BUT I DON'T WANT TO BE EIGHTEEN!!!!!

The staffing today did not go well.

It started as all of them do, with MIke reporting his great progress and how THIS TIME he was ready to do what he was supposed to do, even though he knew that we didn't believe him.

And then when we stated that we tended to agree that a halfway house was a good plan, he started to get very frustrated. And, as always, by the end of the conversation, we were to blame. Everything in his life was our responsibility and we (the people who moments before he HAD to come home and live with) were his biggest problem. We were the ones who did everything wrong.

Attempting to point out the inconsisties was pretty futile.

Then he changed tactics and started trying to get us to buy him stuff, accusing us of not being financially supportive. He was very frustrated at my response which indicated that the $3500 worth of merchandise he had taken from us and the $500 we had loaned him had pretty much put us in a place where there wouldn't be much money coming his way. We offered emotional support.

Apparently that wasn't what he wanted to happen. He ended up in tears and left cussing us out and saying he didn't want to talk to us.

The gist of the conversation was that he isn't ready to be 18. Twelve to eighteen just went by too fast and why were we all the sudden pushing him to grow up. Now certainly, many 18 year olds feel this way, but I had to point out to him that I was not personally responsible for making time go by so fast over the last several years. I don't control the clock.

While I feel bad for him, I do realize that he has made the decisions he has made. He has gotten himself legally into a corner where he can't choose. His probation officer says he has to go to a halfway house, and that is where he has to go.

So, next week we will participate in Family Week and we will take him to his halfway house. His counselor thinks he feels unloved and yet to him how much we spend equals love, so it's hard to know how to communicate it. But we will attempt to connect with him as much as we can.

The regular rules that apply to live don't work so well with kids with FASD and RAD and yet, apparently, when they turn 18, nobody cares about diagnosis any more. You just have to do the right thing or you get locked up.

But the bottom line is that "we live, we love, we forgive and we never give up." And we hope and pray that that is enough.