do or not do and nothing worked because what was broken could not be fixed. All the while, we were drowning and slipping farther and farther into a deep, dark hole of despair. We never lost our hope in God, but we were losing our hope that anything or anyone would be able to help us.