My mother was a very creative person.  She came by it naturally through her father and her mother’s father, who were both inventors.  This creativity flows through many of the members of my family in many different ways.  All we got from my father was skeletal deformities, missing vertebrae, misshapen bones, etc.  A has one leg that’s shorter than the other and his pinkie knuckles are shaped weirdly.  It causes him no end of distress because he doesn’t want to be different or stand out in any way.  The leg is hardly noticeable and didn’t keep him from being a champion youth soccer player when he was younger, but he feels his knuckles are freakish.

    He also inherited my mother’s creativity.  From time to time he gets the urge to draw some very interesting characters.  He is heavily influenced by Japanese Manga.  He wants to write, like his mom.  Unfortunately he has his mom’s procrastination gene and while he obsesses and makes plans, he never starts.  I bought him a computer for his birthday and so far all he’s done is download Anime and scan manga, play Go, and I have to admit he learned how to use DOS without a manual of any kind, but it was to play a game.  Once in a while his obsessions change to craftier pursuits and he comes up with some fascinating ideas for things to make.  I wonder where they come from as I wander the aisles of Michaels or try to convince someone at Lowes to cut PVC pipe to lengths he’s specified.  Unfortunately the pipes usually become weapons to pound some poor plastic object to bits.  The boy is a wonder with twist ties and wire.  One time my boyfriend brought home a long cable with aluminum wires inside.  A spent the whole night bending those wires into wondrous sculptures.

    Another unfortunate thing is his inner critic, who is usually much stronger than his inner creator and everything ends up in the garbage.  I’ve squirreled away some of his drawings and origami.  Before the critic got the upper hand I scanned many of them into my computer under the appropriate grade file.  When he was three he painted a wonderful picture of a dragon that hung on my bedroom wall.  When we left our house it got packed away and I haven’t seen it since.  Even when he was little, painting and drawing were occasional activities, but when he did it something beautiful came out of it.  We had the best chalk decorated sidewalk in the neighborhood.

    He was such a pain in the tuccus when he was little, but he was a bright, happy child and I miss that so much.  I tried so hard to give him a varied, happy childhood and I feel like such a failure sometimes when I look back on it and see how he turned out.  I’m not disappointed in him.  I am very proud of him.  I’m disappointed in how unscocial and unhappy he is and how uncomfortable he is - everywhere.

I'm sorry it's been awhile since I posted anything.  I have no excuse.  I can't say I got busy.  I can say I forgot.  The days blend together in a miasma of all the same until I can't tell if it's a week day or the weekend, but that still isn't an excuse.  Since his birthday A has been having trouble coming to grips with what is expected of him. His showers are now lasting longer than a full day's work.  He washes his hands every few minutes and if he isn't watching something he's up pacing the floor constantly.  I keep getting questions like 'How is he?'  What are you doing to see that he gets his GED?'  What is he going to do with the rest of his life?'  I can seem to make it clear to everyone that I am not in charge of this rodeo.  It's not like he's five years old and I can make him do anything.  He's 18 and the only one who can deal with A's feelings is A.  He has to operate within his comfort zone, not mine, and nothing I say or do will help him expand said comfort zone.  I guess I'm supposed to drag him kicking and screaming to a doctor who will give him the medicine he heeds to cope with life and then force it down his throat so he feels better.  That doesn't sound like it will help to me.  He will get to where he needs to be on his own time.  I'm having enough trouble getting me to where I'm supposed to be.  If I could get myself on track maybe it will show him the way, but until then I can only help me.  He has to be the one to stretch his horizons.  I got him started and I will be there for him if he asks for my help.

    The rages are the hardest to deal with.  It’s like living with the Incredible Hulk.  It happens so fast and usually for the stupidest reasons, like he missed a move in a game, or there isn’t anything to drink except water or milk and he’d rather die of thirst than drink either of those.  When it happens he loses his mind and any semblance of control.  He grabs the closest thing that will do damage and starts hitting.  He has broken so many storage tubs I could support Sterlite or Rubbermaid single handedly.  It doesn’t matter the cost.  I have to admit he has improved and it doesn’t happen as often as it used to.  The first week we lived in our apartment he put his fist through my bedroom door.  Why he picked my bedroom instead of his I don’t know.  If he’s smashed anything handy and hasn’t worked out the anger he turns on himself, hitting his arms and legs and torso as hard as he can.  If that still doesn’t do it he cuts his arms or scratches deep scratches into his face, arms, and chest.  He says only the pain outside can make the inside pain stop.  And he screams at me.  It’s horrible.  I feel like I’m being beaten myself though he never touches me.  There’s no where I can go to escape.  I have to watch it, then clean up the broken mess when he is finished.  I’ve had his clothes scattered and piled all over the floor because he has pounded his storage to sharp bits.  The pressure I feel causes horrific headaches.  His dad keeps telling me he would love to have him come live with him, but I know he couldn’t live with this.  I’d give it a month before there’s a murder/suicide.

