Whatever you believe is the true message of Easter, chocolate features very highly on most people’s list of what makes Easter special. When our boys first Easter arrived, we wanted to make it special for them. Easter egg hunts, a lovely Easter Sunday dinner and, of course, chocolate eggs.
We hadn’t planned on the fact that everyone around us would want to make their first Easter special too. All our family and friends brought them eggs as well as their schools, taxi’s, escorts and the leaders of their different clubs. In total the boys had more than 20 eggs each!
We understood that this was because everyone around us was being kind and generous, wanting to make up for all the boys missed out on. However, it become a very difficult situation that we had to manage. The boys just couldn’t understand why they couldn’t eat them all on the same day. They couldn’t manage having so much chocolate and sweets in the house. We tried to help them by giving them a little each day, but over time the chocolate stash seemed to be going down quicker than it should have been. The boys were helping themselves as well as having the portion we gave them. Worse of all, they started eating our eggs too!
Then the blame started. They blamed each other. They blamed us. We had to spend a lot of time dealing with the boys lying about who eat what. The shame levels were very high. Lots of denial (it’s wasn’t me), plenty of minimising (I only took a little piece), tonnes of blame each other (it was him) or even us (we wouldn’t take it if you let us eat it all now). Finally even raging at us and everyone who had given them the chocolate eggs in the first place.
Part of the problem went back to before the boys lived with us. Their diet was very poor and sometimes dinner was a bag of sweets. So they had a very sweet tooth and the dental issues that accompanied it. We spent a long time changing their diet and encouraging good dental hygiene. Thankfully they loved trying new things and progressed well. However, when Easter arrived nine months later, we went right back to where we started, with them wanting chocolate and sweets constantly.
The kindness of so many people was always going to be hard for our children. They couldn’t manage having so many sweet things around as it stirred up so many difficult memories. What followed was many months of processing their memories around food in the birth family and trying to explain why they weren’t to blame.
The Easter’s that followed involved similar battles. Eventually we decided that they would just have a couple of eggs and a non-food based gift. The boys really like this. It has made Easter easier for us all.
It was much harder though to get some of our friends and family on board. They saw us as being too controlling over what the boys ate. They thought we should ‘lighten up’ and let them have more fun. Even some professionals saw it as a deprivation and felt it was making them different to their peers. Sometimes doing the right thing by our children means accepting the judgement of others and trying not to let it bother us. Sometime that’s easier said than done.
It’s Easter Sunday as I write this post. The boys are now young men who have spent the morning helping out with litter picking in our local area. They’ve had a nice lunch and enjoyed some chocolate. They are very excited about using their new Xbox games. So far, everything is very relaxed and they are really happy.
And that is what a good Easter looks like for us.
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