In the intervening years, getting Freyja to sit down and learn things has been a major struggle. At five, she finally started to learn to read, at the same time as her peers, but long after she could have done. Only 12 months later, she is a good reader, and gets all her words correct in the weekly spelling test. She loves to read and her frustration is gone because she can now do it for herself, and has learned the skills she needed.
The frustration is still there for other things though. She wants to swim, skate, dance, draw, sing, and all the other things that every six or seven year old princesses want to do. But she can’t do them as she wants to, straight away, and she can’t easily learn the skills, because she won’t or can’t concentrate for long periods, sometimes not even 2 minutes.
The frustration has manifested as anger and as a lack of self-confidence. It has grown and mutated over the years. The tantrums at the terrible twos continued into the traumatic threes, the f***ing fours and fragile fives. Now she's six and will be seven in a few weeks and we have pretty much decided that this is not something she is going to grow out of by herself, it’s something that we need a professional to help us with. That was not something easy to admit, for me or her dad, or even for her, as no one wants to say their wonderful, talented, clever, funny, amazing child has something 'wrong' with them, especially a (shhhhh) *whispers* Mental Illness...
But ultimately, when the elephant is acknowledged, that is what this is classified as. People still have that fear of the term Mental Illness, but they bandy around the component terms of it with no problem at all, Depression, OCD, ADHD, ODD and so on… though there is still always a little tinge of embarrassment about it, we are finally starting to get there. Mental illness means that a part of your brain is not producing the correct chemicals in the correct levels for your body. If you had diabetes, you would change your diet, get more exercise, maybe take insulin. If you had Asthma, you would do the same changes to diet and exercise and take an inhaler. Why should faulty brain chemistry be treated any differently? If there’s an issue, it can be fixed or at least helped, maybe with diet and exercise, maybe with therapy and counselling, maybe with medication, but where is the big taboo?!?
I have thought for over a year that Freyja may be ADHD for a long time. We used to joke about her OCD tendancies when she was three and had to touch everything in order on the way to her room at bedtime. We wondered about the anger and defiance (usually directed at me) – could it be ODD? We worried about the vivid and disturbing nightmares she had, and how they were getting progressively worse the older she got, despite shielding her from adult programming and news broadcasts.
And then there was the emotional turmoil, maybe it’s all because of that…..
When she was about 16 months old, her Dad and I both found out that we were going to lose our jobs. At the time, we were living in the North East of England. My parents lived around 20 miles north of us, as did my Grandparents, and her Dad’s parents lived around 20 miles south of us, as did his brother and sister and all their kids. We saw them all every weekend, sometimes through the week too, we were a close knit family. But her Dad’s Granddad had been from Canada, and it was a dream of ours to move to Canada when she was a little older, but because of the job situation, we would have had to move to find work anyway as it was the beginning of the financial downturn in the UK, so we decided to make the leap and head out to Canada, specifically to Calgary, which was then Boomtown.
A few months later as Freyja turned 20 months, and 2 days after Christmas, we moved out of our house and in with my parents for a month. At the end of January, we caught a plane west. Now we do not regret our decision, we love Calgary, we love the opportunities it provides us, though the intervening 5 years have seen a lot of financial struggle, and the economy in the UK along with the general attitude of those living there has plummeted.
BUT, and it is a big but, our move took away her stability. She lost her family overnight, and while Skype is a wonderful thing, it is not the same as a hug from Nana or a couple of hours playing with your cousins on a Sunday afternoon.
Since we’ve been here, finances have been tight, friendships have been started and ended for us as parents and for her, as people have moved out of the city when the economy nosedived. We have moved house 4 times since we have been here, she has been to 4 different day-cares, one preschool, one kindergarten, and a different grade one.
Last year, she became a big sister too, only 4 weeks after her birthday. A wonderful, and yet terrible thing for a five year old. She wants to be an amazing big sister, and she is, but she also wants things to be as they were, no competition for affection, no praise directed at someone else, no having to share Mom and Dad….
And that is pretty much all the back story...... next, Where we are today!
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