Continuing with the series of posts about some of the challenges we came up against, I thought I'd mention an issue that we had that I wasn't prepared for despite all the "training" I went through. One of the things I learned during the prep period for the adoption was that orphans have food issues. Lots of food issues. It's not unusual for orphans to hoard food. The usual scenario in an orphanage is for the food to be set out, and the kids who are fastest get the most to eat, the others not so much. Since the kids aren't always confident that they'll get enough, they try to hide food when they can get away with it. So even when they get adopted, they aren't always sure what's going on, and even though they may get enough food at a meal to feel full, they still aren't confident that there will be more later, and they continue to hide or steal food to store up.
Charlie spent 11 years in that environment, and I found out from someone who knew him back then that yes, Charlie was fast. He got plenty of food--and promptly started passing it out to the little kids. Charlie has a soft spot for the young ones. Knowing all this, I expected him to have food issues. I was prepared for that. But they didn't surface the way we were expecting.
To start with, Charlie liked good, healthy foods and lots of them. But he never got into the junk food scene. He was utterly convinced that eating any sweets at all makes you fat. Cake? An invention of Satan. But fruits, vegetables, rice, noodles, meats, eggs? Bring 'em on!! He ate, and ate, and ate, and never seemed to really gain a spare ounce on his frame. That's when I realized how fast he was growing. For a Chinese kid, he was turning into a giant. They thought he was tall when I adopted him, but in the space of four months, he had grown three inches, and before his first year here was out, he was five inches taller. He is now taller than I.
He started coming home from school with headaches. I didn't make the connection to food right away--when my other son had started having chronic headaches in school, it was because he was dealing with a difficult social scene and didn't want to be there, so naturally I started trying to find out what about school was bothering Charlie. He said nothing was wrong. He just had headaches.
One day the school called me and said he had a fever and joint aches, I needed to come get him. So I went and picked him up. By the time I got there, the fever was gone, but he was still achy. The next day, he was still achy, but had no other symptoms whatsoever. But he was ravenous, and when he made a comment about breakfast and lunch at school being very light, something clicked in my brain.
Charlie was dorming just a couple of nights a week. On the days and nights he was home, no problem. He could eat as much as he wanted for breakfast, and then even though lunch was light, he got home from school early enough that he could eat another meal. Then he'd have yet another meal when I got home from work and made dinner. And THEN he'd eat something, usually fruit, before bed. But on the nights he was dorming, he didn't get that bedtime snack, he didn't get enough at breakfast, and lunch was light. By the time dinner came around, he had a headache because he wasn't getting enough calories to sustain the wild growth spurt his body started once he was getting enough food on a regular basis.
That explained the joint aches and constant injuries, too. His body was growing so fast that the growth plates at the ends of the long bones in the arms and legs were soft and weak. Playing hard was putting too much stress on them during this spurt, so they ached.
What really made sense once I realized all this was his hunger pains. Charlie had grown up under-nourished and growth-stunted, but because it was constant, what he lived with was an ongoing, gnawing sense of hunger. But once he started eating more and growing suddenly, when he got hungry, he was hungry RIGHT NOW and had to have food RIGHT NOW because he would start getting sharp stomach pains if he didn't.
He was literally in more pain from hunger now than he had ever been in the past.
Time for Mama Bear to take action. I promptly dashed off an e-mail to his social worker at the school and to his teacher, explained the situation and Charlie's past experiences (they were unaware of any of this), and they agreed that if I were to send in a bag of healthy foods in his luggage on dorm days, they would give him extra times throughout the day and evening to be able to eat some supplemental meals.
That solved the problem, and that situation lasted for several months. By the time Charlie started high school, his growth had leveled off some and he was eating much more normal-sized meals and not as many of them, so he has been managing just fine with dorming at the high school without having to take any supplemental food.
It just hurts to think of the constant sense of hunger he used to know, and to watch him back in the days when he would feel physical pain from sudden hunger. It hurts even more to remember the faces of all of his friends that I saw at the orphanage and know that they are still living with that and there's nothing I can do for them.
So if you're skeptical when someone tells you to clean your plate, that there are starving children in China, the answer is yes -- there really are.
His next belt test is the second week of June. Hopefully he will get his blue belt then. Feel free to leave a blog comment to encourage him to study and practice hard--I'll be happy to interpret what he doesn't understand!
