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.

I was looking through some of my old files and I found this letter I wrote to A's father in 2008.   This was three months after A tried to kill himself because he could not stand to set foot in his school one more time.  I have another post written about the incident so I won't tell the whole thing here.  At this time his father had a job in another state from where we were living.  We had been separated for just over a year and he'd been out of work until just shortly before this letter.  He lived in a one bedroom studio apartment and wanted us to move there and live with him because I was having financial trouble and I had just pulled A out of school to homeschool him because the school district just wasn't getting it.  A was 13 at the time...

Dear,

I understand your frustration and anger with me right now.  I did not plan to get into trouble again or plan to hurt you or A..  In fact the trouble escalated by trying not to hurt A.  The honest truth is that neither you nor I can survive the way things are now.  I don’t have enough to pay rent, buy food, gas for the car and pay bills and neither do you.  I see the wisdom in us moving there, but the air of hostility coming from you does not help me to make that decision.  There are things you need to understand before any move is made for us to join you.  Our building has been sold and I’ve told my landlord that we may or may not be moving at the end of March.

Right now A is protesting.  Before you go off and start thinking he doesn’t want to be with you or doesn’t love you stop it right now.  That is not true.  But you need to realize that he has serious problems and it has nothing to do with discipline.  He spent a lot of energy trying to hide his problems from you, but they have been accumulating since he was seven years old.  He is afraid you will not understand his problems or respect them.  He’s also afraid you will yell at him all the time and that he will find it impossible to live in a one bedroom apartment because he needs some space of his own.  Yes, he has problems with depression, but that is minor to the other things.  I’m sending a recent photo of him.  He looks like that most of the time unless he tells a joke.  Once in awhile he’s in a lighter mood and more like his old self.  That is happening more and more lately.  He has definitely been diagnosed with OCD and other anxiety disorders.  Taking him out of school to home school him was not a choice I made lightly.  His anxiety about school had reached a height I could no longer deal with and his daily threats of suicide were more than I could bear.  He was going all day without going to the bathroom because he can’t use a public rest room.  He would go directly to take a shower, not even hugging me or saying hello, as soon as he walked in the door.  His comfort zone is very small.  There is no rational thought to what he does.  Some days he takes three showers, depending on if we’ve left the house or not.  If his arm or clothing touches a door or other surface he may have a meltdown.  There are times he is trapped in the bathroom for a half hour washing his hands because he has touched something or something has touched him.  He went through six bars of soap in a little under two weeks.  He has three bars of soap in the shower, one for me, one for his top half, and one for his bottom half.  There is an extra one on the sink for washing his feet.  He insists on doing the laundry and screams if I touch the basement door, even if it has been sprayed with Lysol, but he washes everything twice and only small loads because he can only use one hand to move things from the washer to the dryer.  He is afraid I will contaminate the clean laundry by touching it with “dirty” hands that have touched the door, railing, or machines, or dirty clothes taking them down to be washed.  I can not reconcile this with the fact that he wants the space around his couch to be dirty, with trash mixed in with his belongings.  He does not understand the consequences of this or understand that when something is ruined it is because of the mess.  It is totally irrational and rational people can not figure it out or reason him out of it.  You will have to think of him as Monk in that he thinks everybody feels as he does and he can’t relate to anyone else’s feelings right now.  You and I are Stottlemeyer and Sharona and will be frustrated as hell sometimes, but anger isn’t going to do anything but make it worse.  We will need to find help as soon as possible and the whole family will need to be involved.  I will see if I can get a referral. At least we will have a few more weeks with Erin.  Hopefully some progress will be made and Ethan will be less anxious.

Because of his anxieties he can NOT be enrolled in a normal school setting.  They don’t understand and are not equiped to deal with him.  At this point he would probably end up in a school that is teaching where he should have been and he will be lost.  He has had no world history past the Renaissance, no U.S. history or State history at all.  Three different middle schools in three different grades have taught the same things. If we can get the depression under control to a point where he is motivated again and excited he could work at his own pace and graduate from High School early.  Your support and help can make a big difference.  At his age it is mostly self taught with guidance and assignments.  We could find tons of great stuff to do around there that would be interesting and teach him many important things.  The first thing we need is library cards. 

He has become such a picky eater he makes you look easy to feed.  Somehow he manages to eat nutritiously though.  He favorites are salads and thank God he still likes baby carrots.  We eat quite a bit of chicken and not much beef besides hamburger.

Now, about me.  I can cook and do dishes with help, especially chopping stuff.  I always liked it when we did dishes together. It would be fun to make soup together again.  My back will never be better than it is now and anything that puts pressure or torque on my lower back is very, very bad.  I can only lift about five pounds without problems. The joints in my thumbs have worn away and a cyst that was on one of my tendons in my right hand calcified into an extra bone that rubs against where the two bones meet near my wrist.  I still have Vicodin and Percocet, but I don’t use it unless I do something stupid and I’m in more pain than I can bear.  If it is bad enough I can’t walk straight because my balance is affected.  Then I take the pain pill and sit it out.  Again, your help will make the difference.

If you can read all of this and at least pretend that you would be happy to have us come up there then I have no objections.  It would be better for all of us.



This was just a year after I'd had two back surgeries and I had permanent nerve damage in my lower back.  A's father has never been able to accept that I am disabled and ha never accepted any responsibility for the causes of A's anxiety problems, though I believe his PTSD comes from watching his father trying to drink himself to death for three years before we finally had enough and left him.  He has never been helpful or supportive.  As an alcoholic he lives in a constant state of denial and can not see any point but his own and shows no respect for A or his debilities.   A saw through his father at the time and insisted we move back to my boyfriend's house ten months after we'd left it because he felt safer there than with his father.  A's father insists there is something I can do to suddenly make A well enough to live his life normally.  A is now 18 and after three years of paying only child support and no spousal support he now wants to cut us off.  We've been separated for six years and I never asked for anything for myself all that time because I knew he couldn't afford it.  Now I'll only have my $300 SSI for income and they may want to take that away because A is technically an adult and can make his own way.  What do I do now?

I admit it.  I've been lax this week too.  Somehow the week has been getting away from me and before I know it the sun is setting on Thursday and I haven't posted my blog entry.  Things have been going rather smoothly lately and I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.  On the other hand A is up to two showers a week and they are lasting roughly five hours instead of the normal three.

We survived the cat ordeal of  few weeks ago.  The cats are still with us.  I will fight to the death for them as I would for A, even if we have to move.  They have lived here almost as long as we have, now over two years, and they haven't done anything to harm anyone.  A still jumps at the sound of steps on the stairs or a knock at the door, but so far no one has wanted to come in.

All in all I should be enjoying the peace, but I've lived so long without it I don't know what to do with myself!  I ask for your patience if you're a regular reader.  Check back often.  I'm sure I will eventually remember what day it is and post something.  I do apologize because I did say I would be regular with my posts.  Thank you for stopping by.  Leave me a note if you've enjoyed anything I've had to say.  Oops.  The bathroom door just opened.  I have to go cook some rice for my hungry boy.

The week got away from me and I missed last night's post.  I'm sorry.  Things have been so crazy for the last week and I was completely focused on a doctor's appointment tomorrow because I missed one a couple of weeks ago.  We were in the middle of a crisis and I lost track of the days then too.  The rest of this may explain why.

