I sort of expected this to be a transition for her, but not an especially bad one. I mean, she's made friends with the neighbor kids (riding her bike with one and inviting two others over to play in the backyard on the swingset I built her). She loves her new school, with the exception of an awful little bully girl who intentionally excludes her from things. She even has a little girl with the same first name in her class. This was all good, I thought, and knew she'd settle in eventually.
Well, as always, my version of "eventually" didn't take into account the way her world went, and her PTSD. Poor baby has reverted to peeing in her bed every night, had a couple of accidents at school, and is generally a lot more panicky and clingy than she has been the last few months. This is also the first year she's been really exposed to Halloween, and she's been WAY too interested in the blood/skeletons/scary green women making bone soup.
She's been telling us that if you fall "too far" you explode (to be fair, her uncle did kind of explode on her), and crying a lot, which panics me, which causes her more anxiety...still I was hoping we could deal with the cycle on our own.
However, I realized that we were really going to need to go back into the whole therapy thing with her at a store the other day. We were ealing through the costume aisle, looking for red face make-up for Tuffy (he and Jules are going as devils, while Rorysaurus and I are going as angels. Yes, we do find this funny). Anyway, she found a plastic sword and picked it up to explain to me how she, as "girl-Batman/Spiderman" was going to fight "bad guys." Well, this sword had a red-pseudo-blood-liquid in it, so when she moved it, the "blood" splashed around inside the clear plastic of the sword.
I hate being the parent with the screaming child in a store. And here she is, acting like she's having a Vietnam flashback, just screaming and screaming about the blood and the owies. I tried to explain to her that it was fake, but she is a very literal little girl, so that didn't take. Then, she paused, looking at the costume rack, and got very, very quiet.
I looked to see what had caught her attention. Right in front of her was one of those "knife-through-the-head" gags:
and next to it was a child's doctor costume:
"Crap," I thought. "This is NOT going to go well."
"Mama...is that a doctor like my doctor or is that like Little Monkey's head doctor?"
I confirmed that it was, indeed, a surgeon, and waited. She looked down at the sword, and back at the gruesome prop. "Ohhh," she started, "this is a doctor sword."
What?
"And this person here," she said, pointing to the kid with a knife in his head, "is going to go as Little Monkey for Halloween." Sometimes, her connections do not make any sense, and sometimes, I never even know what she's thinking, but for her to think that this bloody sword and this impaled child were what was done to her brother gave me chills. I must have looked horrified, because she patted my arm and told me that the surgeon only cut the boy's head so he'd get better, and besides, it was pretend.
Smiling, I started to move us to a less terrifying aisle. She didn't want to give the sword up. "Can I have the doctor sword, Mama?" she begged. I told her no, and bought her some piece of cheap, plastic, princess Aurora crap instead. Seriously, whose kid does this stuff?
Reluctantly, I dragged her into a new doctors' office in a neighboring city to meet an NP and get a referral to therapy. I want her to be alright, and part of me wants to deny that she has any problems and thinks if we do just ignore it, the whole mess will go away. I know that it won't, though, so we're heading back to therapy.
On the other hand, I do get some really fun moments with how aware she is. When her Pre-K class all colored a little skeleton to bring home, hers was the only red one. I asked why it wasn't pink, like EVERYTHING ELSE she brings home. "Because bones are inside you, with your blood," she explained, as if I were the child. Fair enough. She was also at school when some little boy fell off a swing and started to cry. She ran over to him, looked him in the eyes after helping him to his feet and asked, "is there blood?" When he said no, her response was, "Oh. Well, then, man up." ::Sigh:: She's fun, sometimes.
