The Early Riser

It's 5 am. I hear the familiar footfall - feet frantic to find out if Dad's still home.

"Mom!" (It's funny - I always called my mom first, too.)
"Yes, Kolbie?"
"Is Dad still home?"
"Yes."
"Oh, good." And his feet carry him back to bed. He'll get up every 15 minutes or so, just to make sure he hasn't missed Brian's departure for work. But, for the most part, he'll be quiet and everyone except me continues sleeping.

I am often annoyed by this interchange. Nine hours of sleep is not quite enough for a growing 5-year-old boy who frequently has difficulty controlling his impulses when he's angry. I have to remind myself of a couple things, though. First of all, we've come a long way. This is the same boy who used to wake up in the middle of the night and stay awake for a couple hours, doing his best to wake the entire household. When it first started happening, we didn't know everything we know now, and we didn't respond with compassion. Once we realized that anxiety might be driving his sleeplessness, we simply made a bed for him on our bedroom floor and calmly welcomed him into our room when he woke up too soon. It took some time, but we finally got him sleeping through the night again. We experience little setbacks now and then. Currently, he seems to be reacting to Brian's summer hours. In the past two months he has slept through Brian's 6 am departure a handful of times, and he seems determined not to let it happen again.

The other thing I have to remind myself of is that it's a deep-seated fear that is bullying him into waking up so early every morning. It's not really his fault. He seems to have an extremely strong sensitivity to loss and separations. The stuff we've learned since adopting leads us to believe that it is the loss of his first family that impacted him so deeply. He was 13 months old when he came to live with us, and already securely attached to his foster family. The loss of his family would have registered as a significant trauma in his young brain. You'd think that the fact that he can't remember any of this would make it easier to get over. I wonder if the opposite is true: his lack of conscious memory of this event actually makes it more difficult for him to recover.

In Anatomy of the Soul, Curt Thomson describes memory as being composed of 2 kinds: explicit and implicit. Explicit memory consists of facts and experiences - stuff we are consciously aware of knowing. Our brains start forming and storing explicit memories between the ages of 18 and 24 months. (p. 73) Implicit memory is the earliest form of memory in the brain. Thomson asserts that it is present at birth, and may begin to develop as early as the third trimester of pregnancy. It is largely unconscious, and involves the more primitively developed regions of the brain. (p. 67) Implicit memory is at work every time we walk across a room - we don't usually consciously pay attention to the act of walking, and most of us have no memory of learning how to walk. Implicit memory can also come in the "form of perceptions, behaviors, emotions, and bodily experiences." (p. 68) This has enormous implications for children who experience loss/trauma before their brains are capable of storing explicit memories. The memories that are stored are unconscious, and may be highly emotional and stored in or close to the regions of the brain largely responsible for survival.

For Kolbie, this means that waking up in time to see Brian before he leaves for work may feel like a matter of life and death. He may genuinely (and unconsciously) believe that his survival depends on waking up early enough. Despite the fact that he has experienced Brian coming home at the end of the work day at least a thousand times since his brain became capable of storing explicit memory, it's not enough to override his more primitive, implicit memory of losing his parents. As his parents now, it is our job to figure out how we can help him heal. I've been learning a lot from Annie McLellan's blog posts on Tapestry's website. She's been writing about what she's been learning from her reading of The Whole-Brain Child by Siegel and Bryson. Our brains were created with incredible resiliency and potential for healing, and I'm so grateful that we have the privilege of being the agents of that healing for our children. We will continue to do our best to respond with sensitivity and compassion when Kolbie wakes up ridiculously early. We will also continue to take advantage of opportunities to learn how we can help him recover from his early losses. Here's hoping his healing includes the ability to sleep in once in a while!!

(Here's a little cuteness from WAAAY back when he was 2!)