I can’t really complain too much about A and his things, because I have them too, but once in a while our things butt heads with one another and it’s awful.  A has a hard time adjusting to new pets.  When he was about ten we lost his favorite cat.  At that point all of the cats we had were there when he was born so he grew up with them.  When Natasha died though he lost his best friend.  She was wonderful, didn’t play favorites, just made sure everybody got loved in turn.  My husband and I were at work when A called to say something was wrong with her.  I went home to check it out and took her to the vet.  They wanted to keep her overnight and try giving her fluids.  The next morning when they checked on her she was gone.  Later that year my husband went to California to work temporarily and brought home a new cat.  A wasn’t ready.  He was upset that his dad would bring home a new cat to take Natasha’s place.  We tried explaining that she couldn’t do that.  She came to make a place of her own with people who would love her.  It still took over a year before he could really be affectionate to her.

When he and I came here we had three cats with us, two he’d grown up with and the new one.  The two old ones died within a month of each other.  The mama ex-feral cat I have now had a batch of kittens out on our porch.  All but one of them disappeared by the time they were two months old.  One night she and his dad and another stray that hung out with them left the poor little guy all alone out on the porch and he was crying up a storm.  Mama cat had been helping me acclimate him to touching, petting, and picking up for cuddles.  He was so sad, and LOUD!  So he came in the house.  A didn’t like it because he was “dirty.”  He’d been outside.  It was over a year before he would pet him and be nice.  Until then he chased him and made very unfriendly noise at him.  A doesn’t remember that because they the best of pals now.

After we moved out of my boyfriend’s house I went back and caught Mamacat and her latest batch of kittens.  Two out of three survived that time.  Again, A can’t stand them and is mean to them because they were outside.  Mama was pregnant again when I caught her and she had the kittens on the floor of my bedroom.  I found homes for all but one of those kittens and one of the middle kittens I’d caught with her died when she was ten months old.  That was two years ago.  Now he tries to pet the youngest one and can’t figure out why she runs.  I couldn’t be because he’s spent most of the last two years chasing her and yelling at her.  Anyway our family now includes the one my husband brought from California, Mamacat and one “kitten” from each of her three litters.  The oldest of the younguns is A’s pal, the other three are afraid of him, though Mama lets him get away with quite a bit.

Enter our landlord.  We have pretty much avoided inspections because A gets freaked out and doesn’t calm down for a week at the mere prospect of someone who is not him and is not me coming into our apartment. The manager let me write a letter explaining the situation and asking that they skip our apartment.  Most of the time they respect that. Well, we were out one day.  Mamacat and the two were shut up in their room.  It was a hot day and the place smelled.  The litter boxes are right by the door as you come in.  So when I went to pay my rent (instead of saying something two weeks ago when it happened) I was told they would have to go or we’d be evicted.  So I am running my self ragged trying to find a place for them to go.  It’s killing me because when I make a commitment to an animal it’s for life.  They become like my children.  Because A doesn’t like them and doesn’t want them here he’s overjoyed at the prospect of them being gone and dismayed that I’m not doing something every waking minute to get rid of them.  I have called a rescue.  They haven’t called me back.  All they have is voicemail.  The local shelter is not a no-kill for cats and I am not going to turn them over only to have two years of my hard work and love walked into a euthanasia room.  Not only that they have a fee to take them.  If I’m going to pay a fee I’d rather board them. That same fee will pay for three days of boarding.  A says “that’s not an option.”  I can’t blame him because he’s truly afraid of being homeless.  I’ve called my boyfriend, who has always been on my side when it comes to cats.  He was with me when both of my babies died and the age of 18 and 17.  He held me while I cried.  He knows.  Why doesn’t my own son, who has been with me since birth and grew under my heart not understand I can’t just through them out to be eaten by coyotes or whatever is out there?  They were here for TWO YEARS without a problem.  What am I supposed to do?  Anybody who says “They’re only cats” without suggesting a real solution will be booted off.  They are not ONLY cats.  They are loving, living creatures who depend on me and deserve loving homes.  Why should I have to give them up because I love them and A doesn’t?  Why does he get to make the rules all the time when I’m supposed to be in charge?  Along with all of this I've been breaking my back trying to get as much cat hair out of the carpet as I can because I'm having the carpet cleaned.  I was planning to do it anyway before the manager gave me the bad news.  I seldom have enough to buy groceries let alone have the carpet cleaned.

UPDATE: I never found a home for them.  The cats are back with me after being boarded for a week.  My wonderful, supportive boyfriend paid the boarding fee for me when my card wouldn’t work and was frozen.  That’s another $500 I owe him on top of many, many other bail-outs.  A is beside himself with fear.  Three days after the cats came home we got another notice and he’s still in a panic.  They are installing carbon monoxide detectors in apartments that are all electric and have no CO emissions.  He asks me everyday what are we going to do with the cats if there’s another inspection and when they come to install the detectors.  I have no answers.  I can only take it one day at a time as it presents itself.  I’ve been looking for rent-to-own homes hoping we can move out of here and have the freedom to take care of ourselves and our cats without intrusion from others.  My credit is so bad though I don’t know how I can do it.  All I can do is hope and pray.

 LONG POST ALERT!!!!

    I’ve started this post over in my mind at least three times.  I started out “I’ve lived in fear for most of A’s life.”  Then I realized “I’ve lived in fear most of my adult life.”  Then I thought about it some more and realized that I’ve really lived in fear for most of my entire life!  When I was little I was as fearless as the next child.  I climbed onto the fence of the bull pen and then couldn’t get down and somebody had to come and rescue me before the bull figured out I was there.  I don’t remember wearing shoes in the summer until I was at least ten.  I stepped on a lot of bees.  And cigarette butts that were still burning.

    I don’t remember feeling fear until I had to go to school.  Like most kids when I got to a certain age I got excited about going to school.  As a toddler I lived next to a country school house and I watched the kids at recess.  I loved going shopping for pencils and stuff for school.  When I got there I learned very quickly that other kids could sense a weakness and take advantage of it.  I’d grown up around adults and had never been teased before.  I took it very personally and cried, which naturally made things worse.  After the first month of school I was transferred to a different school closer to home.  The very one I had lived next door to when I was younger.  We’d moved into a house “in town” when I was five and in the meantime a house had been built where our garden was, but I knew the school well. 

    There were two other kids who had been sent to the wrong school and we all started at the new one together.  Otherwise I didn’t know any of the other kids.  Because I was unfamiliar with teasing and bullying I lived in fear for my life.  My mother tried to teach me the old “sticks and stones” saw, but that really didn’t make the words hurt any less.  It didn’t help that I nearly died over the winter and missed a great deal of school.  When I got back I had to stay in at recess to catch up on my work.  I had a few friends, but only one lived near me and I was too little to walk to her house to play.

    Things didn’t change much as I grew because the bullies grew too and got even bullier.  In ninth grade the boy who sat across the aisle from me in study hall took a disliking to my dress and when the teacher wasn’t looking he would give me a punch to the arm.  By the end of the day I had a bruise that covered my entire upper arm.  Even though it was the spring and it was hot I wore long sleeves to cover it up.  One of the girls in my home ec class saw part of the bruise when I rolled up my sleeves and told the teacher.  The teacher made me show her the whole arm and marched me down to the principal’s office and he made me wait there while he called the boy down and made him apologize.  I’m not sure what fear turns into when it gets worse than terror, but I felt it.

