Things get more real

I've been fairly silent lately. Mostly silenced by happiness. Rose's white noise from the last year has all but disappeared. The tension in the house is all but gone. Thinking of her as a three year old, not eleven, increased my patience.  She's learning how to be a kid in some instances. She's letting us be parents, some times.

On the flip side, we're able to start seeing the real beauty and sad truthful longer term damage. These are my takeaways:

First, the beauty.
1) She is truly empathetic.
2) She is very, very stubborn. (A coworker today aptly said she had a daughter who she knew would make a cool adult, if she didn't kill her daughter before she reached adulthood.)
3) She is really passionate. She hasn't found her passion, yet. When she does, watch out.
4) She wants to be loved.

Then the sad.
1) No matter what we do, we can't convince her we know how to keep her safe. This results in lots of defiance--some acts more risky than others. 
2) Realizing how much she doesn't trust in anyone's ability besides her own makes me especially all too aware of the hard road she'll head down.
3) She makes friends with abusive children. She is hurt by them. She goes back to them and gets hurt again. She takes comfort in pain, heightening my fear of a more dangerous path this could lead as she grows up.

Then the pathetic.
As a grown up, a perfectionist first born, people pleasing grown up, I'm realizing I can't control this. I realize no matter what we do, we can create positive change, but we can't deter Rose. In essence, "success" as a parent isn't truly definable. In training, one haggard, tired adoptive mom said she learned parenting meant attending the court cases for her son and writing him in court. I bristled, thinking I'd never have that fate. I'm too smart for that.

While I hope i don't my know-it-all big sister sensibilities prove right. I hope my optimism that I can flip any situation around, the reality we've seen lately makes me feel a lot more glass half full. This makes it really hard to bond. I have to somehow create a way to not take Rose's stumbles personally so I can overcome this hinderance. I'm just not sure how.