Cydney Grieving Her Loss

I know…I haven’t been posting anywhere near as frequently as I’d like to or used to. I’ll work on that. I have plenty of stories to tell.

Cydney has been going through some changes over the last month or so. She had been making so much progress since she started daycare. She was finally getting the whole potty training thing, she was listening a lot more, and life almost sweet. Recently, she has regressed. While she would have almost no accidents at school, she started having a few. Cydney has been listening less and less. Normally when I’d count down from five, she’d fall right in line at “five.” It hardly works at all. Some days it’s as if she doesn’t care.

Cydney has reverted to acting like she’s eighteen months old. She’ll cry over every little thing for long periods of time, whine, grunt, and point at things she wants. She’s looking for attention.

Cydney has started calling my sister ‘Mommy.” In theory, that is great because that is how she is feeling about someone. But I could tell that there was something more than that. Not that my sister isn’t great with Cydney. She’s been reaching out more and more to women. When it’s bedtime, she’d rather sleep with my mother or my sister when she’s in town. Cydney would cry for my sister saying “I want to sleep with my mommy,” or cry “I want my mommy! I miss her!” That shit is hard to hear.

I was talking with my mother a few weeks ago. She said that she thinks that Cydney has been acting out because she’s finally realizing that she doesn’t have a mother. She was saying that now that Cydney is in school, she’s seeing the other kids get dropped off and picked up from their moms and they probably talk about them, too. I think the Mother’s Day thing made it much more real, too. Everyone made Mother’s Day cards for theirs, and she had to give hers to me. That broke my heart a little bit, too.

Ever since Mother’s Day she’s been reaching out. She’d been saying for a month or two prior that Neighbour was her honorary mom. She didn’t really reach out and express it until that time. Sometime later, Cydney and I had a conversation and she’d expressed that she was mad at her. I won’t say why, but she did. Why she still was crazy about Neighbour, she had been a little more hesitant towards her. Little things were different. I started putting a lot of the pieces of the puzzle together. Neighbour had been really busy with work so she wasn’t around.

There isn’t much that I can do about this. It’s a passing phase and Cydney is expressing herself non-verbally and reconciling something she can’t help. On Saturday, Cydney and my nephew got into a little dispute like kids do. I told my nephew, “Look, you gotta understand Cydney is going through something right now.” I explained to him the best way I could to an eight year old. Out of nowhere, Cydney exclaimed in a pretty hostile way “Because of my friends!”

Breakthrough! What my mother said was right.

I’ll let her refer to my sister as mommy sometimes. This morning she asked about my sister and referred to her as mommy. I said to her “Remember, Timile is your mom.” She responded “I don’t want Timile to be my mom!” She’s said that a few times. It’s hard to hear every time. What Cydney is trying to say is that her mother isn’t here and she wants her own mommy who is physically here.