On Thursday, I packed up Sunny and Sprout and went to Boston with my Dad for my niece’s graduation weekend. Seth had to work, and doesn’t yet have the kind of seniority he needs to take off his weekend shifts. So it was my Dad and me and the girls.
To say I was apprehensive is an understatement. I badly wanted to go, and wanted to make sure my elderly Dad could go, but could not go unless the small fry tagged along. How on earth would my hyperactive 5-year-old and squirmy bored-pants 9-year-old fare through a long graduation ceremony during which they’d need to sit still and be silent? How would they possibly manage meals at nice restaurants, and sitting through my niece’s dance performance? These two aren’t trained to do that sort of thing yet!
I underestimated my kids. By a lot.
Sprout has experienced a lot of trauma. Sunny has experienced a lot more trauma, and she has an official PTSD diagnosis. And let’s face it: they’re in foster care, separated from their loved ones and culture and language and food, and are struggling with it. The separation bothers them to different degrees because Sprout has been here longer – most of her life – and has had time to adjust. But even she has a very hard time leaving her Mama after visits. Foster care = ongoing trauma. A lot of it.
Kiddo, who didn’t go with us, has even more trauma history, and even though she’s back home now, has ongoing trauma even just from living in an impoverished and violent area of the city, familial estrangements, etc. She could not have done what Sunny and Sprout did this weekend, I’m convinced of it.
In addition to their own individual traumatic experiences, all three kids have a lot of family history of trauma. There are increasing amounts of research showing that family histories of trauma are passed down through the generations. Slavery, war, famine, etc. leave an indelible mark in whole families, even generations later. Sunny and Sprout’s grandparents and some of their parents’ generation were born and raised in a violent military dictatorship-run country, or in refugee camps fleeing from persecution and death. Talk about epigenetics and familial behavior primed for passing along trauma-based behaviors and patterns!
So how did graduation weekend go?
Sunny and Sprout were funny, silly, and engaging with my niece and her friends and family. Then they sat like angels through a very, very long graduation ceremony that they didn’t understand or care much about. They liked the parts my niece was directly involved in but there were obviously other kids in my niece’s graduating class and my two minions were bored to death by the end. But they sat. And sat. And sat. They consumed all the candies and snacks that had been laid out on the table for us by the school, but they barely wiggled or talked and when they did talk, it was to communicate something important (like needing the bathroom) and was in appropriately hushed tones. Hot diggety, they were amazingly good!
Sitting still and quietly are skills that have to be taught to almost all kids. For a kid who has experienced a lot of trauma, that can be an especially hard set of skills to learn. For one thing, just being left to their thoughts for long periods of time can be very challenging because some are mighty unpleasant. You know how you get a squirmy feeling when you think of something awful? Well for kids, that often results in actual physical squirms.
Many, many kids who have experienced trauma exhibit ADHD-like behaviors that may or may not be the real thing. Wiggling is more comfortable than sitting still when your thoughts and memories are problematic. Impulsivity and inability to focus are not surprisingly often the result of kids having experienced trauma.
There’s complex science behind all this, involving things like synaptic pruning (elimination of synapses that aren’t being used in favor of ones that are needed at the time). There’s behavioral conditioning going on too, like for example kids experiencing neglect might develop some challenging manipulative-seeming behaviors that were necessary to get their needs met, while ditching more subtle and socially acceptable behaviors that didn’t get the attention of their caregivers. So that conditioning has to be reversed through lots of repetition and reinforcement in a new environment. There are a lot of other fascinating scientific concepts, too, like the epigenetics I mentioned earlier.
But the upshot is that, very often, sitting still is mighty hard for kids who have experienced trauma.
So while we’ve been working on coaching Sunny and Sprout to sit still through grownup nonsense, we’d never tested their abilities for hours at a time, simply because it can get truly uncomfortable for them for reasons we can’t always understand.
Was it a perfect weekend? Of course not! The kids are still kids:
- We had one morning breakfast that involved so much bickering that the children devolved to a WWE-style wrestling match on the bench.
- Sunny got so bored in the car on the way there that she spent time telling my Dad everything she could think of that would get my goat. (“Grandpa! Mommy’s going to get another big tattoo!” and “Grandpa! When Mommy gets mad at other drivers she says bad words!”) Ha! I can laugh now, but she truly did get to me at the time because we both knew exactly what she was doing.
- Saturday night I disagreed with the kids about whether to go to the last event – a party for family at a fancy French restaurant. They wanted to go and won the disagreement, but we all sort of regretted it because Sprout was complaining she was tired, and Sunny was complaining she didn’t like the food, exactly as I’d predicted. We didn’t last long at the party, and I got a lesson in being better at being a grown up who has to make decisions for the kids using my greater wisdom.
On the whole, though, they were brilliant. I’m so so proud of them for holding it together through all the times when it was really important. Those are super important skills for kids to have as they become grownups, and will serve these two well!
In the end, I had a wonderful time seeing my super accomplished niece end one phase of her life and embark on the next. I could not be more proud of her, too, not least for the endless kindness and patience she has for the beloved young humans I’m getting the privilege of raising.
sprinklesonachaoscupcake.com 