What is a honeymoon anyway????

Yesterday Keith said to me, "the honeymoon period is over I guess". He is familiar with that term from my usage of it referring to children in foster care and placement changes. Many "professionals" call the quiet period before kids start acting out the honeymoon period because it is calm and the children (or adult in our case) are fairly complacent. That being said, there is nothing that resembles a honeymoon for kids in foster care. Anyone who has been ripped from their home and familiar surroundings will naturally be scared into some form of compliance until they start feeling a sense of safety. It is at this point that someone who feels they have lost all control will start acting out. I believe that this is where we are now.

I may have said this earlier but I am aware that when Alma is with me and engaged in an activity or conversation, she seems to cope pretty well most of the time. It is when she spends time alone that she become sad and the agitated. Therefore, I am feeling an obligation to engage her all of the time and that is starting to wear me down a bit. Nonetheless, this is what I've signed up for and things could be much much worse.

Today, Alma and I spent some time together talking. I have bought a small digital recorder and have started recording our conversations. My hope is that I will see a pattern form over time.  I'm not really sure what to do with that information but somehow it seems like it may be valuable to us at some point. At least for now, I can use it to keep track until I can get things in writing.

This is what I have noted this past week; Alma has three younger brothers and three sons. She is beginning to mix them up. She calls her brothers, her children (from what I understand, she feels that she pretty much raised them) and today she really wasn't clear about who her sons were at all. She kept getting confused about who lives in our house and insisted that she no longer has any family at all. When I asked her why she was crying today, she said it was because she thought her parents were here and she realized that they weren't. However, she does believe they are still living (they died several years ago). She also talked about her brother, Jack being the favorite and how handsome he was and how her mother told her she was ugly. She said this several times throughout the week. She was quite fixated on her appearance and the sad thing is that she is really beautiful. I did assure her that we are her family and are going to take care of her. SHe will seem relieved for a while and then slip back into a slump.