Interesting Twist…

This post is going to be a bit involved so you may want bail now before you commit a lot of your time. Let me begin by giving God the glory…ALL the glory. We have been blessed to see his hand of provision faithfully guiding us through to a new level with Yaya. I will have to start back on July 26th.  We had some of our dear friends stay over at our home. They are big advocates in the world of Autism and Asperger's. They spent all day Friday with us, stayed the night, and then left Saturday morning. I was fortunate enough to engage in a conversation with my friends about some concerns that have been growing in the back of my mind for several months. They were concerns that I had not actually shared with anyone because I didn’t know how to frame them and to be honest, I thought people would think I was crazy. While talking to my friends I made the statement that I sometimes wonder if Yaya is not on the spectrum. My friends eyes shot open wide and she gently said that after spending a 24 hour period with Yaya they too shared the same concern. We all agreed, something was off about Yaya and we weren’t sure that being an international adoptee could explain it all away.

At this point I’m sure many of you are thinking….did you just suggest that Yaya is in some way, shape or form autistic?!  The answer is, no, not really. Although it would have been foolish to totally rule it out. From all my research in preparing to adopt I had read that often institutionalized children can have very bizarre behavior and exhibit semi-autistic behavior even though they are NOT autistic. Yaya had been exhibiting very strange behavior over the past several months that we tried to keep pinning on “attachment issues”. But for me that was starting to lose its sticking power. There was SOMETHING wrong with my daughter. After speaking with my dear friends and being validated that I was NOT losing my mind, Yaya did indeed have some strange behavior, I crafted an email. This email I sent to 9 different people in 3 different organizations and within 24 hours I had heard from someone from each organization. I LOVE the team God has assembled to care for Yaya. Within 72 hours I had met with the two key professionals in Yaya’s life…her attachment therapist and her speech therapist. What I discovered shocked me. After meeting with the attachment therapist, I was still hanging on to the idea that Yaya’s behavior was attachment/adoption/anxiety related. It didn’t really resonate. Even my therapist said… “I’ll be curious to see what your speech therapist says.”

Here where it gets interesting folks. The week this happened was to be our last week working with this specific speech therapist, something that made me so sad. I went to our last speech session with Yaya and the last half of the session our therapist took Yaya out to play on the playground with a class that was out there. (This comes into play the next day.) We didn’t talk about the email I sent because I had an appoint to discuss it the following day.  But I did throw out the possibility of keeping her on as our private speech therapist in addition to what the state provides. At this suggestion her eyes lit up and she said that Yaya was going to need more than just two days of speech a week. If we could afford to still keep coming that she would keep Yaya as a client. Praise the Lord! So that brings us to Friday’s appointment with our speech girl. We got settled in our room and she opened up with… “I am by far the best person to address your concerns about Yaya. Before I did speech therapy I was a diagnostician for children with autism. I worked exclusively with autistic children.”

Let’s all just pause a moment to let that sink in, shall we?

Do I need to ask the question, “What are the chances of that?”

Does our Lord supply all our needs or what?!

She followed up that statement with, “I worked with autistic kids and there is no way this child has any form of autism. She couldn’t do the things she does with me if she did.” She brought out the criteria for diagnosing autism and was prepared to walk me through every step to reassure me that this was not Yaya. But I didn’t need her to do that since I didn’t think Yaya was autistic. I just didn’t understand what was going on with her and I knew something was wrong.

She then began to tell me that about 80% of the behaviors we are seeing are speech related. She also suggested that I get rid of the idea that Yaya has “attachment” issues. She told me that all of the people I contacted agreed that Yaya is attached. But Yaya is “anxious”. The two words are NOT synonymous, but several of my professional peeps use them that way. Then she told me about two other families she wants to introduce me to that have kids who had clefts. Their kids are biological, NOT adopted, but they are experiencing the same things we are.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! How can that be? Well for starters she is an extremely bright child as we all know, and she gets that she should be speaking like Eden and Noah but isn’t. I have two hyper verbal biological children and Eric and I are very loquacious ourselves so being in our family and NOT being able to verbalize is very stressful. Also, she KNOWS she isn’t our biological child and that Noah and Eden are…and they can talk. But the real kicker is this…she is cognitively at a 4-year-old level but has the speech abilities of a 12 month old.

