We at Adoption Under One Roof wish all of our readers an enjoyable Labor Day Weekend. We have decided to take a five-day break (Friday through Tuesday) so we can spend this time with our families. My family had planned to spend our weekend along the Eastern Seaboard, but Hurricane Earl had other plans. Alas! We will still enjoy our time together as a family … just not at the beach.

I don’t want to leave you empty-handed, so I have selected some of my most popular blog entries below. Happy reading!

Trauma-related Blogs

• Abused Adopted Child and Emotional Flashbacks
• Hypervigilance and the Traumatized Adopted Child
• Talking with Abused Adopted Child about Severe Abuse
• Trauma Thursday: What Does a Flashback Feel Like?

A common aftereffect of child abuse is the “all or nothing” mentality or seeing the world in “black and white” instead of in shades of gray. I recently wrote about my own struggles with this on my personal blog. You can read that for an example of how the “all or nothing” mentality can play out in the life of an adult. Since most of you who are reading this blog entry are parenting traumatized children, I will provide an example that you might see in your child.

Let’s say that Susy is invited to join the girl scouts. She might immerse herself in girl scouts. She cannot miss a meeting and has a complete fit if you try to get her to miss even a less important, optional gathering. If the goal for the scouts is to earn three badges during a period of time, she might insist on earning even more. She takes on any extra responsibilities asked of her with a smile on her face. Her life revolves around the girl scouts.

At some point, Susy will become so immersed in girl scouts that there is no balance in her life. She winds up missing out on other wonderful opportunities because she cannot say no to any girl scout-related activity. And then, out of seemingly nowhere, she wants to quit altogether. As the parent, you are baffled because this child has lived and breathed girl scouts for so long, but she will not even consider staying even marginally involved. It’s all or nothing, and she is 100% “out.”

As I have shared many times, my adopted child has special needs. He has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as well as across-the-board learning disabilities. Toward the end of third grade, we moved our adopted child to a school that specializes in working with children with ADHD and learning disabilities. This made a big difference. We also had him work with a tutor over the summer to help with his reading comprehension.

I am happy to report that, thanks to the tutor, my son moved up an entire grade level in reading comprehension over the summer. Hooray! He actually read the first part of the book The Tale of Despereaux silently to himself and was able to answer questions about the book at his tutor sessions. It was a challenge for him, but he did it! However, this progress did not come without a price.

Today I would like to talk about an unhealthy dynamic that I see in many biological and adopted mothers: losing your own identity after becoming a mother. It is possible that there are fathers who also struggle with the same issue, but here in the South, I mostly see it with mothers. This is a very unhealthy dynamic that we, as a society, need to talk about and change.

For some reason, especially here in the South (and this might be true throughout the United States), many women believe that, once they become mothers (whether through birth or adoption), they cease to have their own identities. I fell for this one hook, line, and sinker. When I adopted my son, I quit my job and stopped doing all of the things that made me “me” to be solely hub’s wife and my son’s mother. While I have no regrets about being a stay-at-home mom, I do regret putting myself through a phase of my life in which I believed that being a wife and mother was all that I was.

Joseph … its meaning is "Jehovah increases" - Think Baby Names

Josephine … its meaning is "Jehovah increases" - Think Baby Names

The baby name Joseph is of Hebrew origin. The baby name has been on the charts since baby names started being recorded in 1880, when it ranked #7. The baby name has not dropped below #16 (in 1968, 1970, and 2009). The baby name enjoyed its highest ranking at #5 from 1912 through 1917. See Popular Baby Names.