As of today I am “elderly,” a “senior citizen.”  I get to order from the senior menu at the IHOP, and qualify for discounts every where.  I’m wondering how this happened.  Did I pass through an invisible gate or doorway into this magical land of being an old person?  I don’t look different.  I don’t feel different.  I don’t feel young anymore, but I’m not ready to be considered “old” either.  What determines old?  A date on a calendar?  Which one?  There have been so many over the centuries.  In 1957, the year I was born, the average life expectancy for a woman was 72.7 years, nearly twenty years older than I am now.  In 2012 that number is 81.73, if you’re healthy nearly ten years longer.  I’m anything but and I’ve already lived longer than many diabetic women.  My heart is clean and healthy despite a cholesterol rate that would kill a lion.  If it weren’t for my flaky joints and regular bouts of heartburn I would say “I’m not old!”  I come from a long lived family.  Illnesses took my grandmothers in their mid eighties, but my great-aunt was 96 and her brother was 93.  My mother was 90 when she passed, my father was 82.  I’ve lived a lot in my 55 years.  I’ve lived in over 30 different places in five different states.  I’ve made and lost track of a lot of friends.  Some of them I’ve considered family.  I guess I’ll spend however many years I have left trying to squeeze a little more life into them, no matter how hard it is.

    I have had way too much excitement for one person to take.  On the other hand I know that three fireman, two EMT’s and four police officers can stand in my living room.  It’s crowded, but it can be done.  I also know that a fire truck, an ambulance, and two squad cars will fill the parking lot from the drive to my building. 

    A is a cutter.  When he gets too frustrated he cuts scratches into his arm.  He says the only way that he can get rid of his pain inside is to cause pain outside.  Last night was the culmination of four days of showers, washing bedding, one frustration after another, lack of sleep and food and short fuses. 

    In the midst of an argument about what was setting him off he grabbed the biggest knife in the kitchen and I could see that it was going to cut through his arm like butter.  I tried to stop him from using it by telling him not to use that one, it was too dangerous.  He shouted over me and I threatened to call 911.  He slashed his arm harder than he intended to and cut it to the bone causing me to call 911 and have my own little panic attack..  The instant the knife slid across his skin he realized he’d make a terrible mistake and between the two of us we got a tourniquet on and he pressed a towel into it while I called for help, which took forever to arrive.  When they did they’d sent the cavalry, four officers were joined by three firemen and two EMT’s, all asking questions he couldn’t answer but they didn’t want me to.

    After what felt like a lifetime we all left at once.  I followed the ambulance down unfamiliar streets to a hospital I didn’t know in a neighborhood I wasn’t familiar with..  At one point it got ahead of me thanks to a red light that I swear never turned yellow.  They made it through and I didn’t.  Until then my eyes never left my son through the window of the back doors of the ambulance.  The light changed and I broke speed records down the hill and up again and saw the ambulance again as it turned a corner.  By the time it reached the hospital I was back on it’s tail.  No place to park.  Down the block I turned around and found a tiny parking spot directly across the street from the ambulance doors.  I can’t parallel park.  Never could.  I put that car in the smallest spot I’ve ever seen in my life like I did it ten times a day every day. 

    I couldn’t get in though the ambulance doors.  I had to walk around the corner to the door of the emergency department.  He wasn’t checked in yet, but they would call me.  It seemed like two minutes.  I didn’t even find a magazine.  By the time I got to his room he was already undressed, had an IV in, they’d taken blood and wrapped the cut.  Five hours of waiting...waiting for x-rays ... waiting for him to go to the bathroom...waiting for social workers...waiting for the girl in the next “room” to stop hallucinating...waiting for stitches.  Waiting...waiting...waiting...hoping he’s learned his lesson and stops cutting.  They asked for insurance information.  I pulled out three different cards before I found out his insurance is inactive.  What am I going to do now?  My son is hurt.  I have no money and no insurance.  But he is safe and I am ok for one more day.  The cut will heal and hopefully he will leave the knives alone.

