A pane of sunshine opens as my fourteen-year-old daughter Laurèn and I drive onto the ranch. The rain, a continuous shower over the past week, necessitated that I buy myself a pair of rubber boots, reminiscent of little girl boots. Not a memory of my childhood—when the style was either boys or girls—but of little-Laurèn boots with two-tone pink stripes, and polka-dotted splendour.
Given the mud-slop stew of the ranch on this July day, Laurèn decides that she’ll work with her horse Pita in the sanded corral. Without any other adults nearby, I need to stay close, rather than ramble across the pastures and down into the coulee, as I usually do. As Pita steps over the barn door, our dog Wylie slips in behind and runs a semi-circle near Pita’s hooves. Given our dog’s natural herding instincts, I decide to take him out of the corral. Although Pita has shown amazing tolerance for our one-year-old Australian Shepherd, I don’t want to spook or irritate him, and endanger Laurén. I pull out the dog toy I’ve been hiding in my pocket, and walk away with Wylie following.
So keen to work, he alternately walks and spins at my side. I stop, and he freezes in a classic Aussie half-crouch with his muzzle tipped up toward me; eyes focused on his toy. “Ready?” I ask. He waits—a statue of rigid contemplation. I throw the toy through the air, and he takes off. With eyes forward, and ears perked, he zeroes in on the landing site of the toy and plucks it from the grass, already carving an arc back to me. I whistle and call, “Wylie, bring it!”—my voice like the chorus of a song.
We share the pasture with some forty horses, who graze in scattered groups. At the moment, neither horse nor dog seems to notice the other. Over and over, Wylie retrieves his toy and returns to me. As he races away, my eyes travel across the hills rambling away from the ranch, and stumbling into the Rocky Mountains. I linger there, if only for a moment. I take a deep breath.
Just two weeks ago, we brought our seventeen-year-old daughter Faven home from the hospital—her third admission to psychiatry in the past year. The steps and mis-steps I have made in my journey as her adoptive mom weigh heavy on my heart. We did not want to bring her home this time. I know that sounds completely horrible. It feels horrible too.
I throw the mud and slobber-covered toy again and Wylie zips down the hill with unwavering enthusiasm. The fuzz-covered barbell bounces and tumbles close to a grazing horse. An elegant and lean, blue-roan horse lifts his head slightly. Just as Wylie dips to scoop his toy, the horse startles and snaps his head up. Wylie abandons the toy in happy pursuit of this new challenge. The agitated horse prances as Wylie barks and nips at its hind legs in frenzied enjoyment. The horse, with pinned ears and wide eyes, alternately dances and darts, in an attempt to lose its predator. I sprint down the hill. “Wylie Come! Here Wylie!” As I close the distance between us, I see the horse’s left hind leg lift. “Oh Shit!”
Every one of Faven’s admissions has involved the police. Each one has been shitty and hard, in a different way. Faven ran away from us, over and over; we didn’t always know where she was. Without the comfort and safety of home, Faven returned to a mode of survival that she had presumably learned in Ethiopia as a young child. She trusted no one, and yet became vulnerable to everyone. Her mild cognitive disability along with a great desire to belong and to be loved, made her susceptible to “predators”.
Once she turned sixteen, the police would attempt to find her, but they would not bring her home against her will, and they wouldn’t tell us where she was—for our own protection. But who is protecting her?
The horse’s leg bends in and snaps out so fast that I can’t even see if it connects to its target, but I hear a startled yelp and Wylie falls into the grass. The blue-roan takes off. Two horses join him, flanking each side, and they stampede toward me. I put my arms in the air, as if signalling a landing aircraft, and they curve away from me.
“Wylie!” I scream, and sprint toward his prostrate white form. He slowly lifts his head, ears flattened, and eyes reaching toward me. I arrive within metres of him, but my way is blocked by a cluster of horses that have inconspicuously managed to surround him. He lies chastened, in the middle of a group of ten, twelve, fifteen horses.
