Trapped

I realized that this is the exact issue that many of us are dealing with today. After hearing face to face and reading several accounts of frustrating situations like Kari's and Cindy's today I realize that this is the most frustrating thing happens to us. We get into situations where we have no options.

I am scheduled to leave town on Sunday. I have a list of things I have to do before I go but I cannot focus. After a completely silent evening and a wordless ride to school, Salinda started texting me today saying that she isn't going back to school. I simply texted, "Please do not text me during my work day when you do not talk to me when I have time for you. My battery is dying, I'm turning off my phone."

Fortunately it is true. I don't have my charger and my battery is almost dead. And no, I didn't plan that. But what I hate about all of this is that I feel trapped. She is stating that she will not return to school on Monday. But she is not going to want to go to any of the schools in town. Her goal is to go to school with her boyfriend 75 miles from here, but that obviously is unreasonable. I do not want to leave Bart here with everything else AND her refusing to go to school, but what are my choices? Do I insist she come with me? Do I let her stay here and then every second I'm gone worry about what is happening?

I know what I need to do. I need to tell her that she can choose to go to one of the two high schools in our town or she can choose not to go and be truant. But the stress involved in waiting for her to decide and the way she treats everyone when she is in this mode is almost unbearable. I suppose I could consider homeschooling or online high school but that makes me feel like I"m going to puke just thinking about it.

But it's the trapped feeling I hate. No options are good. She has held us hostage with her silence, her attitude, her control for the last three years, jerking us around with her drama. We've tried everything from playing hard ball to letting her make her own choices and everything in between.

But when I get in a corner where I feel like I have no good options, it gives me a panicky feeling that I do not like. And I KNOW that there are so many of us as adoptive parents who have been there multiple times. Held hostage by our children, trapped by their choices, their mental illnesses, their emotional problems, and their organic brain damage, and then to add insult to injury, blamed by the very system that gave them to us in the first place.

And very few people besides those of us who have been there know how it feels. But those of us who do hate that trapped feeling and lack of power more than anything else. Well, i can't speak for everyone, but for me this feeling is the worst.