If you are parenting a foster or adopted child with a history of trauma, your child might keep his or her bedroom “gross” for lack of a better term. My sister was this way. She would have her mattress on the floor, dirty clothing strewn everywhere, and cat urine, poop, and vomit covering the dirty clothes and carpet. I would watch sitcoms showing a dirty room, and the room on TV would be cleaner than my sister’s room. My sister was not a gross-looking person when you saw her out and about, but the smell of her bedroom could knock you over. (When we moved out of one house, we had to replace the carpet and repaint the walls to get rid of the smell.)

I couldn’t figure out why my sister was this gross because she wasn’t this way all over the house. I would have thought that she would want her bedroom to be the cleanest room since she had to sleep in it, but it was always the grossest even into early adulthood. It wasn’t until I started healing from the child abuse myself that I figured out why she did this. (I don’t even think she could have told you why she kept her room this way. She just acted like it was normal for her to live in a disgusting room like that.)

My goal in writing my Tuesday/Thursday Trauma blogs has always been to provide insight into the mind of an abused child. I have never parented a traumatized child, so I cannot speak to what it is like other than through observing the joys and trials that parents of foster and adopted children have endured. My goal is to empower those of you who love and care for abused children to understand what is going on in their heads.

I was taken aback by John’s concern posted to this blog entry about people possibly be “put off” from adopting older kids after reading what I wrote. That is the absolute last thing I would ever want to happen. I thought about what he said, and then it hit me – His concern is very likely due to the fact that some of you don’t know that different abused children are going to react differently to the same trauma. So, let me rectify that possible misperception in this blog entry.

Let’s use my sister and me as an example. We both endured the same traumas, and we were severely abused throughout our childhoods. By the time we reached our teen years, we were both very damaged emotionally. My sister would have had a hard time finding anyone to choose to parent her. By age 14, she had already experimented with just about any drug out there and had likely already lost count of the number of sexual partners she had. She was defiant and would tell anyone off at the drop of a hat. She skipped school regularly and dropped out after ninth grade. She had marks up and down her arm from burning herself -- hardly the kind of kid that most people are looking to adopt.

Then, there was me…

As I shared a few weeks ago, I have fallen in love with the new CW TV series Life Unexpected. The show is about a 16-year-old girl named Lux (played by Brittany Robertson) whose birth parents, Cate (played by Shiri Appleby) and Baze (played by Kristoffer Polaha) placed her for adoption with the State when she was a newborn. Nobody told the birth parents that Lux was never adopted and grew up in the foster care system. In the pilot, a judge discovers that the termination of parental rights (TPR) was never finalized and places Lux into the temporary custody of her birth parents. Both birth parents feel terrible about Lux having been raised in a number of foster homes, and they are trying to learn how to parent an emotionally wounded teenager. They both love her, but there have been quite a few bumps along the way.

A couple of weeks ago, the show about broke my heart when it covered the topic of the foster child/adoptee feeling “unwanted.” In Lux’s file, Cate saw a letter that Lux wrote to Santa when she was around eight asking for parents for Christmas. Cate thought it was sweet, but Lux corrected her – It was sad. While children all over the world were asking Santa Claus for toys, year after year Lux asked for parents, but she was never chosen.

I have a friend who was sexually abused as a child. One day, she called me wondering why she was so wigged out. She was having terrible nightmares and feeling off kilter and anxious throughout the day. We ran through her usual triggers and could not come up with anything out of the ordinary. Later, she told me that a relative (who was also one of her abusers) was in town. She had no idea that he was going to be in town and was taken aback when he walked out of her mother’s house to say hello. I asked my friend if this was about the same time that the nightmares started, and she realized that this was the trigger.

This is not the first time that this relative has come to visit, and my friend generally does not react as strongly as she did this time. We finally isolated the reason – she saw her abuser when her guard was down. When she knows that he will be coming to town, she prepares herself emotionally for the visit. While his visits bother her, they do not typically rock her like this.