I. Am. Panicked.
“REALLY?!” I scream to a God I’m sure is close by. “Don’t you see what I’m already going through?” I cry out. This is my place of peace. With two reddish-brown horses facing me, I grab the dog leash hanging at my neck and begin to spin the end toward the horses, in an attempt to move them. “It’s okay,” I say, with the bravado of a fly. It’s okay.
When we made the decision to adopt, in 2005; I told myself that I could love a child born to another just as much as I could love one born to me. Absolutely! I already had experience as a step-parent and a birth parent, and I loved all of our children. Faven joined our family in 2009, three years after her brother Yohannes. We didn’t know about her when we accepted the “proposal” for Yohannes. But, after finding out about her…the hand of fate?…we made the decision to adopt her and bring her into our family. I can say for certain that we have offered her a different life than the one she would have experienced in Ethiopia—we have provided a home, family, love, stability, and opportunity. Meanwhile, she lost everything that was familiar—language, country, food, culture, friends, and family. Indeed, we provided a different life, but I cannot say that we have given her a better life.
Through no fault of her own, Faven has a grocery list of mental health and developmental issues. Trauma resides beneath the skin—invisible. It can undermine a person’s willingness to do well for themselves. Some of their behaviour, learned as a means of surviving a harsh environment, is programmed in, like notes in a player piano. Love becomes more difficult under these circumstances.
As the circle of horses closes in on Wylie, I realize in an instant that I am the protector and must act. I swing the leash with enough vigour that the two horses creating the gate, stretch their necks upward, and away from me. I crouch down, between their muscled shoulders, and whisper, “Wylie, come.” Without taking his eyes off of me, he crawls through the grass like a canine soldier. As soon as he is behind me, I reach down and clip him into his leash. We slowly start backing away. I am chanting incantations: “It’s okay. We’re all okay. No one is going to get hurt. Everything is fine.” The tears began to fall as I finally turn and head toward the corral. The horses, threat removed, go back to grazing.
Faven is my daughter, but I am not her mother. She will not have me. She has a mother, one who failed her, because she died too young. Faven believes I will fail her too. I have lived with her assessment of me as a “mother” since our beginning. She could not communicate her disappointment right away, without a shared language. However, she often sat in the back of a room and watched me with reproachful eyes.
My husband and I knew that it would be more difficult to adopt an older child, so in the months before her arrival we went for counselling together. I called it our “proactive parenting” approach. It’s not that it didn’t work, we covered many possible scenarios and we learned a lot. But knowledge of something hardly prepares you for the expression of it—right up close, and in your face. We could not undo the damage done in Faven’s life prior to our entry into it. We were powerless against such experiences.
I slump into the sand in the corral, and begin to cry in earnest. Laurèn, who rides Pita close by, asks, “You okay Mom?”
“Wylie just got kicked,” I say.
“What! Is he okay?”
“It looks like it.” I run my hands over his body. He lay pressed against my leg. My tears roll like bowling balls in an automatic ball-return machine; one and then another crests my lid, and slides down my face.
“Mom?” Laurèn says.
“I’m supposed to protect him. And I couldn’t. He just ran behind the horse, and I was too far away. I didn’t know. And Faven just got out of the hospital. I don’t know where she is. What mother can’t find her own daughter? And Dad. . . And me . . ” I lost my voice in a sob. “I ca-an’t do it.”
Pita, an immense black horse, stands absolutely still. Laurèn’s jean-clad legs drape across his bare back, and she holds the reins loosely in her right hand. Pita’s head tips slightly in my direction, and his ears pivot toward me—a replica of Laurèn’s head. Horse and rider connect above me as I puddle into the sand, at their feet.
What can she say? Managing Faven within our family has taken a toll on everyone. “It’s going to be okay Mom.” I sit and stroke Wylie’s soft fur.
