Becoming a Butterfly

Becca turned six last week. I watched her during the week of her 5^th birthday implode to some sad, dark place. It frightened me. She’s done so much healing this past year and I anxiously waited to see if her birthday week, which coincided with Chinese New Years, would take her back to that heartbreaking place she disappeared into last year. Her birthday came on the same day we had our Chinese New Years party, and yet she breezed through both, with smiles and twirls of joy.

She’s worked hard this year. We’ve been attending play therapy together for over a year. She’s been doing so well that I told the therapist, if we make it though her anniversary (Birthday and abandonment) without a major depressive set back, I think we’ll be done.

I know the play therapy has helped. We’ve done so many sessions that have allowed her to play out a lot of her trauma and anxiety. In our last session she had all the animal babies set up in the sand tray. Then the T-Rex came to gobble the babies up. The symbolism was not lost on me. But I nearly cried when she brought the Mommy and the Daddy kangaroo into the scene. They came and stood in front of the babies and kicked the T-Rex till he was dead. The T-Rex came back to life several times, but each time the Mommy & Daddy kangaroo kicked him over and over again, and I (acting as voice of the kangaroos) shouted at the T-Rex, “You can’t get our babies. We’ll keep them safe. You can try a thousand times but we will never let you hurt them”. She left the session feeling less heavy, and more joyful than I had ever seen her.

The other major shift in my Becca came this summer. We have friends from Hong Kong, Patrick & Maria Cheuk, who came with their three boys and lived with us for a month. They are lovely, warm, gracious people, and they are Chinese. After they had been with us for several weeks I was talking to Becca and in the course of the conversation made reference to the fact that Patrick was Chinese. Becca stopped me, “Patrick is Chinese?” “Yes sweetie, he is” “Patrick’s not Chinese” “Yes, he is”. As I thought about it I realized that she came to us with an intense fear of men, and whatever man instilled such fear and trembling in her, was Chinese and in her mind she equated that all Chinese men must be mean and loud and scary. Patrick is mild, soft spoken, gentle and tender. This experience with Patrick created a huge shift for Becca. In her play therapy, she never had allowed a father figure, or any other male to be part of the scenes she set up. She would carefully turn over each animal on the therapist’s shelf to check its gender before she would allow it to be included in her play. If it was male it was immediately rejected and returned to the shelf. In our play session after Patrick left she said of her scene, “I think I need a Dad”. It was all I could do not to cry. She had been home 3 ½ years, and finally was inviting a male person to enter her life. . Even though Becca’s Dad and Grandpa have been kind and loving and patient, it took a Chinese man to rewrite her belief system about men and allow her to open her heart to the men in her life.

And then Patrick’s wife Maria was so adorable to my Becca. They made dumplings and colored and talked and walked together. I could see Becca drinking her in. I can never be that Chinese woman that she looks at and sees herself all grown up. She and I make dumplings, but when I watched her make dumplings with Maria I realized what a loss for her, that she can never make dumplings with her Chinese mother and Aunts and grandmothers. She needed to spend unhurried time living and watching and absorbing this lovely Chinese woman into her self.

When Becca came to us she rejected everything Chinese. She refused to speak the language, and when we’d teach all the kids Chinese words, she refused to even try and say them. She was also very aloof when Chinese people would visit and refused to talk to them. She would often tell me how she hated her black hair, and how she wished she wasn’t Chinese. Her month of living with this family allowed her to finally accept her own Chinese-ness.

After they left she announced she was ready to learn Chinese. Since this past summer she has loved her black hair and she has embraced the many Chinese things we do in our family. I took her and my other girls to a Chinese dance performance over Chinese New Years. We sat in the balcony and watched hundreds of Chinese families streaming in, Grandparents and parents with their children, extended families and friends gathering together. I turned to her and said, “Becca, isn’t this SO fun to see all these Chinese families”. She turned to me and said, “Yeah, and I had to come with you guys”. After the first stab that went through my heart I realized two things, First, it was sad that she didn’t come to celebrate Chinese New years at this dance performance with her Chinese family, that she had to settle with sitting with a bunch of white people. And second, her acknowledgment that she wished she had come with a Chinese family was a reflection of her healing.

One of my favorite books on transracial adoption is Beyond Good Intentions” by Cheri Register. In her book Register teaches that “Your child is capable of loving you and still having intense feelings about those other parents off in the distance…This curiosity…doesn’t negate the value of your parenthood or diminish your importance in your child’s life. It’s not rejection, not disloyalty. It is not even about you.” pp. 18-19. Becca’s comment was a healthy acknowledgement of her losses, the loss of her Chinese family, the loss of belonging to a Chinese community, even the loss of being surrounded by people who looked like her. My heart ached for her losses, and after that first stab of pain I also recognized it was not about me.

The third part of her healing has been working through her anxieties about having to be perfect. I posted about her first day of kindergarten and her relief at not getting sent to the Principal’s office. But as school progressed I realized how anxious she was to be perfect so as not to get in trouble. I realized she feels this pressure to be perfect, compliant, to never create waves. But it came at such a great cost, she was anxious from the pressure, and she wasn’t honoring her own needs and feelings. I finally told her,

“Becca, you’re human. You’re going to make mistakes”

“No I won’t. I’m never going to make a mistake”

“Yes, you are. And it’s O.K. when you do. Mommy and Daddy will still love you, and you’ll learn from those mistakes.”

“Well, I’m not going to make any mistakes”

“I’ll make you a deal, if you’ll make a mistake, then you and Mommy are going to go on a date and we’ll go get some ice cream.”

“I’m still not going to ever make a mistake”

It took her four months before she slipped up. She was talking to her friend and her teacher wrote their names on the board. When I picked her up from kindergarten she was totally distraught.

“Hooray for Becca! You did it, you blew it, you made a mistake! Let’s go celebrate”

She got a mischievous grin on her face. Later that afternoon we went to Maggie Moo’s for ice cream.

“But I’m never going to get in trouble again”

“Oh, you better,” I said as I’m thinking, ‘I would never have this conversation with my other kids’

I used to tease that it took another gene pool to get a neat and tidy child. Becca was my only child who would keep her room immaculately clean. Everything was in its place, and if one thing was dropped or left out, she’d put it away. Today her room is a total and utter disaster. The more my Becca has healed, the more chaotic her room has become. I hope that means my other children are healthy. Does that mean that my messy house means that I’m healthy too?

She has also been so sweet and compliant. Now she’ll talk back, throw a fit, scream that she hates me. I never would have guessed I’d be glad about such behaviors. But I realize they’re healthy, she’s finally expressing herself in authentic ways. But as she has, I have also seen more of her authentic self, more joy, and more genuine happiness.

I know there will still be times when Becca will have to grieve her losses, and process her grief. She’ll have struggles, but right now I’m seeing her healthy genuine self, her giggly dancing, singing happy self, emerge from the stress and anxiety she’s carried through her young life. I believe that she will emerge stronger, and with a greater depth of character. Watching her journey has been heartbreaking, but I feel such joy to watch how she’s emerging with such strength. Maya Angelou has said,

"We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes that it has gone through to achieve that beauty.” ~Maya Angelou

Becca is my beautiful butterfly. I feel privileged to share her journey through life.