Trauma

I have not gone into any discussion on why Megan could be having the bad nights that she does up to this point. I guess I have said that she is a "night processor", but otherwise, I have remained quiet. I feel like now is an excellent time to share what I believe is likely impacting Megan's sleep issues: trauma. No, she likely wasn't abused or neglected. She wasn't in a car accident. Here is an excellent website that discusses trauma in adopted children for those of you interested. Essentially, trauma is experiencing loss. And Megan has experienced loss: loss of her birth parents, loss of the familiar at the orphanage (to name just a few). While many people want to simply overlook the fact that she has experienced these losses, it doesn't change the fact that she has experienced these losses. (In fact, she's experienced more losses more than some people ever experience in their adult life and she experienced it all by 11 months.)

Earlier this week, Megan's night started out bad. What's bad? Well, we can tell what kind of night it's going to be simply by how the 10 o'clock hour goes. That night, she would doze off to sleep in my arms, then wake herself up, fuss and we'd start the process over again. It went on for an hour. Finally, at about 11:30pm, she fell asleep and I was pretty certain she was very asleep, but I wasn't sure what do with her. Did I put her in her crib and risk her waking up the minute her legs hit the sheet? Or just bring her to bed with me? As I was standing over her crib praying for an answer, she woke up, looked at me, didn't make a peep but fell back to sleep. I knew my answer and promptly brought her to bed with me. I had just gotten her situated (snuggling close to me) and she began what I can imagine were bad dreams. She whimpered and began gasping like a child who had been crying hard for a long time and they were trying to calm themselves down. It was absolutely heartbreaking. I was almost in tears. It went on for I think was about 15 minutes or so. Then she calmed right down. She did look at me a few times, (and I thought, oh crap, now she's awake again) but she's just roll over and go back to sleep. I'm confident she was processing something. I believe it was some of the trauma she's experienced because it had been a very quiet few days at our house--we'd stuck around the house. She slept with me for about 3 hours, then it took about an hour to get her back to sleep, but then she slept for a couple of hours.

So...if you are wondering...since I posted about our good nights of rest...we've not had good nights at all. The last several nights have not been good. Last night Dad was on "duty" and he said she was very restless, whimpered quite a bit and lost her paci several times. That means a short night for Dad, but he did wake me up a little before 4am to trade off. She never did go back to sleep. I worked on it for 45 minutes, and she slept for only 5 (yes, minutes). Nothing is more frustrating than that! UGH!

I pray she processes her losses soon so that we can have a "normal" sleep life at our house!!!