We met for family meetings every Tuesday during Faven’s three-month stay. Each and every time, Faven entered the small conference room wearing clothes that were not her own, clothes she had taken from her peers on the unit, ones she would encompass into her own wardrobe, and later bring home. Her face was concealed in heavy make-up, and vibrantly-coloured fake eyelashes. She often looked like she was heading out on a date, or even—at times—to the streets. It broke my heart to see her desperation. She always chose the chair farthest from me, and closest to the door, in case she needed a hasty escape. Sometimes she sat beside Ward, and draped herself across his lap. For her entire hospital stay, she cast me in the role as “bad guy”, and I could do nothing about it. I was in fact kind of glad; it gave me a break from the role of being her primary attachment figure and dealing with her scattered emotions.
Faven refused to come home for weekend or overnight passes. Truly, she hadn’t been home for some time prior to her admission—she had even spent a night at a youth shelter downtown. Nonetheless, it seemed odd to me that she chose a locked up psychiatry unit instead of home. On two occasions, during her quiet weekends there, her emotions built up to the point of tsunami-like waves, which uncontrollably crashed out of her. Security, a constant presence on the unit, had to hold her down while the nurses administered haldol, an antipsychotic that caused drowsiness. “This” was preferable to home?
During one family meeting, near the end of her stay, Faven remained on the unit while the psychiatrist told us that she had lost her privileges over the weekend. Along with two others, Faven had participated in body piercing. Not your ordinary piercings either: one nasal septum, one belly button, and one eyebrow. They clearly didn’t think it through—the new piercings shone like beacons from a lighthouse, and the staff noticed immediately. The doctor was unsure if they had shared the needle. Faven would later tell me that she used a contraband lighter to clean the needle between piercings. I sat stunned. How could this be going on, on a psychiatry unit? Moreover, how could we manage her at home?
The discharge happened on a Monday, the last day of school. After I dropped off Laurèn and Yohannes, I went to the hospital where I met with Faven, her psychiatrist, and her family therapist—the glue that had held us together through this process. I could hardly breathe. They laid out the plan that we felt forced to agree to. Not forced because the staff at the hospital didn’t agree that home was not Faven’s (or our) best option. Everyone knew that our home environment, and the people in it, triggered Faven and flipped her into fight or flight. No other reasonable option presented itself, despite many people searching the city for viable solutions. In good conscience, we couldn’t leave her in the hospital: it wasn’t good for her, and she occupied a bed that others lined up in emergency to fill.
I listened with barely contained hopelessness. The doctor passed me a paper with Faven’s prescriptions. I took it, knowing that Faven would (once again) refuse to take the medications that kept her healthy. The family therapist gave me a sheet with referral information, one for a centre that counselled children who had experienced trauma, and another to a facility that specialized in assessment and treatment of young adults with developmental disabilities. They told me Faven agreed to go to both; she obligingly nodded. She had no idea what she was agreeing to; she just wanted to get the hell out and knew from past experience that she had to agree to everything.
I imagined the relief another mother might feel at taking her child home after months of specialized care in hospital; I pictured the “Welcome Home” sign the siblings might have made; and I tasted the celebratory supper that the family would gather around, thankful that this experience had been survived. Was I a bad mom? I didn’t experience any joy.
I walk with Wylie to the car and put him inside. Then I join Laurèn and Pita inside the barn. She tacks down, and spends some one-on-one time “sharing” a meal with Pita—a Higher Trails bonding practice, and I prepare to muck out the stalls. This part of our ranch time feeds my soul in an indescribable way. The barn holds a silence that brushes over me like a soothing hand. My breathing relaxes, and I grab the broom from the wall. With rhythmic motion, I lay the broom on the sodden wood and pull it toward me, collecting the debris from under the long trough. And then I turn 180 degrees, and push the bristles away from me, clearing the planks of mud and hair. The dust rises in applause at my efforts.
Faven and I walked out of the hospital—she, the little girl that she often becomes in times of stress. She called me Mommy, and held my hand, leaning heavily into my side. Tears formed at the corners of my eyes, and I slipped my sunglasses on.
What more could we offer?
“Of all the things trauma takes away from us, the worst is our willingness, or even our ability to be vulnerable.” Brené Brown, Rising Strong
