Update...crazy days

Sometimes the world turns upside down (ever felt like a gerbil in one of those crazy balls trying to get anywhere, but not able to touch anything?)… Friday night there was a bad thunderstorm and we lost cable and internet until yesterday afternoon (almost 5 days without)…I think my sweetie was going crazier than I was…how do I know? Welllllll….if you catch someone watching a screen full of snow, does that tell you something? On his behalf, tho, it only lasted a few minutes J)

 

Update on the kids…my daughter’s MRI showed that the spots on the scan may be taken care of with medicine….no brain surgery, praise God!!! My granddaughter had a visit to the hospital with 103 temperature. After getting a urine sample (ever heard of a catheter being put in an 8 month old baby? I haven’t!!), they gave her some shots of antibiotic & some medicine. She is getting much better now.  Her medicine makes her sleep more, which relieves some stress from mom.

 

Son #1 is now living with his sister. He is looking for a job and checking out college.  He thinks he needs to get a place so he can take care of his little brother, but everyone is encouraging him to go to school. He may stay with us for a while, but hopefully he will stay with sis because there are a lot more job opportunities near her and school is not far away. You can tell he has changed. He says he has stopped the weed and he even did the dishes without anyone asking him to! WOW! My sweetie is going to try to find him a moped…don’t know how we will be paying for it, but….  Anyway, like my sweetie says, everyone deserves a second chance. Lord knows we gave his brother more than that!

 

Son #2 is still at home and is actually behaving well. He says he is getting a place with a friend of his.  I hope he does. He has been doing extra things around the house for money. Yesterday he cleaned out a room and the shed. It is amazing that we can actually see the floor in the room and walk into the shed! On the other side, he saw someone that had beaten up a friend of his and had broken his jaw, so he had to retaliate, even tho the friend basically asked for it. If he hadn’t done this while swimming at the bull hole in his bare feet and cut his feet (both of them) several places and lost the only pair of shoes he had. Other than the fight, he is doing ok (if I had a smiley with it’s eye’s crossed, I’d put it here).  He still has 22 days til court. I hope he goes!

 

On another side, we also had a water mishap in the spare bathroom. There had been a leak in there for a while that we didn’t know about…my son neglected to say anything about water on the floor and something didn’t seem right.  When he did say something last Sunday, my sweetie fixed the leak under the sink, but not before it did horrible damage to the walls, floor, and cabinet. The insurance did pay for it (thank God!), showing over $1000 damage. It is getting repaired as I type.  New floor, vinyl, cabinet, 2 walls, paint, etc., should be in when I get home…I hope!!  Oh, the little things that are so much fun!!

 

Heartbreak...still a normal thing these days...

Today my heart is breaking—again. My son, now 17, is going to jail on Thursday for doing damage to our home. We adopted him nearly 5 years ago. He has a very long and very sad story. We did our best to get him to improve his life—to offer him the world, at least as much of it as we could. He has thrown it all back at us, hurting himself even more than he hurts us, yet he has no idea what he is doing and can’t believe in what he could have.

 

When we met him 6 years ago, he was on 5 different medications to control his behavior. We were afraid of him—mostly for him at first, of what he would do to himself. He had been severely abused by his biological father and again by the Social Services System. The main reason I say the system abused him is because he was not taken away from his father earlier. Not that his sister didn’t try, but that they neglected to take him when they were first called. Those extra 2-3 years could have made all the difference. Why didn’t his teachers notice a problem? Why didn’t the social workers or the mental hospital he was sent to in kindergarten figure out what was going on? Was he too afraid of his biological dad to confess the beatings and God knows what else was done to him?

 

Six months after we met him, he was sent to a mental hospital again. We were asked to call him and go see him (we had been his brother’s foster parents, but his brother had to go back to a group home also due to behavior problems). You see, he didn’t have anyone that cared that wasn’t working for Social Services. So we did. He was sent to the same group home where his brother was. They had changed his medicine and there was such a huge change in him, we saw hope. Hope that he could become a decent, somewhat normal human being where he could live a decent life and not live in fear and frustration for what had been done to him in his short 12 years.

 

He was soon on probation again, mainly for hitting his one-on-one worker at school and punching a worker in the group home as she was waking him up. We tried to connect with him, we went to all the court dates, even though we did not have to, we had no obligation to.  We wanted to let him and his brother know that someone would not give up on him. We wanted him to know that there was more to life that what he was learning in Social Services. Everyone he knew was in trouble in some way. He didn’t-and still doesn’t realize that he and all of his friends were in a minority. A minority that feels that their life was normal. It was normal to smoke pot. Normal to be beaten by your parents, normal for life to basically stink about 90% of the time. He still doesn’t know that he is in a minority of only about 10% that live that way. Somewhere I read that about 90% of kids graduate from high school, get jobs, survive in the world outside of school.

 

Since he was now charged with violence at school and at the group home, he couldn’t go back to either. According to Social Services, his next placement would have to be a Level IV placement, the worst possible place for him and it would lead to him being in mental institutions or jail for the most of the rest of his life. At this point we had to pray harder for him than we ever had before. We deeply felt we were led to adopt him and his brother, I would quit my job and home school him since he couldn’t go back to regular school. We could only afford that because their biological father had died and there would also be an adoption stipend. It looked like God was providing. He was and still is.