    I spent most of high school afraid that there would never be someone for me to marry.  These were the early days of women’s lib when it was hoped that I could be whatever I wanted to be, but the reality would probably be I’d end up being a wife and mother - IF I could find a husband, which didn’t seem likely there.  So off to college I went.  I went to a small technical college in a big city, at least it was big to me then.  I’ve lived in much bigger cities since then.  But I digress.  There I was afraid I’d get lost.  I was afraid I couldn’t find my classes or get there on time.  I was afraid of so many, many things I can’t remember them all.  I made it through orientation, made a new friend, and found my way home again!  First day licked.  Second day I walked into typing class - on time I might add - and saw the scruffiest hippiest looking man I ever saw in my life.  My first thought was that it would kill my dad if I brought him home.  He was in every one of my classes.  I had to fight every shyness cell in my body to speak to him, but after the fourth class in a row I had to know if he was going to be in all of them, so I asked.  He was.  After the next day we spent every break together and started going out.  We got married nine months later.  Partly because we fell in love, partly because I never thought I’d find anybody else, and partly because I wanted to show everybody at home I could find somebody and get married before I was 19 or 20.  The wedding was one month before I turned 19.

    Then I lived in fear that he would leave me.  He threatened to regularly for 23 years.  Anytime he felt like I was getting beyond his control he would threaten.  We actually separated several times.  Once he threw me out of our apartment and I had to go back to my mother’s because he wanted me to quit my job and I didn’t want to.  He got his way because I didn’t have any choice but to pack up and go 100 miles back to my parents.  A month later we were back together again.  We separated again nine months later for financial reasons.  We each got better jobs in different places and started saving up so we could have a place of our own again.  I got hurt at work, he came to see me and because we didn’t end up having sex he asked for a divorce.  It felt like a punch to the gut.  I’d been working so hard to get back together and he’d been dating!  So I filed for divorce.  He came up for the hearing, one thing led to the other and the divorce was over.  Back together again.  It took six months.  After that he liked to pull out the D card every once in awhile.  More than once I was ready to go along with it, but he wouldn’t move out.  I didn’t think I could make it on my own.  I had no idea about spousal support after a certain number of years.

    Then A was born.  Perhaps the greatest fear of all came after I found out I was expecting A.  First I was afraid I couldn’t carry him the whole time.  I was afraid I would lose him, like the others.  A was baby number four and the only one I carried past the first two months.  Then I went into preterm labor at six months!  He was saved, but I lived for three months on bed rest - not as easy as you’d think!  Then he didn’t move!  You couldn’t make that kid move for anything!  Not even the occasional foot sticking out of my belly!  Nothing!  After he was born I was afraid of SIDS.  Then it was abduction.  I never let him out of my sight.  The hardest thing was baby and me classes.  He was going to have to be an only.  There was too much risk to my life to try again.  I didn’t want him to grow up like I did without any other kids around.

    Aside from the fear for A these were wonderful, happy, challenging years when we were a real family.  His dad got a great job.  We bought a beautiful house and two cars.  Dad left for work at a little before seven.  A was pre-programmed to wake up at 6:30 (I swear he was born waking up at 6:30 every morning!).  He would climb out of his crib and race down the hall to see his dad before he left for work.  He went to a day care where he was well watched and protected. 

    We lived in a small town, the kind where everybody knows everybody else, even if it isn’t by name.  They had a fall festival with a one K race for kids.  A wanted to run in that race so badly.  He was an athletic kid who loved to run and climb on anything, including the piles of dirt and machines at the construction site across the street - under strict supervision!  He trained for that race by running around our block with me following him.  The day of the race comes and dad picks a big fight over whether he should run or not.  Dad says no.  I don’t want to let him down so we leave dad in a snit.  Problem: the plan was for Dad to be on one end of the race and I was going to be on the other.  Now there’s only one of us.  There is a landmark at the end of the race and A is told to go to that landmark and not leave it until I get there.  He knows about stranger danger.  I can walk faster than a four year old can run can’t I?  It’s only three blocks.  I take photos of the race starting then get out of the way and head for the other end at a fast pace.  I don’t make it in time for the end of the race.  A is no where to be found.  I find neighbors and ask.  They haven’t seen him.  I panic.  I walk back to the other end in case he’s gone to find me.  No A.  Back to the finish where I fall apart asking everybody I can find.  Finally a policeman is coming to help when someone asks if that’s him across the street.  IT IS!  I run to him crying my eyes out in relief.  He can’t imagine what’s wrong and the woman holding his hand tries to explain.  She saw him faltering toward the end and went out to encourage him, then took him to look for me.  I must have passed them at least twice.  I can’t believe what I’m hearing, but he’s safe in my arms trying to comfort me, to get me to stop crying because it’s ok.  He never leaves my sight again until he’s 13 at the county fair with a group of friends and still I was afraid the whole time!.  I can still feel that panic and terror today as I’m writing this.

    I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from that sick feeling of terror.  It never leaves me.  Even when I leave him outside in the car to wait for me while I shop of get him a book or get our food.  He’s almost 18 and I don’t think I will ever stop being afraid that he’ll hurt himself and I won’t be there to help him.  I know he can defend himself now and he can call for help.  He’s six and a half feet tall and weighs nearly 200 pounds!  He knows how to defend himself.  I think I’ll be afraid for him until the day I die.

    His underwear doesn’t fit.  I spent $15 I didn’t really have to buy new underwear two weeks ago.  He insisted he needed mediums and I thought he needed large.  I bought large.  I washed them.  I had to go back for medium.  Another $15. They didn’t fit so he switched to the large.  Now they stretch funny and they don’t fit either.  He’s been crying and breaking things for two days because his underwear doesn’t fit and it hurts.  So, back to the store to spend another $15 I don’t have plus $35 for the overdraft fee for a different brand of underwear. 

    Yesterday something fell off a tub in the hallway as he was walking by and it touched him!  That tantrum because he didn’t know what to do to fix it caused 7 holes to be punched in a bifold door in the hall.  That wasn’t enough damage so he cut his arm.  I can’t take this pressure!  I know it only lasts a little while. 

    By the time I got back from the store with the underwear he was all smiles.  He showed me the difference between the two brands of underwear and they were significant.  The new mediums were larger than the old ones, yet smaller than the old/new large.  Hopefully they will fit and I won’t have to hear him complain and cry for the next two weeks.  Since there basically are only two brands I don’t know what I will do if they don’t fit or “wear funny.” 

    I honestly don’t know how I avoid killing us both to end the misery and the hopelessness I feel.  I was feeling so hopeful.  He had been doing better, going into the book store and the grocery store, talking about getting his GED and a job.  There hadn’t been a tantrum in nearly a week.  He started learning to knit.  Now I feel like the whole thing is in the dumpster.  I feel like I’m stuck in this apartment until I die because I can’t afford to pay for the damage he’s caused.  I feel like I can’t mention any progress because it will all go away if I do.

    “Why do you let him get away with that?”  That’s what I constantly hear from my family.  What they don’t, or can’t, grasp is that he’s the driver on this run away bus careening down the interstate highway of our lives.  It all happens on his timetable, not mine.  If people knew what it used to be like and could see the difference they wouldn’t judge so harshly.  But they can’t, so they say hurtful things that I have to either defend myself from or let slide off my back, believing that they are only trying to help.

    At the peak of A’s, I don’t know what to call it, OCD activity?  We could hardly walk through the living room for the paper, ruined books, playing cards, and other detritus that he just dropped or flung on the floor.  He didn’t keep track of his belongings and most of the time if it was on the floor it was dirty and therefore garbage, but if I touched it he’d have a screaming raging fit and I’d have to wash my hands, repeatedly.

     He slept on the coffee table because he could wash it every day and you can’t do that with a mattress.  He took three and four hour showers every day.  All of his bedding and any clothes that were on the floor had to be washed everyday, whether he’d worn them or not.  And he wanted every load to be washed twice.  The kitchen light had to remain on all the time as well as the one above the front door.  He would not eat anything that my boyfriend cooked.  I would either have to buy or cook him something else.  All of this while recovering from back surgery.  He did nothing to help.  He was too busy trying to maintain some kind of comfort zone all the while adding to the pile of garbage that was causing everyone else so much discomfort. 

