Where Am I on the Arc?

As someone who has never parented outside the reality of trauma, I often feel like I am trying to figure out where I stand and what within the wider world of parenting applies to me, and to us, and what doesn’t.

The “mainstream” of parenting - for our purposes here, people raising their own biological children in the absence of major trauma realities - seems to offer an arc of expected development that goes something like this: the under 3s and under 5s are a lot of work, then things get easier when the kids are more independent and in elementary school, then the teen years show up and oof, those are hard too. Then 18 rolls around and they’re off!

Throughout this arc of development, there are milestones of ever increasing self sufficiency that serve as guideposts for the parents: sleeping through the night, rolling over, sitting up, and bathroom independence are reliably achieved and then fade in the distance as they give way to riding a bike, sleepovers, and learning to drive. There is a pattern of challenge, struggle, mastery, and importantly, moving on. No parent is dealing with second grade stuff at the same time they are teaching that same kid to drive.

With trauma, its a whole different story.

The impact of childhood trauma is incredibly complex and long-lived. Due to the rapid rate of neurological growth in infancy and the early years, the younger the child is during the period or events of trauma, the more complex the impact on the brain, and the more unknowable as to how it will express itself as the child gets older.

With trauma histories, it is very common to see developmental milestones experienced differently.

In the mainstream, as crazy making as the potty training phase can be for some parents and kids, parents know that this is a toddler/pre-school thing and they will be out of this nuttiness before kindegarten. But among children with trauma histories, its not uncommon to experience issues around using the bathroom for much longer: a 13 year old survivor of sexual abuse who uses pullups at night, and then hides them rather than putting them in the trash. A 10 year old who wets themselves when under stress.

When your three year old has an accident, everyone understands. When your middle schooler is still struggling with bathroom hygiene, not so much. The camaraderie from pre-school peers and teachers is gone, and the elementary and middle schools and their students and staff aren’t equipped to be dealing with that reality.

It’s important to have compassion for the kids in these scenarios. Depending on the individual, they can be experiencing a wide range of reactions, emotions, and thoughts.

It’s also important to have compassion for the parents/primary caregivers. It’s hard on them too.

I gave just one example of many - bathroom independence. But the reality for many of us parenting children who have experienced trauma is that all kinds of things take their own unique paths. We find ourselves doing things in different order than other people do, or for much, much longer. All kinds of things, big and small. It can be very disorienting, hard to know where we are in time and space.

As for me, I feel like I never know where I am on the arc, or, how much trust I can have in it. My daughter has successfully graduated from mainstream pre-school so a lot is going right. But I can’t trust the inevitability of change so many other parents expect. I feel this on both a micro and a macro level, both when facing short term current realities as well as long term planning.

***

“It will get better!” one of my closest friend’s insisted as I burbled about how frustrating one aspect of toddlerhood was turning out to be. “I remember that phase and yes, it was awful. But it passed. I can’t give you a date, and I know its miserable now, but it won’t be as long as you think it will be. It gets so much easier, I promise.”

More than two years later, I was burbling on the phone again. “It never ended! It never ended! We’re still in it and so exhausted!” She didn’t know what to say other than “Oh hon, I’m sorry.” Both she and I were learning that my kid’s path wasn’t the ones that hers followed; that as much as she wanted to be my big sister and share her parenting wisdom with me, it might apply, or it might not, and neither of us would know when that was.

Runners pace themselves differently according to the distance of the race - you approach a sprint differently than a 5k, and a 5k differently than a marathon.

As a parent of a kid who has endured substantial early trauma, I feel like a runner who has no idea how long the race is, and knows only that I have to finish it. Is the end around the corner the way the other parents say? Is the current developmental hurdle a 6 month thing or a two years thing or more? And how do I care for myself in the meanwhile, without ending up a burnt out husk?

***

With kindegarten around the corner, I find myself both fiercely proud of my daughter and confused as to what this means for me. The youngest or only child starting kindegarten is for many parents a promotion of sorts. There is an expectation that with this milestone the parents’ lives will shift too - away from the home and into the school and wider community, with more freedom and independence for both kids and adults.

For me, I’m not so sure. Will my kid follow that arc? Or will the elementary years not be so different, following instead a phrase I picked up from a parent of three international adoptees: “Our kids’ needs change, but the intensity of those needs stays the same.”

Just as with my mainsteam friends, though, I don’t feel like I can rely on my fellow foster/adoptive parents’ experiences to guide me either. Every case is different, every child is unique, and trauma is a small word for a very big and diverse reality. The day to day realities faced by my fellow foster/adoptive parents are supremely varied.

There are many kids who do well, and many kids who do well eventually. The big storms pass. And then there are those who are in a different place - the “we thought this would be a chapter we got through, but here we are more than X years later and its only getting worse” place.

Some kids emerge from trauma and go on to lead productive, healthy adult lives. Others never get to a point when they can safely be a part of wider society.

It’s really all over the map.

***

As the parent of my one and only daughter, I find myself looking to her over and over again. I want to neither ignore the reality of the trauma she sustained, nor do I want to live in fear of worst case scenarios.

Trauma doesn’t come with a clear single diagnosis or path for recovery. It is complex for many reasons, but one of them is neuroplasticity - the ability of the brain to keep re-wiring itself - and for me, that leaves room for a ton of hope.

No, I don’t have much of a map for my parenting, short term or long term. Yes, I have to take everything all of my inner circle friends and parenting peers say - both mainstream and foster/adoptive - with many, many grains of salt. Whatever arcs there are, we may or may not be on them.

Will my kid hit any of these milestones? Yeah….but in what order and how? What will be the challenges and when? And how long will any of them take?

It’s not just that my husband and I don’t have the map, it’s that no one does. And it often feels like the wisdom of the collective (parenting, medical, educational) just doesn’t apply. Even advice from the therapeutic community - the experts! the people who should have answers! - can be totally off base. Now that we have been parents long enough to have a track record, I can look back and see how much I trusted information and assessments from various authorities (pediatricians, educators, therapists, social workers etc) which only time would show was simply inaccurate, wrong, or didn’t apply.

Where am I on the arc? Nowhere, I guess. Our daughter, and my husband and I along with her, are making up our own path as we go along, more bushwhacking through a dense forest than anything else.

I have no idea what shape this is, but a simple arc it is not.