Stride

We have hit our stride.
Rory has been home for almost 14 months, and it's time to call it good. And oh, it is such a relief.

The past year been like hitting my head against a wall, in that it's so much better now that it's stopped. I've never, ever been so glad that a year was over, and I would repeat sixth grade before I'd live through the first six months again. Of course, we had our beautiful moments. Of course, it's always tough to see calendar pages flip, and I'm always telling myself not to "wish my life away." But it has been a tough year, and that's putting it mildly. And suddenly, with little fanfare, it seems to be over. Last month I posted to No Hands But Ours about how I wasn't ready to do the squishy lovey one year post. If this month were our one year marker, I'd be more inclined, although I still resist putting a rosy haze over the changes any of us went through last year. I can't imagine our lives without Rory now, although sometimes I still do. (I also sometimes contemplate what life would be like with Sam as only child, or with Sam and Lily as a tanned and tow-headed pair of co-conspirators, a role they took on tonight when Wyatt and Rory went off to do some twin thing in the playroom. It's not personal. It's just one of those things.)

Things that felt impossible six months ago, like taking all of the kids to the swimming pool without another adult, or the three youngest to a bead store for a little craft action, today manage to seem like good ideas. (Although there are some situations, like kid concerts, that I still avoid like the plague. I can't see any possible way that would be fun.) The house is cleaner, our lives slightly more organized. We buy milk in glass returnable bottles, and the process of returning the empties no longer strikes me as the straw that might break the camel's back. In fact, I broke two full ones the other day (it was bound to happen) and dealt with the result with far more equanimity than I would ever have expected of myself. We make plans. We look ahead. We sit at home, and I periodically actually sit down on the couch with a magazine without anyone on my lap.

On the Rory herself front, too, we've made one of those startling leaps. Her language suddenly shot up to a level where she feels she can talk to other people, outside people, even people she has never met (whom she really likes to tell that she is from China, and rarely fails to ask if they know Baba Mike, her foster dad). She chats with us about all sorts of things, about how she feels and what she thinks and what she did and will do today (all of which she avoided before). Lest you think it's perfection, very few people can actually understand her, and she's still got a weird sort of noun fatigue, with little gaps of common words simply not finding a place in her hear (like sausage and soup, which she forgot yesterday). She handles the gaps so much better, though. "I don' know what that is," she'll say. Tonight she turned to me from the kitchen counter and declared that she wanted to make "a nakkin." You can have a napkin, I said, and reached for one. "NO! I wan' make a nakkin!" Well, I said, you can make a nakkin, here's the paper towels. "No! NO! A NAKKIN! A NAKKIN TO GO ROUND MY NECK!" I was still obtuse (she often makes these sort of napkin bibs for herself or for dolls) and she was near tears. "It's ok," I said. "Stop. Breathe. We'll figure it out." And she actually did stop, and hold back the howls of frustration I could see right on the edge, and I looked at her, and what she had, and what she was doing, and I said "oh! a necklace! You want to make a necklace with your beads!"

Which was what she wanted to do, and then sat and did, very calmly and very well, too, considering that she made the beads at art class and I never, ever thought she would get the tiny thread through the tiny holes. Of course. A nakkin. We had another, similar near breakdown a few nights ago, when we had guests (which is always tough on Rory). She wanted a tub, she kept repeating it, getting angrier and angrier and more and more determined. It was 9:30, there would be no tub and I was getting frustrated, how could i make her see that there could be no tub and not have her loose it so badly that we might as well have just had the tub, because it would take less time? And just as I was getting my stubborn reared up and ready to go, (and pretty much matching her and forcing us both into a standoff) she stopped, thought, and said, "then I have tub tomorrow?"

Well, yeah, sure. You have tub tomorrow. Situation defused by Rory, who might, at that moment, have been more mature than I was (but note how she found a way to control it, too. I think that's ok). She's come far, and all of a sudden, it shows. We both have. I know it was gradual, but it has a way of feeling sudden, as if someone quite quickly uprighted our household snow globe, and things were settling gently into place.

Cross-posted at RaisingDevils.com.