I started another post, a nice one, but I got interrupted 72 times by two raging-over-nothing children, and now I am very angry.

I probably shouldn’t even blog, while in this black mood, but this is the reality in the adoption of older children.

It is barely eight in the morning on Spring Break, and the smartest one just went down in a fury because it wasn’t his turn to get on the computer. How does that translate into a right to tear up someone’s house? To hit walls, kick furniture, and lash out at the only person who has ever properly taken care of him and his very emotionally disturbed siblings?

We cannot go on a Spring Break vacation because I’ve chosen to use what little money I have to take care of children who often hate me for doing so. They’d tear up any place we stayed at anyway, and I can’t afford to pay for damage somewhere else and here too.

I resent that. I’ll be honest about it. It’s not fair. I’m not the birth mother that murdered their birth father, that left them sleeping in bare dirt outside in the barrio. I’m not the one who chose drugs over groceries, nor alcohol over provisions.

I’m the nerd who budgets, takes them to school, feeds them constantly, clothes, loves and provides for them. But the damage has already been done, by the one who didn’t do any of the correct things.

This is why they are the way that they are. This is what I have to deal with; this is the reality in the adoption of older children. It is pure sacrifice on my part, an attempt to possess the ability to distance myself emotionally from the hatred that is spewed out at the world, usually bitterly drenching me in the process.

I’ve had them all in counseling for years, in an attempt to “break” them, to free them from their anger that has emotionally crippled them, that will likely send them to jail as adults if they don’t overcome this disability, this inability to face the world and its subsequent disappointments without melting down.

Again, the only way for adoptive parents of older children to survive, is to emotionally distance oneself from the maelstrom of mixed up feelings; we can’t take it personally, we can’t expect anything in return, and we can absolutely forget logic and concrete thinking in their initial stages of emotional development.

This all takes a very, very long time.