Friday, July 21, 2006

Where Does All the Time Go?

There are many things I could blog this morning, but there is little time to do so as John has a psychiatrist appointment in a half hour.

Yesterday I referred to John’s meltdown right after getting his job. It was in regards to where he is staying while we are gone next week. It isn’t totally resolved yet, but his response was really pathetic. Angry, mean, defiant, resentful. I was especially annoyed with the statement, “You never do anything for me” after a week where I had done more for him than I had in a long time. Anyway, the fact that I had been without internet for 9 days, was behind at work, and had an unnamed daughter not speaking to me for two days did not help my state of mind or my mood, so I responded in a less than ideal fashion and it escalated. Fortunately he didn’t get violent, but finally after he followed me into my office and refused to give me space I said, “OK, here’s the deal. I’m going to turn around and work. You may sit there and verbally abuse me for the rest of the day if you’d like but I’m not going to respond. Have at it. You have my permission to stay right there and talk as much as you want as long as you want to. You can continue to swear, be disrespectful, and annoy me as long as you can.” He left.

Yesterday JImmy and the girls and Tony opted to go with me to translate for the same birthmom that had a baby last August. She is pregnant with twins. However, this time the father is in the picture and she’s keeping the babies, but I needed to go with the director to make sure. Our trip was OK, except for horrendous service at the McDonald’s we stopped at (I’m liking those snack wraps, no lettuce). That experience alone would be worthy of a blog entry if I had time but the highlight was a slow, male voice saying “I know what no lettuce means.” It literally took us over 20 minutes to get our drive through and that was after standing in line for 15 minutes inside. Then they forgot two things and we had to go back. Crazy.

So we got home to find that John had gone to the park but was not at the park and came home late. He was apologetic and appropriate but his story was not very believable. I just thought it was an ironic way to end the day when the morning was spent with his “I can’t believe you guys don’t trust me. No matter how good I am doing you always think that I’m going to do something I’m not supposed to do.” Duh, honey! Experience is a great teacher.

One tip though, for parents of tough kids: If you can ask them questions right when they first wake up sometimes you can get the truth.

Off to the psychiatrist...

1 comment:

Mary said...

I love that statement at the end -- it's so true! Whenever we want to truly know what happened, we wait a day and ask as soon as they wake up. Funny how that works!