    He would get an idea for something and obsess about it until I got the materials he needed.  Then if it didn’t work there would be a meltdown and the stuff would just end up in the pile across the room.  When I couldn’t stand it anymore it would take nearly a week, on my hands and knees, sorting through the piles, to clean just the one room. 

    When we moved into our own apartment it took me two weeks to clean the living room and another two weeks to clean his bedroom, which I was not allowed into when we lived there as it was a “dirty” area and he wouldn’t know what I touched or moved.  He would go in once or twice a week to sleep in a cleared out space that he had to build himself a “nest” for piling blankets and sleeping. 

    He was like a toddler in that anything he wanted or thought should be his became his.  After we moved and I was cleaning his room I found so many of my things scattered around the room under piles of clothes and books.  Things he had no business touching or unpacking, but he thought were fair game because they were in HIS room so they must be his.  We had briefly moved back to our old home and things I’d packed to send for later were put in his room so they would be out of the way.  When we came back I didn’t get the chance to take care of them before he decided the room was off limits.  I thought they were safe in there, silly me.  One of the things was a family Bible, over 150 years old, that was in plastic box for safekeeping.  I found it in several pieces scattered around the room. 

    His anger knew no bounds.  I compare him to the Incredible Hulk now, but he was much worse then.  Several of the walls in my boyfriend’s house have holes punched in them by A’s fist.  My computer desk, which matched my boyfriend’s and was an IKEA closeout, has holes in the top that were made by both A’s head and his elbows. He started playing Go, an Asian board game similar to chess, online and when he lost he would take it out on my desk. 

    He always expects to achieve high results on everything, even if he’s only a beginner or he’s trying something new.  He expects it to work perfectly from the first time.  He’s tried games, magic, origami, inventing.  He does brilliantly at everything, especially once he gets the hang of it.  The problem is getting him through the beginning stages.  Because he’s so intelligent, he seems to think he should just be able to do whatever it is the first time and not need practice.

    Since we have been on our own - two years now - he has cut his showers down to once or twice a week.  He no longer needs to wash his bed every time he remakes it, though he is still more comfortable sleeping on the board than on a mattress.  He doesn’t always smash things to oblivion, though sometimes...  His sleeping area is neater.  He still can’t recognize the difference between a clean room and a cluttered one, but he cut down on the scrap paper pile.  He still asks me if his hands are clean after washing them.  He has cut down on the number of blankets and sheets on his bed so it only takes about three loads to wash them all.  It used to be five.  However things still get “dirty” by some pretty confusing ways.  Last week he dropped a book on his lap and because he thinks he leaks urine the book had to be thrown out because it got “dirty” by falling into his lap.  Things aren’t as severe as they were, but they can get pretty “different” sometimes.  As more “things” go away others crop up, but they are getting fewer and farther between and easier to deal with.  Not long ago he would not have even thought about getting out of the car when we went somewhere.  In the last few weeks he has gone into Walmart (at 4 A.M.) and the book store several times.  He even went into the grocery store with me one day.  He’s talking about taking the class to get his GED, which he should have had a year ago, but couldn’t even think about going into a classroom, and getting a job at Barnes & Noble.  I’m not sure what would happen if he didn’t get a job there, or if he did!  But he’s thinking about it and that’s what counts.  Stepping forward, even if it’s with baby steps, at whatever pace he sets, as long as it’s forward.

    For someone who was born so easily A has been a real pain in the keester since then.  Actually the lead up to his birth wasn’t all that easy.  In fact it was anything but.

    My husband and I had been married for 17 years.  In that time we had separated and gotten back together at least three times, had lived in nine different places, both large cities and small towns, moved 13 times, had ten cats, gone through over ten years of fertility tests and treatments and lost three babies.  At the time I got pregnant with A we were in the midst of another move.  My husband decided he liked his old employer, whom he’d left just 14 months earlier, better than his current employer, which was probably the best one he’d had in 17 years.  I had just returned from the pestilent ridden city we’d left 14 months earlier where I’d taken a bus to look for an apartment. 

    That trip is practically a post in itself.  On the way out there I’d been sitting next to a drug dealer who was transporting product to the city we were bound for when he was arrested half way through the trip.  On the way back I was sitting next to a smelly, dirty drunk and behind a young couple with a young baby who spent most of the trip sleeping and ignoring the baby.  They had been on the bus for two days and had to go several hundred miles yet when I got off. 

    Anyway, the employer decided that my husband was so valuable that they broke precedent and hired him back.  I drove him the several hundred miles to settle into our apartment with what we could carry in the car to start his job and drove back to pack our condo and drive back again two weeks later.  On the way back to the new apartment I became ill, chalked it up to allergies from the dust from packing the car and cleaning the condo, and stopped several times to throw up.  I wasn’t pleased to be moving back to that particular city so that might have had something to do with it as well. I had been treated for an ulcer a few months before that and thought that was part of it as well. 

    After we got settled in the apartment life evened out and I still experienced nausea from time to time.  The scent of my husband’s aftershave seemed to bring on a bout of vomiting every morning, but I’d always been sensitive to scents so I didn’t think anything of it.  We’d given up on ever having children and stopped all the fertility stuff and I figured the nausea was just more problems with the ulcer.  A barium test a few months before had shown it was worse so it made sense.  I went to the doctor and scheduled an endoscopy.  On the day of the endoscopy they asked the normal questions including the one about when my last period was.  I did a quick count back.  My periods had always been irregular and it wasn’t odd that I’d skip a month, but it had been three months!  They insisted on a pregnancy test and I was sure it would be negative, but it was positive!  Since our sex life had slowed down naturally over the years I knew when I conceived.   I was nearly through my first trimester.  I’d nearly missed it!

    Physical activity and I have never been companions.  We’re hardly casual acquaintances, but I wanted to be as healthy as possible so I signed up for water aerobics.  I was doing pretty well until one day I got severe abdominal cramps in the pool.  That scared the crap out of me. 

    About the same time my hubby decided that he would rather be living somewhere else.  Seems he got the idea he wanted to die and this was the place to do it.  He had been sure he was dying since we met.  He was 20 at the time and sure he wouldn’t survive to see thirty.  He has a death wish that refuses to come true.  Anyway the baby had given him a reason to live so we packed up again.  Luckily most everything was still packed.  Off to the new place for a job interview and house search.  Houses were selling like ice cream on a hot day.  We made three offers and were outbid on all of them.  Soooo we decided on an apartment temporarily.  It was a military area so you could find an apartment with a month to month lease with a three month minimum.  So pack up the car and the cats and follow the movers on to the next new place.

    The doctors I went to at the beginning of my pregnancy didn’t seem to think there were any concerns with a 37 year old woman having her fourth pregnancy, the first one to go past the first two months, so I went to my first appointment with my new doctors without any preconceived notions of disaster.  From the first visit they told me about being cautious and the dangers of having my first baby at my age.  There were tests and ultrasounds and classes and then another specter reared it’s ugly head.  In a class for high risk pregnancies I met a woman who was expecting her second set of twins.  She had gestational diabetes and tested her blood right there in the class.  She had to test six times a day.  She’d had it with her first set of twins too.  It wasn’t long before I had to endure the test for gestational diabetes myself.  Of course it was positive.  In the beginning it was only a dietary change, but I wasn’t gaining weight so they tried insulin.  No matter how much I took there was no weight gain and I had terrible hypoglycemia.  Yet every month I got a threat from my doctor, no weight gain and I’d go back on insulin.  So I’d gain a pound.  Then the next month the pound would be gone.  It was the only time in my life I had trouble gaining weight.

