Jumbled Feelings

Trumpet playing exclamation mark daughter really loved all her sessions with a psychologist.  She has internalized many of the ideas shared with her to help her cope with the challenges she faces.  Like everything she does, she takes all that she has learned one step further!  Yesterday she found a huge unused white board and set up a feelings chart, colour coded and labelled for the entire week ahead.  Today was a multicolour day of jumbled feelings.  I am not at all surprised.

Celebration days are not easy for many children.  Gotcha days also bring up sadness and feelings for the birth and foster families, previous adopted families and other foster siblings left.  For our daughter too, last year we planned a funeral service for her mom on the day before her Gotcha day.  Her mom died several years ago under tragic circumstances, but our daughter had never had a chance to formally remember her mom in a service, so we had a lovely family service.  She wrote notes on helium balloons to send to heaven.  She burned a card where she had written a longer letter to her mom.  We read a passage from the Bible that had been given to our daughter by her birth grandma.  We prayed. We ate an ice cream cake inscribed with "I love you, MOM" on it.

I had forgotten that we had linked the memorial service and the Gotcha Day so close together last year.  I guess the thought was to acknowledge the unfinished grieving before the Gotcha Day joy.  Our daughter did not forget.  Added to this was the death of her friend's dad last week.  We took pizza and helium balloons to the friend yesterday too.  Our daughter was well aware of the close link with her own grief and that of her friend.  We saved one balloon for our daughter and she used a sharpie to write a note to her own mom too.

Even though our exclamation mark girl appears confident in so many situations, underneath it all, like so many of us, she struggles.  She does not like to be singled out for attention.  She always has a hard time with birthdays too.  We discovered the hard way that big birthday parties are not the way to go for her.

Grieving is never something that we complete fully. It  is an ongoing process like so many things in life.  Jumbled feelings are to be expected too.  Our daughter is always comforted that we do not expect her to have unencumbered joy in all the celebrations of life.  Life is so much more complicated than that.  There is relief in knowing that is alright.  I want to allow our kids be comfortable with the wide range of feelings that celebrations can bring.