I have recently come to realize that most of Alex’s behavior can be distilled down in terms of anxiety. I know this is an oversimplification of the matter, but in my feeble effort to understand what he is going through, I have had a lot of luck looking at it this way. There are the anxieties that I know are there, new country, new language, new expectations, new family, etc. These we all expect and try to head off as much as we can, but sometimes can’t. I can do nothing about the language part for example.
Then there are the other anxieties, like anxiety about his family left in Ukraine which I can’t relate to as I look at it as better of left since they didn’t do so much for him. He has anxiety about his future, after all, he never really thought he was going to have one. He has anxiety about relationships, after all, they have not gone so well for him in the past, being abandoned by almost everyone he loved. These anxieties and I am sure a thousand more that I can’t even begin to comprehend are there I am sure.
When he is doing something that is irritating or annoying to me, I try to step back and realize that it is usually rooted in an anxiety. For example, we had a homeschooling group outing to a ceramics studio today. The kids had gone last month to create mask and were going back today for painting. The studio is not large and the parents were asked to drop off their kids and then meet around the corner at a coffee shop. Amanda was with Alex, and they had been before, so I felt pretty good leaving them. About 30 minutes after I dropped him off, the phone calls started. I was a little irritated - ok a lot irritated. After all, I am with this kid 24/7, to the point that even when I try to sneak off the go to the bathroom he sometimes stands outside the door of the bathroom! So I was looking forward to a little adult conversation.
I actually missed the first few calls from him as the coffee shop was busy and noisy, but as a good mom, I checked the phone and saw that I had missed 5 calls from him in 30 minutes. So I swallowed my irritation and called him back. I found out that he had left his drink in the car and was thirsty. This is a no brainer for our bio kids. They wouldn’t think twice of looking for a water fountain or asking for a cup of water, but he was worried about it, so I helped him problem solve to ask the studio person for a cup of water. The next call was to ask what I was doing. The next one was to find out if I was having fun. My irritation was boiling over at this point, but after asking I realized that their activity had ended and he was worried about what to do next and when would I be coming back. But this had been covered ahead of time. The studio owner knew that it wouldn’t take the whole time, so he had encouraged the kids to bring a sack lunch (which I had packed for them) and play outside for the duration of the time of the meeting.
When I was irritated, I was looking at this problem from my viewpoint of can’t you leave me alone for 30 minutes? But when I started looking at it from his viewpoint of feeling anxious, I realized that nothing was going to get better until I alleviated his anxiety. So I asked him what Amanda was doing, told him that I would be back in 20 minutes and asked what other teens had shown up. Once I mentioned these things and he verbalized all his friends that were there, the fact that Amanda was happy and playing with the others, and that I knew I had to come back, he seemed much more at ease and didn’t call me back! I think he felt that he answered his questions himself, not me lecturing him. And when we were driving home, he even said unsolicited, “I had a great time today. It was a lot of fun. When can we go back?”
I realized that I had made a small triumph - I had taken a situation in which he was starting to ramp up the negative feelings and then diffused it into a now positive one. Small victory, but I felt good about it. 6 months ago, I would have just rushed back to him so that I could have smoothed things over myself, and while that might have been ok then, I realize that I need to start helping him deal with these anxieties himself. I wouldn’t have thought about it in terms of anxiety back then - I would have just assumed there was a language issue or some other type of issue that only my presence could have solved.
Alex needs to develop coping skills in life to compensate for what he is feeling and what better way than to start small. I also realized that if I had given into my irritation, I would have ramped up his anxiety by adding to it - what did I do to get mom upset. And what did I loose, not much - I got my adult time out of it - I just lost a few minutes to answer the phone a couple of times. It still amazes me that I am learning so much from him even after all of this time. I see just how far we have come, and yet still how far more there is to go.
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