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?