caerula's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- running late I really need to not be at home with Blue on weekday mornings. I came in late today, as I'm still feeling just horrid. Blue has the day off, and is going with YMB's class on a field trip, for which he had to be at the school at 11 am. When I got up at nine, he was simultaneously looking up car stuff on line and playing hockey on PS2, and has both the washer and the dryer going. He has at least four phone calls to make still, and still has to get cleaned up -- which takes him far longer than the average male. Now, I've decided that if I'm going to live with Blue without murdering him and burying the body in the mud pit that is our backyard, that I'm not going to nag him about trying to do too much at once. That I'm not going to be responsible for making sure he gets out of the house on time. He's a grown-up and that's his job. So while I'm sitting on the couch waking up and watching the last hour of the Today show, he finishes up his computer stuff and comes in to ask me help him remember what phone calls he has to make. I tell him: he has to call his doctor's office to get a referral sent to the lab for the sperm count my doctor wants to get. He needs to call our Lawyer Lady to ask about our most recent developments -- constant annoying phone calls from the Dementors, and the revelation last night from YMB that they've been telling him that he's going back to live with them. He has to call the house company to find out why no ones's been out yet to fix the stuff that's needed to be fixed since we moved in, including the aforementioned mud pit. And, he needs to call his counselor, who he's supposed to be seeing for help with his ADHD issues, whom he hasn't seen in months and keeps saying he's going to go back to, to schedule an appointment. I need to go get in the shower, but I loiter to see if he actually gets these things done. He calls the doctor's office and explains that he needs a referral for the lab. The woman is confused for what, since his doctor didn't order any lab tests. He tells them it's from the ob-gyn doctor. I'm trying not to giggle, because I realize there's a huge misunderstanding going on all due to the fact that Blue doesn't want to say "sperm count." The woman thinks he's calling for a referral for me, since we go to the same office. He explains it's for him but that my ob-gyn ordered it. I'm being treated for fertility problems. Yes, I hear him say finally, exactly. She's figured it out. And probably telling her co-worker the humorous story right now over lunch, about the guy who couldn't say "sperm." Calls the lawyer and leaves a message. Calls the office and leaves a message, albeit forgetting to leave phone number. At this point I feel things are moving along and go get in the shower. It's 9:45 am. 20 minutes later I come out of the bathroom to find Blue, for some inexplicable reason, vacuuming. He has to leave in 45 minutes for the school, and isn't showered or dressed. I casually remind him that the field trip is at 11, and he gets all annoyed. "I know, but this is my day off, and there's stuff I want to get done, and I'm going to get it done." "Yes, sweetie, I know. But if you try to do to much, you'll be late." Blue rolls his eyes, despite the fact that he knows this is perfectly true, and continues vacuuming. I finish getting ready for work, and ask him to move his car so I can back mine out of the driveway. He goes outside; 10 minutes later he has not returned. I put on my shoes and grab my stuff and go out, to find him cleaning out my car. I have to go, I tell him, and he has to leave in 15 minutes. I get in the car and leave. I have no idea if he ever actually made it to the school or not. It annoys me because YMB was all excited that Blue was going on the field trip, and it was really important to him. If Blue missed it because he was vaccuming, I'm going to be very pissed. Blue has such good intentions. He just wants everything to be neat and clean, and wants to do his share and make sure that I don't have to do too much. But he doesn't realistically plan out what he can accomplish in a given amount of time, which makes him late practically always, and drives me and most people who know him nuts. There's nothing I can do about it, I know. It's the way he is and he has to be the one to decide to change his habits. It's one of the things he's supposed to be working with the therapist on, except that he can never remember to call and schedule an appointment and missed his last one because he forgot to set the alarm. It just drives me insane to watch the process. I'll watch Blue walk across the room, heading out the door to somewhere, and he'll stop five or six times: picks up a fuzzy on the carpet. Straightens papers on the desk. Twitches the curtains straight. Goes back to look for something. Comes back having forgotten what he was looking for. It takes him half-an-hour just to get out of the house most of the time. So last night YMB had a huge tantrum. He was as upset as I have ever seen him. It started with homework, of course. He has a project on graphs that's due on Monday. We tried, ineffectively, to get him