I have to wonder…
“Is this behavior that of a 13 year old boy, or his mental health?”
See our other two boys didn’t give us all the sass, back talk, attitude and behaviors. Or maybe I just don’t remember the behaviors because we were so busy dealing with David’s issues.
Not sure if that is a blessing or not.
How can we turn bedtime into a struggle for right and wrong?
He claims to be funny, I think that he needs a visit with a bar of soap.
Alas, I bite my tongue.
If I raise my voice at all from a normal conversational tone, then he calls me out for yelling at him. So I raise my voice a little louder in self-defense.
If I call him on his behaviors, he asks if he can pack a bag to save time tomorrow when I take him back to a residential facility. I threaten to call one person to ask for advice on how to deal with him, and he takes that as a epic tragedy of Shakespearean proportions worthy of the Queen’s Court.
He claims to not have any clean clothes, yet there were no “dirty” clothes in the laundry. Can’t find the pants we wore today, because we don’t know where they went, though he only took a shower at 8, About 2 hours ago.
In the end, I say good night, give him a hug and say “the neat thing about tomorrow is you can have a fresh start.”
What I wish I could get him to understand is that all of this, this stuff, is just behaviors. He claims we don’t want him, and in reality, if we didn’t want him, we sure wouldn’t have driven out to the facility to bring him home when they released him.
I take these moods, behaviors or whatever as a cry for love. He is trying to push us away before we can do it to him.
When all we really want him to do is recognize that we are family. That he is a part of us. A part of a family.
In reality, he may never recognize that.
In reality, tomorrow is a brand new day.
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