If you drove up to the front of my house, you might be fairly impressed by the size of it, the way it seems to rise out of a hill on one side; the height and breadth of it are singularly impressive. One son of mine claims though that we each only have enough square feet to breathe, the square feet of oxygen over our heads. He exaggerates because our house is huge.

So it looks good from the outside, sometimes it looks OK on the inside, but the giveaway to the fact that I parent traumatized children, comes from the faint odor or urine that seems to be pervasive at times. Traumatized children wet the bed. There’s a fact for publication, one I can take to the bank.

It gets better over the years. I’ve had children wet the bed until well into their teen years, precludes sleepovers and weekend trips away, as Mama is understanding, others may not be so.

It’s embarrassing to the child of course, but not as much as one would expect. The sad fact is that it is all they know, often siblings wet also, therefore this must be normal. Normal in the world we live in maybe, but to outsiders not so.

I’ve found that DDAVP or other drugs designed to combat enuresis have little positive effect.

If a child has been repeatedly molested at night, just coming into an adoption home does not stop the resulting behavior. Just because I sweetly tell the child, “You’re safe now, honey ,” does not translate into their minds as a truth. The statistics for sexually abused children, who’ve come out of foster care, or unsupervised international orphanages, or as victim of their mother’s many marginal boyfriends, are astronomically high.

Bedwetting isn’t willful, it’s not their way of getting back at me, it’s nearly a reflex. The child or children are not about to get up in the night and visit a bathroom ten feet away when all their previous life experiences have taught them that “Monsters” truly exist. Sometimes just knowing that the urine reeks is comforting to the child as they hope that it will repel others.

Getting past these behaviors usually requires psychological intervention in the form of counseling. I’ve found that it can take years for the child to feel safe, maturity sometimes helps in the cessation of this behavior, I’ve found that boys and girls exhibit bedwetting fairly equally here, and at least for our family, by the mid to the late teens it has decreased into non-existence.

Nowadays it is a much more rare occurrence for our family, certainly not the daily event with multiple participants like it used to be. (What was this, a sport?) Maybe once a week now, and only in a couple of the kids anymore, the decrease in this is now impressive.

Measurable progress in a family like ours.