Again…let that one sink in…

Upon hearing this comparison…I just wept. I looked at my speech girl and said, “It’s like being locked in.” Her eyes widened and she affirmed to me that this is very much how Yaya experiences life right now. Yaya knows all the words she wants to communicate, full and complicated thoughts and ideas, but she has no way to communicate them. Ugh. Can you imagine? I know this is a temporary situation. Intelligible speech is going to come, but I was informed it is going to come extremely slowly for Yaya. The road before Yaya is still a long and arduous one indeed. <Big sigh> However, this is the road that God has set before her and it is one he will lead her safely down. (As a side note, I am praying against the idea that it will take an extremely long time for her to master speech. I am praying for a miraculous, supernatural intervention on God’s part that will allow Yaya’s mouth to do what it needs to do, what it should have done naturally were it not for her cleft. Please join me in that prayer.)

Remember when I said, we went out to the playground for half of Yaya’s last speech appointment? That was so our therapist could observe how Yaya interacted with other children (unbeknownst to me). I remember Yaya being introduced to a few kids. Things always start off good with Yaya and new kids but usually end badly. What our therapist observed was that Yaya does NOT interact “atypical” with other kids. Yaya actually does great…right up to the point that dialogue is required; then Yaya shuts down the interaction because she knows she can’t be understood. Stab me in the heart, will ya? Please pray that Yaya’s preschool class is loving and will work with Yaya to include her and befriend her.

So where does that leave us now? What do we do? Well we are to do several things:

1. Give her more control in her life. There are all kinds of things we need to let Yaya be trying on her own, instead of doing for her…i.e.. picking out her clothes, putting on her clothes, doing all parts of the process of teeth brushing and washing her hands etc. She needs to be able to assert herself more in her own environment to feel more comfortable in the environment and to feel good about herself.

2. Get a workable daily schedule in place.  Yaya NEEDS to know what is going to happen ‘next’. In the orphanages they had very rigid schedules and things were predictable. To help address Yaya’s anxiety level we need to have a functional daily schedule that she participates in creating. Our speech therapist has made one for us to use and it is wonderful!

3. I am to stop correcting and working on speech in the home right now. Constantly correcting Yaya’s speech and continuing to connect with her at the same time equals impossible. She is stressed enough as it is to communicate with me and correcting her all the time is making her anxiety worse.

4. Increase Yaya’s sign vocabulary to that of a 4-year-old.  This is just good sense. She can communicate with someone on her cognitive level if she has the signs she needs. Therefore I will be signing all the time with her.

We have instituted these changes and have seen a dramatic decrease in her rages and other strange behavior. We are also speaking to her about how frustrating it must be for her right now and reassuring her that speech is going to come. We are praising all her efforts and tell her how proud we are of her (she has mastered the sign for proud by the way.) Since I started signing to her all the time, she is attempting to respond in full spoken sentences. I have no idea why that is happening, but it is, and we are thrilled. We are still having hard days but we don’t seem to be escalating anymore. It has been remarkable to watch. And amazingly her speech is actually getting clearer! We are able to understand more of what she says. We weren’t supposed to see our speech girl until September but she had an opening last week and even she noticed that Yaya was sounding more articulate.

All this is amazing, but what is helps ME the most is knowing that this behavior isn’t all coming from the trauma of her past. Her past still haunts her that is for certain, but it isn’t what is driving the majority of her anger or anxiety. She may always be an anxious child and she may be a little quirky, but who knows? What I do know is this: our attachment is there and it is growing. As it grows it will help decrease the anxiety. Speech is coming and as her speech grows it will greatly reduce her anxiety. God is faithful and he desperately loves this child of his and as his presence in her life grows…He can eradicate her anxiety. This is my prayer. I pray that God eradicates anxiety in Yaya’s life, that it is not something that she will wrestle with her whole life.

So there you have it. How amazing is our God to orchestrate all of this? Can you see his hand in all of it? I mean how bizarre freaking awesome is all of this? If my friend hadn’t shown up, if I hadn’t of emailed all my therapists, then my speech girl would have never know what was happening. And it was our LAST WEEK WITH HER! And how is it that she just so happened to be diagnostician for autism but now is MY child’s speech therapist? Seriously?!! God is Glorious!!! It blows me away. Pray for speech, friends. Pray.