Imagine if Cinderella Was a Fraud

Having adopted older children,  I have learned a lot about attachment disorder.  This is a disorder found in children who have lived in orphanages for long periods of time, or who have been abandoned or abused in their lives.  This disorder presents itself in a child not able to trust adults, attach emotionally to a significant adult parental figure.  Often a child with attachment disorder is very manipulative and sneaky, cleverly able to "triangulate" the mother and father, setting one up against the other by behaving very differently when with one or the other. To the public however, they present as the ideal child. Their public behavior can be model.  The longer the child with attachment disorder is with a family the more pronounced the disorder can become because attachment should be occurring over time and the stress of resisting it creates a great deal of stress on the child. Distancing behavior, such as stealing, lying, hurting others and random emotional outbreaks are some of the common behaviors found in a emotionally detached child.  It is hard to imagine any child behaving a such a deceptive way.  If you've seen the horror film "Orphan" there are elements that ring true, even though on the whole it is a terrible film.  Living with a calculating child is very counter-intuitive as a parent and at times scary as hell. Again it is hard to fathom unless you are in a house with a child with attachment disorder.  On the other hand, the reason the child has attachment disorder is because they were neglected, abused or institutionalized, so they aren't to blame for their abandonment and how, regardless of how unhealthy, they have learned to manage their feelings.

Without going into the personal details of what happened in my own family, the experience got me to thinking about stories that are part of our childhood experience that explore the theme of orphaned and mistreated children. There are many of these tales; Pinocchio, Harry Potter and Cinderella for example.  The plot often is of a sad and abandoned child who is eventually "saved" by new parents or a caring adult.  Many of us believe that love heals all things, including an emotionally fractured childhood.  I certainly believed this to be true, but this was before I lived with a mentally ill child.  I still believe love can heal, but it takes more then love at times.

As I said I started thinking about the orphaned characters and the awful step-parents in some of these stories.  The possibility occurred to me that if the details were skewed in Cinderella so that the step mother and sisters could become the victims and Cinderella could in fact be the deceptive person then you might have a somewhat accurate representation of what some adopted parents are experiencing living with their attachment disordered children.  In this rendition of the tale, Cinderella would be taken in by her "adopted" family. Her sisters would share everything with her, include her in their social lives and see her as very much a member of the family.  Initially, as valuable items such as cell phones, game boys, jewelry and money belonging to individual family members and people at Cinderella's school begin to disappear everyone suspects that Cinderella is the culprit.  People are sympathetic towards Cinderella given the deprivation she came from it is understandable she would covet other people's belongings.  

Over time however, weird things begin to happen in Cinderella's house.  The cat gets hurt repeatedly, and there are tacks placed where her step-mother sits and will walk, Cinderella lashes out at a sibling unprovoked and clocks them in the head with a wooden carving.  The family becomes alarmed and initiates some much needed therapy.  Cinderella manipulates the therapists into believing the family isn't caring for her properly, that she is alone and sad. Other people who have known Cinderella's family for years realize that this cannot be so and see some of the strange things happening around the house  Friends witness some of the bizarre and hurtful behavior and realize that the image Cinderella hopes to portray is a fraud, and she in fact is the meanest of them all.  Of course this is a fairy tale, nothing ever happens this clearly, but you are getting the jist of my rewritten fairy tale.  Again, doesn't it feel counter-intuitive to even believe this?

So while that "Orphan" movie was over the top and creepy and unreal on many levels, parts of it seemed familiar, not just to me but to other parents I've met and talked to with older adoptive children who have attachment disorder.  One mother described waking up with a note pinned to her PJ's that was left by her teenaged adopted child with a hand drawn picture of herself being stabbed to death, red blood dripping off the knife.  Another family told of the carefully drawn picture of the snake, fangs drawn and also dripping in blood found in the father's "Things to Do" notebook with a message saying "I love you mom and dad" written next to the snakes open mouth.  So, while Harry Potter had a terrible go of it sleeping in the hall closet and dealing with Dudley his adoptive brother, and I wouldn't want to be Cinderella ever, there are cases when what appears to be isn't always what it is.