Learning to Love (page 2 of 3)

Rage Took Over

For the first six months at his new home in Ohio, Daniel seemed to adapt well. Fascinated by the unfamiliar world, he loved talking on the phone and, with his new mother, learning to swim. There were trouble spots: He threw occasional tantrums and had a hard time sleeping alone. Though he quickly picked up several English words, he still struggled to communicate when he entered the first grade at the local public school.

Then, on the day he turned eight, something snapped. It was during a birthday party his parents threw for him -- the first one he'd ever had -- that Daniel fully realized someone had brought him into the world and then abandoned him. The thought filled him with an explosive fury.

"I got this idea that Heidi and Rick had left me for seven years, then picked me up and tried to act like nothing had happened," Daniel says. They explained many times that they weren't his biological parents, but Daniel was unconvinced. "I didn't care what they said or did," he says. "Rage just took over."

He would erupt in hours-long tantrums, throwing anything he could get his hands on and gouging holes in walls throughout the house. Eventually Heidi and Rick moved everything except a mattress out of his bedroom. But the outbursts got worse. When Daniel turned ten, his parents gave him a puppy, which the boy promptly tried to strangle. The following month, he was sent home from synagogue in a police car after he charged a bunch of kids with a shovel.

The Solomons called in therapists; Daniel bit one in the stomach, leaving a three-inch gash. Three separate times that same year, he was committed involuntarily to a psychiatric hospital, once after threatening his school principal with a shard of glass. The institutionalizations seemed only to fuel his anger. "Before, he'd get frustrated and it would escalate," says Heidi. "But after being in the hospital, he became deliberately violent."

Heidi was Daniel's favorite target. He head-butted her, then smiled when he saw he'd caused a black eye. He swung a golf club at her. More than once when Rick wasn't home, Heidi called the police for protection.

Perhaps the only person Daniel hated as much as Heidi was himself. He talked often about suicide and made several clumsy attempts, jumping from windows or trees.

The family began to crack under the strain. Rick talked about leaving. Heidi was consumed by guilt. "I remember reading in the newspaper about a family of three dying in a fire and thinking, That should be us -- we cause so much chaos," she says.

Mental-health professionals, friends and relatives told Heidi there was no hope, that Daniel would never love her and that she should give up on him. But she wasn't going to back out. "Though he hated me, I didn't take it personally," she says. "I knew it was because of what had happened to him. And I knew he needed a family. He's my son. I never questioned that."

On the day Daniel pulled the knife on her, Heidi, trained to deal with

her potentially violent students, deliberately showed no emotion. She knocked the weapon out of her son's hand, and he backed away. The crisis was over. Only later did Heidi allow herself to think about what might have happened -- and what might lie ahead. Daniel was a scrawny ten-year-old, but he was growing bigger. She knew they couldn't go on like this.

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