    I kept looking for a house, looking through the paper and driving around.  Hubby had certain requirements, which I’m sure had something to do with him not wanting to buy a house.  One day I found one with all of his requirements.  It was a bit odd, but in an interesting way.  We went to see it and made an offer the same day.  It needed a little work, but nothing we couldn’t handle.  We made a list and I started getting bids from contractors.   Most of it was out of reach so we broke It down into manageable pieces and started painting and cleaning.

    I was in the grocery store checking out one Saturday morning.  I was almost exactly six months along.  As I was bagging the groceries I got a hard cramp in my abdomen that nearly took me off my feet.  Being the idiot I am I finished packing my groceries and took them out to the car, experiencing at least two more of the cramps.  Hubby was downtown at a piano lesson so I drove to the music store to get him.  There wasn’t a place to park so I had to go around the corner.  On the way to the music store I had to go to the bathroom really bad so I stopped in a restaurant on the way to use the bathroom.  When I got to the music store he had already left and the cramps were worse.  I nearly sat down on the floor.  Do you think I asked for an ambulance?  I was about to when he came back in the store.  We could get going faster than an ambulance could get there so we walked to the car and went straight to the hospital.  I was in labor.  They stopped the labor, but I was put on bed rest for the rest of my pregnancy. 

    We were in the middle of painting the inside of the house and putting in woodwork.  That ended my involvement with redecorating.  Hubby did what was left himself.  We moved into the house with the help of friends.  The day we moved in the basement stairs were missing.  They’d been taken out the day before and new ones weren’t going in until after we’d moved in.  So practically everything was piled in the diningroom.

    You’d think that someone who was no friend to physical activity would have no trouble laying in bed for three months, but it is not easy!  The only day I was allowed to get up was the day I saw my doctor, and that changed to once a week.  We had food delivered every day.  It was a very very long three months.  Two  months out my husband did something that both surprised and shocked me in it’s show of consideration for my safety.  He moved the guest bed downstairs to the dining room so I didn’t have to come down the stairs in the middle of the night.  We only had one bathroom, downstairs, and our staircase was less than safe.  It was one of the things on our list that needed to be fixed. 

    Due date was fast approaching.  The bags were packed.  We were down to two days when I went to my weekly doctor’s appointment.  I’d been having problems with pre-eclampsia, a blood pressure problem during pregnancy.  So far it had been under control, but this time the nurse took my blood pressure and went out to get the doctor.  He came in and asked me if I’d like to have the baby right away?  He wanted me to go right over to the hospital to have labor induced.  I wanted to get my husband.  Apparently my blood pressure was so high he didn’t want me upset so he relented and let me go get my husband.

    We got to the hospital two hours later, labor was induced.  After the first few contractions Dad took a powder to the waiting room.  I had a hired labor coach.  Things moved along so quickly I never got my epidermal.  Six hours and three pushes later I had my son. 

    He came into the world at the beginning of the current wave of breast-feeding enthusiasm.  They pushed breast feeding to such an extent that I hadn’t even bought bottles.  I thought it would be the easiest thing in the world.  Women have been breast feeding for millennia - since the first baby!  Nope.  It took two days for him to attach once.  Then we were out of the hospital and home.  After hours of trying and many, many phone calls he latched on to one of them.  I didn’t want to take a chance on him not latching on to the other breast and getting too little so I didn’t switch. 

    Then the colic kicked in.  We didn’t sleep until early morning and hubby’s family was coming to see the baby.  Four hours.  We got four hours sleep before we had to get up and greet them.  Thankfully they stayed the night and my sister-in-lay got up to take care of the baby so I could sleep. 

    We went out and bought bottles and formula and I pumped as much as I could to mix in.  He threw it up.  It took months to figure out he was allergic to formula and we had to use soy formula.  I got an electric pump from the hospital and spent the time he was asleep pumping.  By the end of the first week my legs were killing me from taking care of him all day, trying to clean, do dishes, and laundry at night, and walking the floor with him.  21 days after birth I couldn’t get the milk to come out.  I had to hook up to the pump and have my husband stroke my breasts to force it out.  When we were done that was it.  Not one more drop of breast milk.  And still the kid threw up a third of what he ate.  Trips to the hospital, trying everything we could figure out  to do for the colic, I was exhausted. 

    Baptism day, one month later and trying to get him to eat.  “You’re starving him!”  He’s not getting enough to eat” advice from my family.  He takes a whole bottle for the first time.  Hubby takes him back to our room to change him and takes forever.  I go to see what’s happening and he’s changing his clothes.  Two thirds of that bottle is on the back of his shirt.  No cause is ever found for the vomiting or the colic. 

    The colic is solved accidentally at a visit to Grandma’s when I’m inspired to sit him in the warm tub after his bath.  He’s a month and a half old. And I’d been afraid to put him in the water to give him his bath.  He can’t sit up yet, but I can sit him up in the tub of warm water.  For the first time he goes right to sleep and there is peace and rest.  He sleeps through the night for the first time.

I've been told I'm very prolific and that nobody posts as often as every other day. (who knew?!)  so from now on I will post new posts on Wednesdays.  Why Wednesdays?  I don't know.  It seemed like a good idea.  Check back often.  Play the game a little.  Have some fun!  And don't forget to comment once in a while!

 Before I get to today's post I want to thank everybody for stopping by!  I'd like to hear some comments though.  Am I reaching anybody?  Am I making any sense?  Anybody have anything helpful to say?


    I always wondered how other parents felt when their children came to be a certain age, when it was time to push them out of the nest to make their way on their own.  There comes a time when people look forward to their life without the children underfoot and the children can’t wait to get out on their own, go to college, get a job, make their own life.  I didn’t have the “luxury” of those feelings because I was sure I’d have “A” with me until I died.  He couldn’t go into a store or classroom.  He can’t cook anything.  He can’t use a stove, he’s afraid to.  He’d never be able to make it happen on his own.  He has a plan to write books, publish and then when I die he goes on a long hike across America, seeing what he can see, scavenging, maybe going to California and living on the beach.  Sounds lovely, but impractical.  I’ll be dead so I can’t worry.  He doesn’t care what happens to him so he’s willing to take his chances.  Anything but living with his dad.

    Then we had a big slap in the face from reality.  My ex-husband is probably the best ex-husband on the planet.  He deposits child support in my account with out fail every pay day.  He does this without force from a court order and has been known to put in extra when needed.  My finances have been a mess for months.  We’ve been living far too deep in the negative.  My phone and internet access were cut off and we were pretty much out of food.  Pay day came and there was no deposit.  He does something every once in a while that pisses me off to no end.  He turns off his phone for days at a time and for all intents and purposes disappears from the face of the Earth.  It scares the crap out of us.  Even though I can’t live with him, I still care about him and his well being and I knew he’d been having heart trouble.  That weekend he decided to disappear.  While we were trying to reach him with my cell phone we feared the worst.  My son, who usually never thinks about the future other than when the next Yugi Oh card release is, suddenly had a coherent plan that involved getting his GED, getting a job at Barnes and Noble and his own studio apartment. He said I could move back in with my boyfriend and we could both make it.  That was such a huge step for him I can’t believe it yet, several weeks later.

