Loyalty Tested

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No, this is not a motivational Monday bonus post. This quote and image summarizes where G and I have been pushed as of late.

I speak very vaguely about the bonus kid in our house – and very sparsely. Most of the posts I have mentioned the kids get locked after a period of time. It is by design given I’m walking a line writing about it. We have had a lot more ups and downs than I can write about which is sad because it would be interesting to allow people a look behind the curtain, but I digress.

We have been a huge supporter of the kid even when we have wanted to shake him. We have spent more time than we would have liked sometimes as he rides the roller coaster of dealing with his past. But in the last 11 days, it has been almost our full time job dealing with the crap this kid is getting into which, if he was 6 wouldn’t be as bad, but he’s sitting on the verge of adulthood. Between G and me, we have taken 3 days off of work and that is in addition to the 3 day weekend G also had and my regular weekend. And while we are at work, we have each spent many hours taking calls and shifting our own schedules to take the calls discussing the issues going on.

If the kid was showing an ounce of remorse or an ounce of even taking responsibility for the shit happening, we would feel different. But sadly, the way trauma works, what he would display for those things would not be what you would expect. I get that. What is difficult is that the more things happen, the more he is out to demonstrate that no one can tell him what to do. He goes past rational and reason and into flight AND fight.

As I described recently, imagine you are dealing with a six year old who is in the middle of the street playing with his trucks. It’s a busy street, so you know bad things are going to happen if you do nothing. Even if you go out to where the six year old is, the kid runs away from you yelling, "I can play anywhere I want!" You can’t go an pick the kid up to take him out of the street, so you are forced to negotiate and coax and hope he gets the hell out of the street while you hopefully keep the harm from happening.

That is what we are dealing with.

Except the 6 year old is almost 18.

And the 18 year old knows, to be cynical, that we aren’t the boss of him if he decides we aren’t – and there is nothing we can do about it.

Everyone is at a loss.

His grades are back to being on the verge of not graduating.
He sits on the cusp of being expelled from school.
He is sliding back into a group of drug users and thieves.

The school is looking to us for help on what to do next as consequences there are ignored leaving them to decide if they have the time and bandwidth to enforce things or not. (With the size of the school, they do not.)

Consequences at home are ignored to the point where everything is a fight. And when he decides he is done talking, he leaves for hours without telling us where he is going or if and when he will be back.

We have been loyal to him. We have been helpful in helping navigate him through some harry situations. We have sacrificed a lot in the process.

We are pretty much done.
And if we are done, his options are too.

We all hate this – but he seems hell bent on this path.

Which makes me think of this:
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What do you think?

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