Spurred on by our early success in getting LuLu to talk, we decided attachment was her major issue and began searching for another attachment therapist. This quest took us to a professional out of our state for an intensive. LuLu made much progress, and my hopes were high. Her hours of sleeping increased to about four hours at a time without waking, although rarely more than eight hours total in a whole day.

But I was floundering in juggling the demands of being the kind of therapeutic mom I needed to be along with working full-time. Less than a year after LuLu had arrived home, I gave up one of my part-time jobs because the commute there added two hours to my time away from her. By January 2000, I had decided that giving up the other job was in order, and that I could consult from home, allowing me the “best of both worlds”.

While I was extremely busy for a few years, the truth was that I was just exhausting myself…and LuLu needed more. She had a fabulous caregiver during the day, who kept just a few children in her home. It was a stable, structured and nurturing environment. But it wasn’t a chance to attach to her family.

The therapeutic interventions had moved LuLu from a very avoidant and almost dissociated state to the quintessential Velcro kid! This shift from an avoidant, rejecting child to an anxiously attached one was heralded by the therapist as a healing move.

I wanted to believe, I really did. But having a nearly 4-year-old who refused to leave my side (even for me to use the bathroom), was a bit disconcerting. I blogged about this a long time ago as the summer in which I didn’t even get to shave my legs.

Developmentally delayed is a key buzzword when it comes to LuLu. And although she had opened herself up to being more attached to me, she stayed in this anxious attachment stage for over a year. The flip side of this stage was her total rejection of Super Dad. She literally screamed bloody murder upon seeing him. Before that, she actually seemed to be more contented with him than me, and searched for him when he traveled. But during this phase, he was the interloper, and his presence was not to be tolerated.

It was also during this time that I tried to put her in the church preschool – one year successfully (only because the teacher was the most highly structured/nurturing teacher I’ve ever seen); the next year was a total bomb. So, for the first of what was to be many public humiliations, LuLu was kicked out of preschool.

By the fall of 2001, I felt as if we were still adrift. I had memorized every Nancy Thomas tape I had, called her attachment therapist repeatedly, read every email from our attachment listserve. I was even striking up a friendship with Nancy Spoolstra, one of the gurus of parenting children with attachment problems.

But I still felt like I was on shifting sand. So, I headed to the ATTACh conference, and the people I met there changed our lives.

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