    It all worked out.  My ex had forgotten it was pay day.  I reached him after three days of anguish and he was just befuddled.  It amazes me that anybody can live in a way that pay day can be forgotten, but he is safe and that’s all I was worried about.   That leaves me to face a new fear that I thought would never come.  What if my son has actually progressed to the point where he can take a class and get his GED?  What if he does get a job and his own apartment?  How will it feel to not be with him every minute of every day?  It scares me.  I don’t think I could ever be ready for it.  I’m afraid if he gets his own place and I’m living with my boyfriend again that I will never see him again.  In fact I’m terrified of the day that happens.  Do other parents feel the same way, or are they relieved when their little birds leave the nest and fly away?

    This is one of the old essays I mentioned in the Welcome post.  I-43 runs from Beloit, in south central Wisconsin near the Illinois border roughly 200 miles through Delavan, East Troy, Milwaukee and Sheboygan, ending near Green Bay.  Several times friends saw me stopped along the freeway looking through my camera at some obscure thing only I could see. 

Hawkin’ Down the highway

    There I was, minding my own business driving up I-43 going - well, as fast as everybody else was - and my eye was caught by what appeared to be a large squirrels nest in the middle of a dead tree straight ahead of me, about 100 feet from the highway.  You know the kind, bunches of leaves and sticks bunched together on the flimsiest branch that hangs out over the busiest street in town.  Except this one was firmly in the center of the tree and I glanced to the side as I passed it.  There I saw the silhouette of a large bird.  In my excitement I thought it might be an eagle.  I’ve been trying to see an eagle in the wild from closer than two miles all my life.  Unfortunately I had neither binoculars or camera with me and I was going - well, as fast as everybody else - on my way to downtown Milwaukee.  For the next two days I thought I’d try again to see the bird, or birds, but I would leave the house without the proper equipment and not remember until I was past the point of no return.

    Finally on the fourth day I remembered both camera with telephoto lens and binoculars.  Just before getting to the nest site I saw a bird circling the sky and I knew I was close.  As I pulled over as far as possible I saw the silhouette of another adult bird sitting on the nest.  I turned off the car and turned on the flashers and got out with the camera and the binoculars and took a look just as the beautiful bird took flight.  It was a very large red-tailed hawk and sailed toward the ground, then up to a tree across the clearing from it’s nest.  Naturally I followed and photographed it, but then turned my attention back to the nest.  I switched from the camera to the binoculars and back again and while I was looking through the binoculars two fuzzy little heads popped up from the nest. One of them was brave enough to climb up on the side of the nest and stretched its little wings as if to take flight.  One of the parents was there in a flash with food, prompting the brave little trooper to drop back to safety so its sibling didn’t get all the food.

    I watched the nest for a time, hoping that little guy would pop up again, but time was flying instead and I had to leave.  Just as I was turning to load my equipment back into the car and pull away I saw both adults sitting at the top of a tree about thirty feet from the nest.  I took a few more pictures of them sitting there and got into my car.  As the door closed they took off in unison, soaring out over the highway.  I felt like the whole show had been put on just for me and they left when the audience was leaving, taking their bows as they flew away.  I left for downtown with tears in my eyes at the wonder of what I’d seen, knowing the other drivers were oblivious to the beauty of it all.

    I hate feeling like I’m in a pressure cooker all the time.  I like to trick myself into thinking I’m independent, but I’m really not.  Sometimes I feel like Scarlett O’Hara, always depending on the kindness of strangers.  Or really having to depend on the kindness of strangers.  Sometimes I’m surprised and find a kind stranger, like last week when I needed to buy milk and my card wouldn’t work.  I had a $5 store reward coupon and I stretched to get exactly $5 worth of stuff so I could use the coupon to get the milk, except the coupon wouldn’t cover the milk and I was $2 short of cash to pay for it.  A nice lady came along and handed me $5 so I could get the milk. 

    I’m always overdrawn.  I can’t remember what started the roller coaster ride down, but I’m always at least $250 overdrawn when I get my child support.  The deposit goes in and just as fast goes out again.  Having a child with OCD makes it go a little faster.  He wants to read something when he wants to read it, not when I can afford it.  He wants to eat a particular thing and nothing else whether I can afford it or not.  Last week it was Panda Express Sweet Fire Chicken.  He gets bored.  On the other hand he has willingly given up all of his games and game systems so we can buy groceries when I’m out of money.  He has given up trading cards and books to buy other books.  He wasn’t always like that, but I’m glad he is now.   When he was little I made the mistake of telling him about collectibles and what “mint on mint card” and “mint in mint package” meant.  After that when we bought toys he wanted two so he could play with one and keep the other mint in it’s package.  As the OCD got worse he wanted three so he could play with one, have a spare in case something happened to the first one and he couldn’t play with it anymore, and one to keep mint.  It got up to five of everything before he finally decided one was ok again.  I think buried somewhere in my boyfriend’s garage there are tubs full of mint in the package toys.  I do have to admit he had good taste in toys.

    Anyway, back to the pressure cooker.  The telephone and internet are shut off because I can’t pay the rent and the phone bill.  I got a yellow letter from the electric company because I can’t pay them either.  Rent and groceries take all my child support and my SSI.  SSI is a joke.  I get $635 to support two people for a month.  A teenage boy puts away approximately $200 in groceries a week.  If I buy meat and vegetables my grocery bill for two weeks goes over $300.  By the time my overdraft is covered and the rent is paid the groceries take the balance below zero.  If I don’t do it we don’t eat.  I can cut down to one meal a day, though as a diabetic I shouldn’t, but A can’t.  I get just enough in child support to take me over the limit for any assistance programs.  Luckily I’m low enough to live in an income controlled apartment complex.  However because of the lousy economy there is no longer a housing authority in this city so no low rent or subsidized apartments.  The only way I could get a cheaper rent payment would be to buy a house and with my cash flow problems I don’t see that happening.  I feel the weight of impending homelessness or starvation almost constantly and there’s nothing I can do to change it.  A’s dad pays support voluntarily and it’s all he can afford.  He does come through with extra from time to time, but he can’t always pick up the slack.   Between my disability and A’s OCD neither one of us can work, though he is making strides in that direction.  He’d like to work at Barnes & Noble, but he has to be able to take a class to get his GED.  So far in the last month he’s mustered the courage to go into Walmart at 4 in the morning and into B&N three times.  I know it really stresses him out, but he’s trying and trying leads to becoming more comfortable and then to doing.  All I can do is hope that some day he will be self sufficient and will be able to live on his own.

    Until then I am at a loss as to how to make ends meet and keep the bills paid without losing my benefits or becoming homeless.  It’s a constant game of tug-of-war.

    My son had an idealic childhood.  We had our own home.  His nursery was beautiful.  His dad had redone the room right down to the woodwork before he was born. He had pets who immediately bonded with him, “guarding” him while he slept and getting into the playpen with him on the rare occasions he was unsupervised for a few minutes.  When he was in his crib they would gather outside the door and peer in to make sure nothing disturbed him.  He had developmental toys that were all the rage.  He also had colic, which kept us up and walking the floor for hours.  At some time during the first two sleep deprived weeks we discovered that music would calm him and reduce the hours we had to walk about.  So at the age of 14 days he got his first boom box with CD player and the Narada CDs made a trip up to the nursery.  Ironically his favorite was a CD called Nighttime.

    Just before he was two we moved to a small city in a different state where we had a more beautiful house and a big yard for him to play in.  He started going to day care a couple of times a week just to be around other kids for a few hours a day.  I grew up like an only child, my siblings were all grown and gone by the time I can remember anything so I wasn’t around other children very much before I went to school.  I felt that it held me back when it came to relating to others in my own age group and I didn’t want that for A since he was an only child too.  Before our move he had been enrolled in a baby and me class that separated the moms and the babies so moms could go to a parenting class and the babies could interact together.

