This Monday?!?!?

So, no sooner did I make the last entry than I get a phonecall from the clinic asking for Lee and I to go in for a meeting. "can you do tomorrow" asks the nurse....

Erm sorry what?

"or Monday if tomorrow is too short notice" she says...

Wow!!! So on Monday we go to start it all off. I am so nervous!!!!

Where we are today!

Finally, now, we have some stability again.  Our finances have improved.  My husband and I both have stable jobs with family oriented bosses.  Freyja’s school is great, a huge improvement on the one we went to for kindergarten, and there is no bullying.  She has dear, close friends.  She is growing and learning and doing well at school.  We have close family friends who are like a surrogate family here, they live only a few streets away.  Her daycare (before and after school) is the one she has been going to for almost three years now, her sister goes there now, and her care-giver is like an extra grandma, the other kids are like cousins.  Our landlady is a wonderful woman who has treated us like family and basically told us we can stay in the house until it falls down if we want to.  Finally she has a stable basis, continuity….. but the behaviour hasn’t stabilised, if anything it is getting worse.

She’s getting vivid nightmares of people hurting her, her sister, me.  Daddy trying to save us but not being able to.  She is frustrated when she can’t get something right first time.  Calls herself stupid, hits herself on the head.  She is angry when she can’t do things her own way and lashes out, especially at me.  She is doing well at school, getting all B’s,  but her teacher is getting frustrated because she thinks she should be easily getting all A’s.  Says she is the smartest kid in the class but cannot concentrate, does not listen, is always the last to finish.  These are things I have been hearing for a while, and things I have been telling teachers since she was 3, but because there has been no continuity, they have not realised that this is a continuing pattern, not a phase.

Well, it finally came to a head a couple of weeks ago when she started throwing things during her tantrums and almost hit her little sister with something.  She was heartbroken about it, and as always when she loses her temper, she was full of remorse after and telling us she was stupid again, and that we would all be better if she was dead.  As a person with depression issues, that waves a huge red flag to me.  There is depression on both sides of our family, and after watching her cousins as kids, I think possibly some ADHD tendencies amongst them too – certainly they had anger issues as young kids, though now they are grown into well adjusted teens.  So, we went to the family doctor last week, and he referred us to a Paediatric Psychology Unit, who have in turn yesterday referred us to the Paediatric Behavioural Development Clinic (PBDC) at the East Calgary Health Clinic.

So, in around 10 weeks we should have our first appointment, and bearing in mind that we have been dealing with this for five years, you would think that 10 weeks would be a breeze, but already my mind is racing....

What have I done? Am I a bad parent? Will it scar her for life? Will they think we are mistreating her, hurting her? Was it a mistake? What did we do wrong? All the usual second guessing I am sure all parents in the same situation as me and DH must go through...

So, I am going to take a deep breath and started this blog to get all those thoughts and feelings out. To document it for me, and for her, so we can decide if it was a mistake, or if it was the best thing we could ever do for us as a family, and to show her down the line (hopefully) how far we have come.... oh how I hope that we do indeed go far and that she can grow up to be an inspiration to other kids who just can't help themselves sometimes.

The first few Canadian years...

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!

Where it all began....

This is a blog about and for my eldest daughter. As I begin this, she is 5 weeks away from her seventh birthday. She is funny, sweet, very clever, kind, amazing and the most beautiful miracle any mother could have not to mention an awesome big sister. She is also at times angry, defiant, depressed, achingly unsure of herself, of her worth, and of her place in the world. This is our journey to find out what we can do as a family to make things better for her, for us as a family, and for the family she will have in the future.

Freyja Honey was, and is, our little miracle. We had some stuff going against us for getting pregnant, and had decided that we would start trying 3 months before we got married. We expected it to take at least 6 months, probably a year or two – we were pregnant next month! That’s Freyja for you, determined to have her own way even if it means making me have last minute dress fittings!

Nine months later (2 days, induction and absolutely no labour ) later she was born. The birth plan had gone out the window, she had decided not to come out, and was eventually born by c-section, to the background music of “Is this the Way to Amarillo” by Tony Christie and Peter Kay on the radio, and the accompanying grunting of the doctor who nearly broke Daddy’s rib using him as support to literally force this baby to leave the womb – yep, really we should have hear alarm bells then. She really will not do something unless she wants to, no matter how much you beg, plead and cajole.

And so, off we went home with our bundle of joy. New parents. I’d never even held a baby before, and here was this amazing little girl.

Freyja was a very happy and smiling baby, very independent even early on, and very quick to develop, though again she would do things when she wanted to, and only then. Just as she was approaching her first birthday she was not yet walking, not really doing much crawling either, though we were sure she could. One day a little girl at daycare that she always played with got up and walked a few steps, much to the excitement of their carer. Freyja immediately got up, stalked across the room, sat down at the other side and gave everyone the look…. Yeah that look, the one that says “I did it better than she did! Now what do I get?” Sure enough she showed off for Daddy and Mama that evening too, and that, as they say, was that.

Her speech was early and she was fast to learn, by a year and a half she had the vocabulary of someone a year older, by 2 years she was speaking in full sentences. Her ability to communicate was wonderful and helped reduce frustration, but at the same time it also became a bit of a curse. She was the size of a child of three when she turned 2. She had the speech of a child of three, so everyone treat her as if she were older, including me if I am truly honest. I had never had a child before, I didn’t know what to expect and thought she was just like any other child. It’s only now as a mother of another baby, and after spending much time with other parents over the last 7 years, that hindsight gives me the truth of it. Everyone expected more of her, everyone treated her as if she should have the understanding of someone older, and we were so wrong to do that.

Along with the early speech development, came an ability to know her alphabet and her numbers, again both were in place by 2 years old, but soon they were accompanied by a frustration that she could not put them into context to read a story, or add up a number. The frustration got worse as she did not want us to teach her, she did not want to LEARN how, she just wanted to KNOW how!

And that was the beginning of the path that we are on now. A great morass of frustration, love, anger, laughter and tears that makes up our family life.