Adjusting and Honesty

In the one month that Jacinda has been home, I would honestly say that 97 percent of the time things are picture perfect. However, this post is going to focus on the other 3 percent...


Throughout my adoption journey I had heard other parents talking about the famous Ethiopian pout, so the first time the pout came to visit, I immediately recognized the signs. You really must experience this to get the full picture of it, but I will try my best to describe it.



Jacinda's pout goes something like this. First her always present beautiful smile disappears as she purses her lips together. Then her beautiful brown eyes halt their dancing and become empty pools of darkness as she stares right above my head or directly through me as I speak to her. Next her thin, but strong little arms that are usually hugging me or tickling me, become paralyzed and find a frozen spot crossed in front of her chest. She stands defiantly, ignoring me and everything around us.



Now honestly in the six weeks that I have been with her, we have only had four or five instances of this, so I count myself blessed as I know families who have much more frequent visits from the Ethiopian pout. But during one of my bouts with the pout, that is little consolation to me.



A few times school work has been the culprit. Usually she works on her vocabulary words and does book work with zeal and no complaining, but a time or two, she obviously doesn't "feel" like doing it and prefers to goof off or haphazardly write nonsense answers and when I call her on it, she instantly shuts down. The other day her regular tutor was out of town, so I had a substitute come in to help. Honestly I thought it would be fun for Jacinda because it is a young teen girl that she absolutely ADORES. However, Jacinda immediately thought it was going to be a play day and when that didn't work out for her. She shut down and the pout came to visit for a couple of hours.



Another time, I won the worst mother of the year award for trying to slip a sliver of egg into a breakfast sandwich. She looked at me with detest and snarled "Egg." In my defense my darling daughter ate eggs while we were together in Ethiopia. She had turned her nose up to them a few times since we had been home, but I honestly thought combining them in the folds of a sandwich would be a good way to get her to try them again. Boy was I wrong! I advised her to follow the same rule with the sandwich as we have with everything else...take two bites and if you don't like it, no problem. Well evidently that was a problem for her. What ensued was a battle of the wills...she took a bite of egg, but then held it in her mouth like a 2-year-old. She seemed shocked that I knew what she was doing and swallowed the egg, only after I told her to open her mouth. She did take two bites and I was true to my word and removed the offensive egg from the sandwich. When I asked her if she just didn't like eggs, instead of answering me...the pout took over and she pretended I didn't exist for the next few hours. She even found a way to button the back of her church dress and tie her bow without me. It was a lovely Sunday morning.



While we talk about the pouting afterward and I pull out an Amharic chart of feelings to get her to tell me what is going on inside of her head (just in case the culprit is frustration at not being able to express herself. She will NEVER say she is angry, even though I know she must be.



As I try to get Jacinda to work through her feelings and understand that part of life is sometimes doing things that we don't really feel like doing, I have also discovered that I too suffer from frustration. As I said months ago, this would be a process and now I am learning that I am not merely a guide or spectator to her transition, because we truly are on this journey TOGETHER!