    The only problem we had with day care was he would get excited and start hitting other kids for apparently no reason.  The teacher in the day care wanted to spend more time with him teaching him to socialize without hitting so he went three times a week instead of two until he started pre-school when he was three.  Pre-school at three was two days a week.  He would go to pre-school in the morning and to day care after, plus one more day of day care per week.  Slowly, ever so slowly the hitting began to decrease, but the pre-school teacher wanted me to keep him back from Kindergarten because she didn’t feel he was socialized enough.  At home he was always getting into trouble.  I can’t remember what he did, but when he was four I remember him spending whole days in time-out.  I kept hearing “it’ll get better when he gets older” but it never did!  It just got different.  The terrible twos started when he was about a year and a half and then came the terrible threes and the terrible fours.  I took him to a social worker who specialized in ADHD children.  I needed to know what was going on in his head that he just would not obey me.  My family told me I spoiled him.  Nice advice considering none of them ever saw him at home or saw how I interacted with him.

    About the time he was four we were facing financial struggles and I wanted to look for a job.  His dad said “No.  A is your job now.”   So I tried to think of a business to start so I could take A to work with me.  In the course of trying to do this my marriage started falling apart.  Dad was withdrawing into his own little world and having very little to do with A or me.  I really needed his involvement because by the end of the day A had me worn to a frazzle.  Bathtime was a nightmare because he fought me every inch of the way and I was always afraid he’d get hurt.  Being a typical child once he was in the tub he was fine and didn’t want to get out.  Once he was in bed, songs had been sung and stories told, CD player playing, Dad would leave the house.  So, I was alone all day with a kid who wouldn’t behave, and alone all night with nobody to talk to.  He come home after three or four hours and fall asleep on the couch having said approximately ten words to me since he had gotten home. 

    He hated the idea of me starting a business and he was sure I was spending “his” money hand over fist to get it going, but I had started a search for venture money and I’d had one firm show some interest.  I had blueprints, I had other businesses interested in leasing space, I’d even contacted equipment manufacturers.  I was just waiting for money to finance.  In all I’d spent maybe $500.  I started looking for decor and I’d bought some posters, both because I liked them for the family room in case it all fell apart, and because they would look great in the place if it didn’t.  One day mister helpful dad came home with an ultimatum.  I had been handling the family finances for years.  Twice before he’d taken them over because he thought he could do better and the bills fell behind after two months.  This time he offered me a choice, either hand over the money management or get a divorce.  I chose divorce, but I guess he didn’t hear me because he came to me some weeks later and asked me again.  So I told him to start looking for an apartment because the choice was divorce.  He had threatened me with it many times before and he never thought I‘d do it.  To him it was a power struggle.  The one with the purse strings had the power.  The only power I could see was the power to deny the other something they wanted.  I never denied him anything.  Any new toy he wanted we found the money to get.  He, on the other hand denied me even a new blouse to wear to work.  I ha to hand my paycheck over to him and if he wanted anything it was gotten, no questions asked.  I worked when he wanted me to and at what he wanted me too.  I’d given up my college education so he could finish his.  When I wanted to go back the subject had to be approved by him or no dice.  It is a wound that festers even today.

    I’d noticed that he started going down in the basement immediately on arrival after work, and that his smoke breaks down there were lasting longer and longer.  One day I went to the basement, out to the workshop where he smoked.  I started looking around and packed in nearly all of the boxes stored in there I found empty brandy bottles.  As far as I knew he’d been sober for over 13 years.  From the size of the stash I guess he’d ben drinking for about a year, sometime after the death of his stepfather.  That explained the decline in our marriage and the disappearance of money from my purse everyday.   I usually went to the bank and got cash once a week or so, but I’d been checking my purse before going to the store and finding I had a lot less money than I thought I had.  That was the nail on the coffin that was my marriage.  I’d bent so far back at times to please him that I was close to snapping, but I was not going to live with a drunk again.  He was out!  He insisted on declaring bankruptcy because as far as he saw it I had run up th debt by pursuing my business and none of it was his.  The truth of it was I had been borrowing on credit cards to cover bills for months because there was never enough money to go around.  We’d gotten a second mortgage to catch things up the year before and between the higher house payments, higher credit card payments, and car payments there just was not enough.  I just wanted him out, but it would mean losing the house.  As it turned out A and I stayed in the house for another year.

    While his dad and I were separated I continued taking A to counseling, but it was getting nowhere.  I was supposed to try positive reinforcement, but how can you reward a kid for being good when he never is?  She suggested I try one of the drugs for ADHD.  If that was the problem there would be a difference right away with the first dose.  Well, I found out it wasn’t ADHD.  His father had a royal fit when he found out I’d given it to him, but he never had to deal with the problems.  He behaved for his dad.  He just wouldn’t for me!  The only thing I can think of is the problem was familiarity.  He and I spent every minute of every day he wasn’t in day care or preschool together.  I never got a break where I could just decompress.  Even if he was at a playdate or in school I had so much on my plate I could never relax.  So I was worn out and he thought he could get away with murder and I couldn’t do anything about it.  You’d think any kid, when they run against the same boundaries time after time would stop doing it, but not my kid!  I knew from the beginning there was a problem, I just didn’t know what it was.

    I have a dear friend whom I’ve come to think of as the younger sister that nature didn’t give me.  We met through our sons, as many close friendships start.  They were a match from the start.   They met in pre-school and were like brothers  Both were only children, two highly intelligent little boys with huge, vivid imaginations interested in most of the same things. They both loved sports, though they were too young to be enrolled in anything organized yet.  Several weeks into the school year C’s grandma stopped me on the way in to pick up A to arrange for a play date on Saturday.   We went to their house and the boys played while Grandma and I got acquainted.  Her husband was in and out doing this errand and that.  After a few hours A was finally worn out and we left.   On Monday I picked up A and asked him about his day.  C wasn’t in school that day because his grandpa had died.  I was shocked because we had just met him two days before and I was sure that A had not understood, so when we got home I called C’s house and his mom confirmed the bad news.  He had died suddenly of a heart attack in his sleep the morning before. .I arranged to pick up C so they could go make funeral arrangements.  Somehow we instantly formed a family that day.  The boys spent as much time with me as they did at C’s house.  We took day trips together and spent family celebrations at each other’s houses.

    When they were old enough we signed them up to play t-ball together.  C went to soccer camp with A.  They were both cub scouts together, though I had to sign A up in a different city so they could be together.  Sports camps, cub scout camps, swimming lessons, They did it all like brothers.  They we moved away.  My marriage had broken up again and we’d been through hell.  We moved 2000 miles to live with a boyfriend I had met during my first divorce. Then we briefly moved back and things had changed.  I’d been ill while we were away and A spent two months living with my boyfriend.  I thought they had been bonding, but A had formed a pretty strong hatred of my boyfriend and didn’t let it show.  He was different, more sullen and uncomfortable.  He still felt his strong bond with C, but C had friends at school that A didn’t know and had a hard time fitting in with.  As his discomfort grew it was harder for him to be comfortable going to school.  He literally saw the germs crawling on the lockers and desks, anything touched by other students.  As the problems developed I tried explaining them to my friend, but though she is also highly intelligent she could not relate. 

    Financial problems led us to a choice, back to my boyfriend or back to my ex-husband?  A surprisingly chose back to my boyfriend.  So back we went, 2000 miles from everyone we knew and loved. 

