A Real Pleasure In Moving On

I slowly painted my office all day long, a canary yellow, soft and warm, an example of the sun that I don't feel on my skin today. Yesterday's high was in the 30's. That's inexcusable. This is Georgia, for Pete's Sake.

Even though I recognize the telltale hairy root when I see it, I've usually already wrapped my hand around it before acknowledging that it's poison ivy, thus the itchy forearm I'm now sporting.

My new stove arrived and was christened with a pot of garlic beans, I ran my new washing machine all day long. Such luxuries.

Acknowledge that you are sad that things didn't turn out the way you wished they had. You are entitled to cry about that. Perhaps you feel like you gave up years of your life for nothing.

Recovery From Hazardous Parenting: How To Reclaim Your Life After Raising Children With Behavior Disorders continues to soothe my soul. I ran its words through my mind all day long as I mindlessly painted, in many ways feeling spurred on to totally physically change my entire existence and surroundings here to eradicate the memories of the unbelievable, unimaginable, and intolerable stress under which I've lived for so long.

Dr. Brenda McCreight goes on to discuss self-esteem recovery which is truly something I'd never considered I'd ever have to deal with, I've always been ballsy and confident, yet torn down badly over the last 17 years. Then there's depression recovery and anxiety recovery which means working on one's brain, "that has been habituated to respond to triggers by inducing an increased heart beat, forcing an onrush of adrenaline and cortisol through the brain, and leaving you with an overwhelming sense of panic."

Amen, sister.

"Get to the point," I anxiously snapped yesterday to a dear friend, who I know well enough to know she was choosing her words carefully, an unpleasant phone call about an older kid of mine with dangerously severe issues.

Acknowledge that the main trigger, your child, is no longer your full responsibility. Say it to yourself over and over.

When others let me know what this grownup, or another grownup is doing, I have to let it go. It is out of my control. They have free will, they've been taught correctly, although their choices often don't reflect that fact.

Was I enabling yesterday to pay a seat belt violation fine for Fabian? It was his 20th birthday gift. I didn't want to give him cash, knowing it'd be spent badly, maybe even illegally. I'd thought about taking him shopping for new clothes, but I'm wary even of that because he's chronically unemployed, yet not ever intrinsically motivated by a lack of clothes, or anything else, enough to find a job.

There's a bunch of dumb girls in this world that fall for handsome boys and buy them stuff, enabling them to not have to work. That's just gross to me.

A seat belt violation? Seriously? Do you have a death wish? I paid it online, always afraid to put cash into the hand of one who isn't always truthful.

Everything I do is fraught with implications, good and bad, unseen or misleading, underlying or undermining, it's very hard to always discern the right thing to do with so many mitigating factors.

He was not the grown kid that I'd discussed earlier on the phone, which indicates the difficulty I'll have in total recovery, since there are still so many stress inducers.

In stress recovery The Adoption Counselor states, "It's time to learn how to respond to your day based on what you need and want and wish.

Whoa...that's gonna take some geting used to, lemme tell ya.

You may still have other children at home to raise, so now when they ask for a ride somewhere you can decide what to do about that without first thinking about whether you can leave your challenged child or youth at home alone for ten minutes (resulting in a fire being set or your room prowled through and items missing) or what you will have to do to get him to come with you (resulting in swearing and maybe a new hole punched in the wall). Your brain will still be assuming that there are complications to everything, so learn to take a deep and tension releasing breath before your answer.

Oh my goodness, that is so me.

One who is now in prison once broke a van window out and peed in my front seat on purpose to indicate his 11 year old displeasure at having to accompany me, but I called it 'grounded to a grownup,' as he could never be left unattended.

Paloma would always punch Tabby because both had to be in the first seat of the van, Tabby for her own protection, and Paloma for everyone else's protection, yet that didn't work either. There was no feasible answer...I'd ended up with destruction or an injury to someone.

Jonathan would flat out refuse to go, knowing I wouldn't leave him alone, so therefore his negative behaviors controlled us all, resulting in many, many missed Sunday church services and other activities.

17 years of that. More'n 6,000 days of severe emotional trauma on me - stress and anxiety resulting in periodic depression and resignation to my oxygen-less existence.

Now for the best part - Moving On.

Bye-Bye.

Raising your child to young adulthood and independence (or semi independence) has been an exhausting and stress filled process. You have managed to help your child stay alive despite his risk taking behaviors and his lack of impulse control; and, despite the lack of appropriate services and the inadequate resources.

It's going to take me some time to unlearn my nervous condition, my fight-or-flight response to loud noises, my deep-seated fear, and all the other severely negative emotions that have been thrust upon me over the preceding years. I do still have many children here at home who also need to heal, who need me to be 24-7 with them, happy, smiling and nurturing them on into adulthood.

And I gotta tell you, even with rampant ODD here and zero impulse control issues, nowadays, in comparison to the past, it's a real pleasure here.

Last night Lily and CW serenaded me again with their guitars as I worked, we had a wonderful suppertime, Mayra asked to spend the night, plopped on the sofa with Sabrina, Martin tied their hair together, and this morning on a Saturday, I've already taken three teenagers to the high school to work on their course recovery credit - Mayra being one of them, having learned that the magic age of 18 didn't quite mean what she once thought it'd mean.

An 'I Told You So' moment that I'm refraining from pointing out, it's too obvious.

Wanna lose 35 pounds? Read this, Sarah blogged her view of it.