   

Ha!  I remembered this time!  This post comes before the letter in the post before it. It's about what came before A's hospital stay and leading up to it.

    I have seen some pretty horrifying things in my life, but there is nothing more horrifying than having your child try to kill himself in front of you other than that he was successful.  Mine has tried it twice.  Both times I was close enough to see it coming, but too far away to stop it.  The second time was not intended to go the way it did so I suppose it doesn’t really count, but the first time, though it had no chance at success, was every bit intentional.  I was on the phone arguing with the school to leave us alone while I worked to get him into a mental hospital. I was trying to get him admitted for a week long evaluation that was recommended by his counselor. They were insisting he had to be in school while we waited to hear if there was a bed ready.  They thought I could just pick him up when I got the word.  By that time discomfort at being in an environment as dirty as a school, surrounded by people he didn’t know had evolved into pure terror at the very idea.  While I was talking he heard me say something about someone from the school coming to pick him up and take him in.  He grabbed a belt that was nearby and wrapped it around his neck and tried to attach it to a plant hook.  The last thing I said to them was he’s trying to hang himself and I hung up and got him down.  Instead of a trip to school he got a trip to the hospital and an expedited entry to the mental hospital for evaluation.

    Our battle with the school started in October.  He started feeling sick and missed several days with what seemed like the flu.  Then he started telling me about the things he was afraid of.  We were seeing a counselor regularly.  He had trouble with his homework and they started keeping him after school.  The night before the crisis he had stayed from 2:30 when school got out until 6:30 when I went to pick him up.  The principal wanted to keep him another half hour to do something the class hadn’t even done yet.  A could take no more and I couldn’t blame him.  The school was just not equipped to handle someone with his problems and the state law was too rigid for us to operate safely for A.       

    We had already come to the conclusion from his behavior that one problem was OCD.  We had arrangements for a bed for him the day before he went, but the situation was such a shock for his father, who did not live with us, that he wanted to talk about it first because he didn’t see that it “was necessary.”  He’d never seen any odd behavior so therefore it didn’t exist.  The two hour delay lost A his room and we had to start over,  meaning he had to go to school.  Through the hospital evaluation, during which he was hospitalized for a week, we became acquainted with PTSD and the other members of the mental unhealth alphabet that inhabits my beautiful boy.

    He went back to school after winter break armed with the report from the hospital and a request for an Individual Education Plan (IEP).  During his hospital stay the school was supposed to be sending his homework to the hospital.  Instead they just let it pile up so he started out behind anyway and went back to the cycle of punishment instead of encouragement.  I kept asking for the IEP and finally in February the school told me they “didn’t have time” to work out an IEP for him, something that is required by the same laws they were using against us to charge us with truancy and contributing to truancy.  Finally one day the police liaison - fancy talk for truant officer - showed up at my door to give me a ticket for contributing.  I drove the 60 miles to the state capital that day to sign a form to home school and A hasn’t set foot in a school since then.  That was eighth grade.  He was 13 years old.

    I didn’t want to home school him.  I knew he wouldn’t do any work I gave him.  We tried online academies.  Same thing.  He never even logged on.  I basically let him study up on whatever tickled his brain and he gave himself a good education in history, social studies, English grammar, pretty much every subject except math.  He was ready to take his GED a year ahead of time, though the agoraphobia keeps him out of a classroom to prepare for the test.  In our state the class is required so he has to work up to it.  He has been talking about doing it though so there is hope.  He’s been going into places more, though only if they aren’t crowded.  I sincerely feel that if he is allowed to work at his own pace he will find his way to a more normal lifestyle.  I get a lot of people telling me to “quit babying him”, but I don’t feel it’s babying him to let him find his own way at his own pace.  Forcing him is what got him into the shape he’s in now and as long as he keeps testing his limits it’s progress.

    The doctors and counselors tried giving him medication, but he never took it long enough to make a difference and he was comfortable with his various “things.”  I managed to keep him going until he was 15, but he never talked.  The only answers he gave to any question was “I don’t know.”  When he was told that as of the age of 14 he could reuse treatment that was exactly what he did.  Another thing his dad can’t wrap his head around.  He keeps giving me choices and ultimatums to get A into treatment.  A has agreed to have another evaluation, but that is as far as he’s willing to go.  He’s comfortable with his life the way it is.  I’m not okay with it, but the state has taken it out of my hands.  I want my boy to be happy and live a prosperous life, but the prospect scares the hell out of him.