January is the worst possible month to get fit, get sober and get solvent.
The excitement of Christmas and the New Year are over.
The days are short, the weather is miserable and it’s a long time until Spring.
For our Little Man, January was a time of intense distress, and I am using here the Foster Carer/Adopter scale.
I mean a long sequence of disrupted nights, apparently mindless violence and destruction. I mean ‘far away eyes’ or ‘dead eyes’ when you just couldn’t reach him. Social Workers and psychologists call this ‘disassociation’.
In a brief, brief moment of calm, we began to look for the reason behind the behaviour.
When you’re drained, metaphorically, and perhaps literally, bruised and battered, and suffering from secondary trauma, having the time and resilience to reflect rather than survive takes a herculean effort, and probably the help of friends.
The reason dawned on us. Our Little Man had endured a particularly difficult transition in a January a few years previously.
He didn’t know why, but he was terrified.
The coming down of the Christmas tree, the short days, and the bad weather all reminded him of a terrifying time, and deep deep down, he thought his life was going to be tipped upside down again.
We had no solutions but at least we had a reason.
We figured if we could just keep going one day at a time, we’d get away from January, and maybe it would get easier, and it did.
You can survive without sleep, but you can’t live without hope.
We went from the brink of a breakdown to a much more manageable and even enjoyable household.
We are now on our 10th January.
Each one gets a little bit easier, and at lest we know that this too shall pass.
Fostering and adopting with phil 