started on it on last Monday, and again Tuesday. So yesterday when he got home from school, we sat him down and told him we were going to work on it for at least half an hour. He was supposed to go over to a friend's house at 5:30, so there was more than enough time. He looked at it, read the first sentence, and immediately started whining about not understanding it. Things got worse from there. Whining, crying, stomping, etc. Finally, finally got him going on it, he calmed down and got the first page done, and things seemed to be progressing. The next part of the drama I missed, as I went to the sewing room. Next thing I know, I hear slamming and yelling, and YMB runs crying to his room. Blue informs me that YMB turned to the second page, got really upset, and threw his pencil across the room. When Blue tried to find out what the problem was, YMB started whining about how hard this was and how he could never do it, etc. He just got more and more upset, and the more Blue tried to calm him down the worse he got, until finally Blue told him to go to his room until he was calm enough to talk reasonably about what was going on. This led to the headlong wailing flight through the house, slammed door, sounds of things being banged, and ear-piercing wails coming from the area of YMB's top bunk. Gah. We agree to ignore the wailing and leave him there until he's ready to talk to us. The wailing goes on for a good 20 minutes. After it's stopped for a few minutes, I go to the door and ask if he's ready to come talk to us. He yells "NO!" Blue informs him that he certainly won't be going to the friend's house until he talks to us, at which point, inevitably, the wailing begins again. We leave him along for a while more. Blue calls the friend's mom to reschedule. Half-an-hour later, YMB's sound asleep, and we have 45 minutes of peace and quiet and I get to watch most of the "Buffy" rerun on FX (the Halloween one where Buffy turns into Marie Antoinette and Xander makes a rather cute soldier boy). We decide, though, that we have to wake him up so that he'll be able to sleep through the night. Blue goes to wake him up, and finds him awake and staring at the wall. Blue asks him to get up. No response. Tells him to get up. No response. Tells him the less cooperative he is, the more trouble he's going to be in. No reponse. I come down the hall and say "Get up right now" in my best Mom Voice. This, for some reason, elicites a response (perhaps because I use my Mom Voice a lot less than Blue uses his Dad Voice). YMB poutily clambers down and stomps into the living room, plops down on the couch, and continues to stare at the wall. So we proceed to have one of those discussions I always hated as a kid -- you know, the "this sort of behavior is not acceptable, young man" type of things (although I, of course, was "young lady"). It took a while, but we actually seemed to get somewhere. We knew YMB has been desperately unhappy lately, and that obviously the homework was just some sort of last straw, but he hadn't been able to talk about it at all. Last night we sat there and told him he was going to talk to us, and waited and prodded and waited until he did. Apparently one of the main things is a boy at school who has been teasing him unmercifully. YMB is the unfortunate possessor of some rather sticky-out ears, and this kid's been calling him "Dumbo" etc. So we cleared that up, and told him he needed to take this up with Teacher because that kid did not have the right to tease anyone. I think this was a new concept to YMB; he'd convinced himself he just had to take it. Then the thing with the Dementors came up. We were talking about how we know it's hard because there are different rules and stuff at each house, and things are very different with us than they were when he lived there. That's when he told us that they've been telling him he's going to go back and live there. We asked him how he felt about that, and he shrugged. Then we tried to explain that that probably was not going to happen, even though the Dementors want it too. Tonight we're meeting all together with YMB's counselor, which I think is very good timing, especially as this weekend is his weekend with the Dementors. It's just not acceptable that they keep filling his little head with all this crap. I don't understand at all how they can think this is the best thing for YMB. Let's make sure he's really unhappy all the time with his dad, that'll make him love us more. Yeah. We talked to the counselor last week, and he's going to try to help YMB understand the legal processes involved in where he lives, and that judges usually don't change their minds once they give custody to a parent. I hope it helps for him to hear it from someone other than us, someone uninvolved in the custody thing. Everyone keeps telling us we're doing all the right things; the school counselor told me that again yesterday when I spoke with her. But most of the time it feels like we're just stumbling along blindly, not knowing what we're doing. I suppose that's what parenting is. Gah. 12:28 p.m. - 2001-10-18 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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