Why I wrote And Trauma Made Five

When I wrote And Then There Were Four, I thought that was the end of the story. We’d reached our happily ever after, beyond the emotional experiences of infertility, adoption, matching and finally becoming our family. What else was there?

I naively imagined that pretty much everything that came next would be the same as other families. Parks, ice cream, school, birthdays, holidays, endless laundry, faces smeared in spaghetti, poo-xplosions, stepping on Lego. Mundane everyday shizzle.

And for a while, life proved me right.

Until our family started to wobble. Then rock. Then face plant.

When my assertion that my children were unaffected, unscathed by adoption began to look somewhere between oversimplification and downright falsehood. When the phrase all children do that began to rankle and hurt. When the unusual chaos began to be more frequent and we felt more and more unprepared for the family we had created. When too many evenings had a WTF? flavour of dismay and despair. When the evidence kept coming at us and we couldn’t hold onto our denial any longer.

New Eyes

But it was meeting other adopters that really helped me see my family and my children with new eyes. First through social media, when I started using Twitter. That led to a sudden and illuminating baptism in words like dysregulation, previously unknown to me but describing our experiences so well. Then it was the Adoption UK conference, when I heard about the way that education so often fails our children. I sought out and surrounded myself with people who understood.

From feeling overwhelmed, alone and confused, I started to understand why our family wasn’t the same as others.  Why the traditional parenting approach didn’t fit. To discover pieces of the puzzle: explanations and tools to help my family.

But it was a chance conversation with Betty at school, when I was struggling to understand how to convey empathy in the face of anger, that proved a turning point. She showed me the way. I wanted to dismiss it – it seemed too simple – but I was desperate. The technique clicked and later that afternoon, I used it to instantly defuse a volatile situation that transformed me overnight into a therapeutic convert. It was miraculous. Inspired, I wrote about “Fighting Fire With Fire” on my blog.

On Fire with Enthusiasm

The feedback made me realise how hungry parents like us were for information to help them navigate their family life. And I kept learning, kept adding sparkly spanners to my therapeutic toolbox. Each new insight helped me understand a little more about what was going on beneath the surface, in the brains and bodies of my children, and helped explain what drove their weird and wonderful behaviour. I wrote about those too, because each family needs their own unique toolkit that works for them, in their situation, with their children.

My greatest wish is that this book finds another family when they sit down one evening, exhausted after a WTF? day, and gives them a piece of their puzzle that they didn’t have before.

Something that makes their life a bit easier, a little happier and perhaps less combustible.