e-mail
It is not unusual for children who have been through trauma to have mixed up memories of the trauma. I have seen and heard of many cases where a foster or traumatized child has accused the current parents of something that the birth parent did to them.
These are young children who have been through horrible things. Hannah used to tell me stories about what her biological aunt did to her. When I spoke with her previous mom, I discovered that these are the things that he her birth mother did to her. They happened, but her memories are mixed up as to who the offender was.
Sammy has done this on occasion, accusing us of things that his birth mother did. However, there are sometimes when kids just flat out make up stories. Maybe their brains truly believed this happened, or maybe it’s just for attention. I have no way of knowing for sure.
I requested a pack of Sammy’s school work since we have never seen anything that he has done in the almost six months that he has been in this facility. We received the pack today. While my husband was reading something, I saw a funny look on his face and when he showed me why, I’m sure that look on my face was similar.
Sammy’s assignment was to read the book “The Five People You Meet in Heaven.” It’s a very good book if you haven’t read it. The rest of the assignment was to write about the five people you (the student) would meet in heaven. Sammy’s second person took my husband and I by surprise. Here is what Sammy wrote:
The second person I met is a man in Texas. I was visiting my grandparents in Lubbock Texas when my dad cut off another driver. He then chased after us and crashed into a pillar on the side of the road for a billboard sign. The man’s name was Bill. He died. He was so angry when he was speaking that it sounded like my grandma when she used to yell at her white pit bull. He finally calmed down and when my dad confronted him because we were trying to get to my great-grandpa’s funeral. He then said, “Well, you could have come to mine instead, because you killed me.” Then he vanished. He taught me a valuable lesson that day. How not to be so rushed and slow down. My dad was rushing so it taught me how to calm down in rushed situations.
The other people Sammy wrote about are factual, with a few embellishments, so it makes me wonder what was going through his head as he wrote this.
This event never happened in any way, shape or form. Sammy has only been to Lubbock twice, and by the time that my in-laws moved to Lubbock, my husband’s grandfather’s funeral had long passed. The only time we were ever chased by someone was when we lived in Dallas and Sammy had not even been born yet, much less lived with us. None of Sammy’s grandmothers have ever owned a white pit bull. According to his paragraph, my husband spoke with a dead man, or the spirit of a dead man.
It is fabrications or confused memories, like this that can get us, as foster parents into trouble. Maybe something like this happened when Sammy was with one of his biological parents. Maybe it never happened at all. I don’t know for sure. However, not knowing the way that Sammy’s memory or mind works, someone reading this could be lead to believe that it actually happened.
Had Sammy written about being abused, we could be the subjects of an abuse investigation. This has happened to other parents. It is difficult to prove to an investigating worker that we did not abuse the child. How would I prove to anyone that the event that Sammy described here did not happen? Children who are skilled at survival know which adults will believe things like this. Others truly have confused memories. Either way, it can hit you with a punch you never saw coming.
I agree that children that have been abused do have confused memories. I think it’s a way of dealing with what happened.
The brain has a way of dealing with things. I don’t think that we’ll ever understand it.
Thank you for the original post and the comment from mistyeyed. I have been crying for hours over an incident with my foster adopt 24 year old and I needed to hear the reminder that we may never understand them or what they have been through. I stumbled upon this site and had to join to say, “thank you!” The post was made ironically on her birthday. We are also haunted by stories and incidents that may or may not be true – that if they are true, they are horrific, and if not true, the making up of is horrific. It makes the quest for stability and trust difficult to achieve. Anyways, THANKS!!