    Now that we live so far apart we don’t see each other so much, but I talk to C’s mom occasionally.  The two boys who started out growing up so much alike have taken much different paths.  C graduated from high school this year and is going on to college.  A has been homeschooled since eighth grade and is not comfortable with the idea of taking a class to get his GED, though he could have taken it a year ago.  When I talk to C’s mom she worries because she remembers that little boy who was so outgoing and gregarious and can’t apply the description of him now and his quirks to that memory.  She is full of suggestions, but they involve a level of comfort that he is just not ready for.  She doesn’t hear the accomplishments in my telling her he went inside Walmart or the book store, because she doesn’t see that he’s been held back from doing those things for so long.  It’s hard to relate the progress, because she didn’t understand the digress.  The rest of my family is the same way.  They pull out the “you’re the mom, make him do it” argument and can’t understand why that won’t fix it.  I get “his hair is too long, he needs a haircut” without realizing that part of this is an overriding fear of having a scissors anywhere near his head and to him it’s like being attacked in an alley by a knife wielding thug, even though he knows his mother would not let the barber hurt him.  The fact that none of them have seen him since he was five feet tall and he’s now six foot six and out weighs me doesn’t help.  I guess there something magical about being a mom that I didn’t get and what I say is just “magically” supposed to happen. I think that’s what’s the most frustrating to me.  That the people I love most and should be able to turn to for support just don’t get it.

    It is not easy being the parent of a child with OCD.  I don’t say my son suffers from OCD because he doesn’t.  I do.  The machinations I have to go through to maintain his comfort level are sometimes very painful to me and at times it doesn’t work and I suffer great levels of stress.

    I’ve tried to find support in other ways, but they were not satisfactory.  My family is so caught up in their own drama that the only thing they do when I talk about my life is offer suggestions and criticism without understanding the problems.  OCD doesn’t just run in my family, it trollolups and plies in giant circles through the room and plants big wet kisses on everyone it meets.  I have a niece who is so obsessive about cleaning I once watched her disassemble and reassemble an entire kitchen three times  one week, scrubbing every inch like it had never been cleaned before.  Another one obsesses about her kids and knows everything there is to know about raising everybody’s kids and isn’t afraid to tell you what you’re doing wrong.

    Sorry for the rant there.  It has been my opinion since I started dealing with this that OCD should be considered as a member of the Autism family.  I’m constantly reminded of Dustin Hoffman’s character in “Rainman.” His entire world revolves around his comfort zone.  He has to have a certain brand of underwear from Kmart.  His things need to be arranged in a certain way.  He wears a certain shirt on a particular day.  The more I live with my son and his OCD the more I see the same kind of behaviors.  I see some of the same things in myself.  I have to have my food organized in a certain way on the plate or it’s uncomfortable to eat it.  When I was young I went through many rituals.  We went to a park with a beach for one of my birthday’s and for a long time afterwards I felt sand on the end of my fingers and would try to blow it off.  For some reason I started shaking my hands when I felt stressed.  It drove my sister crazy but I couldn’t stop it.  One by one the rituals would go away and another would take its place.

    The fact is Aspberger’s Syndrome has been linked to OCD and it is on the Autism spectrum of disorders.  OCD is also associated with high IQs and a whole alphabet soup of other mental disorders like PTSD.  OCD is often brought on by a trauma of some kind, even though it is an inherited tendency.  My particular brand was brought on by a life-threatening illness when I was six.  I am a survivor of the German measles epidemic of the early 1960s, but along with the measles I caught chicken pox from my niece and nephew.  I had such a high fever I was delirious for days and the doctor told my mother to prepare for my death.  After it was over I became a different child, overly shy, unmotivated, and fearful.  I’d missed a lot of school and had to stay in at recess time to make up my homework.  I never got ahead of it again.  I would start the new school year and be behind by the end of the week.

    As hard as things were for me to deal with nothing has ever been as hard as what has become of my son.  He was a happy child, popular among his classmates and teachers.  He even took my divorce from his father in stride.  Where things started to go wrong was when I remarried his father.  We had to move into another school district and he had to adjust to being around people he didn’t know in second grade.  He had a terrible teacher and an even worse principal.  He had trouble making new friends.  He started to hate school and fought against doing his homework.  On the home front his father had a drinking problem so there were different battles there.  We moved again in between second and third grade and he went back to his original school, but his friends had moved on so he was still without friends.  Within a few years his dad’s drinking got so bad he tried to drink himself to death.  He tried to rush things along with a knife one night and the only way to get the knife away was to get him to give it to my son.  That night he was hauled off to jail and the next few days were very tense as Dad had to be taken to a treatment facility in another state.  My son started experiencing mysterious illnesses in the winter that caused him to miss a lot of school.  My loving family told me I was spoiling him.  Now I can look back and see that it was the beginning of his OCD.  It started in first grade with hand washing.  That was after we married again and moved out of the house we’d lived in since my son was two.  He was now six and had to give up most of his toys and belongings to move into a tiny apartment.  Everything would start out fine at the beginning of the school year, but every winter after the Christmas break he would have trouble getting into the routine again and would soon be sick.  He would miss weeks of school.  More than once I was threatened with tickets for truancy, but what are you going to do about a child who appears to be seriously ill? 

    I’d been taking him to counseling for years because he was oppositional.  No matter what I wanted him to do he would fight me and I couldn’t get through to him.  The counselor never got OCD from any of the symptoms or situations.  It wasn’t until years later, when he was in 8th grade, that everything came to a head.  He had been through a lot.  I’d left his father again because he could not maintain sobriety and neither one of us could listen to him beg for death anymore, I’d moved us to another state halfway across the country to live with a boyfriend who was not who I thought he was, I got sick and spent two months away from him, leaving him with said boyfriend, we moved back to where we lived before.  While we were living there he was in eighth grade.  It was a new school.  His best friend went there, but had a crop of friends of his own who did not welcome my son, though the girls seemed to be turning themselves inside out to get his attention.  He started noticing that other boys didn’t wash their hands and touched EVERYTHING.  He started feeling and seeing the germs every where.  He got more and more uncomfortable as the days went by and within a month of the start of school he was already feeling sick.  The school and truant officer started making threats almost immediately.  I tried explaining what I thought was going on.  His counselor started making plans to have him go into a hospital for testing.  His father, who never saw the symptoms, wouldn’t believe there was a problem, Again I was “spoiling him” and I should make him go to school because “I am the mom.”  What the heck does that mean?  One day just before Christmas, when we were waiting to hear from the hospital that they had room for him, he was particularly agitated, by then we had figured out that OCD was the culprit.  The school called and insisted that he had to go to school until we heard from the hospital.  I was on the phone arguing with the nurse when he grabbed one of his belts, wrapped it around his neck and tried to hang himself from a plant hook.  He was in the hospital that afternoon.  You would think the school would be more helpful after that wouldn’t you?  No.  After vacation they started again in earnest.  Finally after fighting and arguing for months and both of us getting truancy tickets I pulled him out of school and filed a form with the State to home school him.  I’d fought against it because I was sure he wouldn’t do anything to obtain an education.  I was right. I tried online high schools, but he wouldn’t even log in to do the classes or assignments.  Finally I just let him go.  He read about whatever he wanted to read about and actually got a pretty well balanced education.  At 15 I gave him Pre-GED tests and he aced them all.  The only thing standing in the way of getting his GED is he has to take a class and he has Agoraphobia so he can’t go into a classroom with other people, but he’s talking more and more about doing it.  For an Agoraphobe with OCD that is a really big thing.


http://www.webmd.com/anxiety-panic/news/20000427/ocd-possibly-hereditary