A friend asked me if I’d ever blogged in detail about how we “healed” LuLu’s attachment disorder. I have written several times that I know her attachment to us is much healthier than it was, but haven’t necessarily talked about how we got there. I’ve got to tell you that it hasn’t been a direct route. And as I play it back in my mind, although I know that her attachment is greatly healed, I still question which parts are which in a child with so many disorders.

So maybe, if I review it all here, you, my readers, can jump in with any insights. After nearly a decade of parenting LuLu she is not “healed”. What I mean by that is that she does not appear to be developing into a person who will be able to live independently and function in society without support. She is truly disabled. What her disability is (if we have to list a singular one) is anyone’s guess. I believe her true disability is that she hit the lottery of combined genetics, neglect, abuse and poor nutrition, resulting in what looks like a ton of disabilities intricately woven and barely distinguishable.

In the beginning…I was so naïve. I was convinced that my overwhelming urge to love and nurture a child who had not received any love and nurturing would be enough. No one told me about attachment, trauma, sensory integration problems. I had enough common sense to know she would be delayed in speech and motor skills. Delayed implies the ability to catch up, right?

When they handed me LuLu, she was calm. I wouldn’t call her totally “flat” in her affect (words I had no idea what they meant at the time). But she didn’t act afraid of us. She, however, remembers the situation much differently. Years later she found the hat I had worn to the orphanage (a large brim straw hat to keep the sun off in the blistering summer weather). A flood of memories came back when she saw the hat. She was obviously traumatized by our “gotcha”.

Back at the hotel, we realized that we had a child who had never eaten solid food, and wasn’t about to try for us. She also wasn’t real keen on sleeping in a room with strangers. And she began running a high fever. The next two to three days we teetered on the edge of crisis as we tried to get her to take anything from us…formula, water, etc. Finally she started to eat, and when she did, she ate like a horse. To this day, I don’t know how much of her refusal to eat was trauma and how much was illness. I know I was worried…and began instinctively that balance of nurture and structure (both cuddling her and forcing her to eat) that has become the theme of our relationship.

Back at the ranch (after very LONG, mostly sleepless two flights home) she took off physically. She started walking, then running in less than two weeks. And her two teeth became 10 in no time. She ate everything in sight (except for ice cream…too cold). But sleeping or speaking were totally off limits…she refused to do both. And I was doing just about anything I could to get this child to doze off.

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