These next 4 ½ years have held many blessings and heartaches. It was a blessing to see him laugh, to enjoy being a boy—doing things like catching frogs, going fishing, climbing trees, playing with friends. I remember the first time he ever stayed overnight with a friend—I felt like an extremely nervous mother of a young child, praying everything would be ok, and it was. He was 12 when we adopted him and couldn’t read or have the math ability of a 3^rd grader. Seeing him learn to read was such a huge achievement for him. There were such fun times…One of the funniest that makes still me smile is when he wanted to swim in the lake down the street. My sweetie had the biggest grin when he gleefully told our son to “go jump in the lake”. Sure, it was the middle of November, and we knew he would be back soon because of the cold, but it was fun!

 

Yet there were great heartaches also. Once his brother joined us from the group home he was in, they played against each other to where at least one was acting out nearly every day. Finally, he went to a mental hospital in January, only two months after the adoption was final.  His brother started to act out more in school-as in getting poorer grades and not turning in any homework. A month after my son came home (and was being a wonderful kid) from the hospital, his brother was kicked out of school for having a lighter and drug paraphernalia. His brother then made life a living hell for us. He acted out all the time, a favorite phrase was “you are not my parents, you can not tell me what to do!”

 

The brother taunted us all the time about not being able to see his “real” family, even though we repeatedly told him that all they had to do was to call and talk to us and we would arrange it.  When it finally happened in May, 6 months after the adoption, I only asked them for one thing—that the boys not see their biological mom without us there.  They hadn’t seen her for years and we wanted to be there. Little did I know they were great deceivers also. “Mom” was living with the cousin we agreed to let the boys stay overnight with. Everything with the brother went downhill from there. Within a month he failed a drug test and had to go back to Social Services—another long story.

 

Two months later my youngest son decided to try public school again. It only took one month to have him committed to a level IV facility—one of those the social worker said would be the worst place ever for him. It turned out to be the opposite. He completed their program within 3 months, which normally took others 6 months to 2 years. He came back so changed and so wonderful it was amazing. That actually lasted until the next school year came around. He missed so much school that year that he did not pass 8^th grade. All he had to do was show up. The school told him (in about late March) that he was going to be passed no matter what because he didn’t need to be 16 in 8^th grade. BIG MISTAKE. He rarely went to school and missed so much they couldn’t pass him. He did try about 2 weeks at the alternative school, but got into trouble the second week and never went back.

 

Since then it has not been fun, to say the least. We have not been able to get him to work on his GED or find a job. We had to make him leave the house permanently—after a joint was found in his room. My sweetie told him he would have his social security to live on starting in December of last year—just before he turned 17. By the grace of God, my sweet received an unforeseen raise that covered it in our budget. He did two trips to Florida with his friends and spent about a month with a friend in Virginia. He came back 12 days ago. Everything was fine until last Tuesday night.

 

My sweetie had been letting him go out to the truck to listen to the radio while he smoked. Not to smoke in the truck, but to be listen to the radio. Tuesday when he went outside, my son was out there with a couple neighborhood kids smoking in the truck. He was furious and took the keys back. A few minutes later, my son pounded on the door, asking if he would be allowed to listen to the radio. The answer was no, and he became even more agitated, picked up a post from the chain link fence we are putting up and pounded on the window on the side door—breaking it. He then came in knocking things off the counter and breaking a light fixture. He also broke the taillight of the truck. Of course, the police were called again. He can’t get by with that behavior.

 

The next day he played us, his friends and the system very well.  He faked attempted suicide, avoided the police for a few hours, went to another mental facility and escaped again for 7 more hours. He successfully played on my emotions traumatically until it was discovered the whole thing was done to avoid being charged for the property damage. Today I found out that he will be released on Thursday. He doesn’t know it yet, but he will be released straight into police custody. It is the toughest love we’ve had to do yet—he states he wants out and to go straight to Florida with his friend who has a job for him. But if we don’t do this, he will have “gotten away with it” and may do it again….and again.

 

For my friends & family reading this…please pray for all of us. The next few days will not be easy…

 

Graduation

When we adopted two troubled boys from Social Services, our hopes and dreams were that we would help them to make a life for themselves, graduate from high school and have decent jobs.  That was only 4 ½ years ago. Today one of them graduates from high school and has a job lined up with one of the large cities near him. I am not sure what he is doing yet, but he has a job and he is graduating! It is our older son that is graduating. We didn’t think he would ever get to this point because he had to return to Social Services 7 months after the adoption. It has been a long hard road for him, but he has done this basically on his own—that is if you don’t count all the prayers that have continually gone out for him.

Right now we are both very proud of him for accomplishing this.

 

In the meantime, his younger brother had another episode this week and is back in a youth psychiatric ward at a nearby hospital. Their older sister, who we have unofficially adopted, is married with an 8 year old boy and a 8 month old baby. Right now they think she may have some brain tumors—more this time than several years ago. The older son does not know about either of his siblings medical problems—we don’t want to bring him down when this is the happiest point in his life so far. There will be time to tell him in a few days.

 

My hubby went to a conference this week and was not home when most of this was going on (getting one in a hospital and finding out about the other on the same day). He spent most of last night fixing the glass in a door that had been broken by the younger son. I do ask my family and friends to please keep me in your prayers as I still feel like I haven’t dealt with any of this personally. I think I am on “automatic” and doing what needs to be done to keep things from falling apart. My next round of classes starts next week and I pray I get everything done in a timely manner. When I look over all of this, I know I need to write a book (or two!). There are times when I feel like I’m in a “movie of the week”—those movies they had when I was growing up that showed people going through traumatic things and how they deal with it. The thing is, I could have scripts for movies of the week for several weeks from things that have happened in just this past year.

 

This is being posted on my blog, mainly because I want the praise of the graduation in here, but also because there is lots of prayer being requested also—including for me and my hubby. I know that none of us could survive without it.