Kind of tired.

Blogged on Friday, January 18th, 2008 by Rachael. Filed in Blog365, Emo, Philosophical.

I wouldn’t be nearly so tired, but Troy and I have been working with my oldest son through some tough stuff lately.

He has a lot of issues that don’t necessarily surface all the time, from being abused by my ex-husband. The same ex-husband who has 50% custody of my youngest son. *Sigh.* Life sometimes gets very tangled up, doesn’t it?

He got himself in trouble last week for leaving his sister behind at the bus stop. It is very unusual for one of us not to be there to pick them up when the bus arrives (I think that it’s happened all of three times), but we had already prepared them for this eventuality. They’re to find one another, then walk home on the side of the drive (we live in a trailer park, so the road itself is safer than the two-lane the park is on), being careful the whole time not to talk to anyone or to dawdle.

On Friday, he burst in the door while we were sitting at the table talking about - something, I hardly remember what now, and said, “WHEW, I’M HOME!” and proceeded to begin taking off his winter things and backpack.

Troy and I immediately said, in unison, “WHERE is your sister?”, because we did not see her on the porch, the steps, or even in the driveway.

He gave us a puzzled did I forget something? look, and then we saw her, running up the street as best as she could in boots and snowpants, crying. The first thing she said as soon as she reached the top step was “I was shouting for you the whole time and you didn’t hear me!!” It was obvious that she had been about two minutes’ worth of jogging behind him the whole way.

My poor girl. And I was so upset and disappointed with her brother, because instead of being worried he couldn’t find her, or being instantly relieved when she came to the door, or telling us he had tried to find her, he played it off for a long time like he just didn’t think she was on the bus and therefore wasn’t there to be found. He was far more interested in what he was getting for snack than the fact that his sister could have been abducted or hurt, and that he’d failed his brotherly responsibilities toward her by leaving her behind.

Since then, he’s gotten into a lot of other trouble, which hasn’t ended up being very much related to what the initial issue was about, but has simply come out over time. When a man is at his wit’s end, the core of himself is what comes out - and my eldest son is no exception. What tears at my heart, however, is that what comes out is mostly all the wrong behaviors and twisted ideas about himself that he learned while my ex was treating him badly without me really knowing.

So we have been dealing with him and his fragile psyche for a whole week so far (which I realize, in the grand scheme of things, is not so very long at all). He has to relearn some things - some of them small things a boy his age should already know, but that it’s taken us this long to find out that he was only faking it. He has to learn big things as well - to respect himself and to believe that he is worthy of all the love we have for him, for one.

I know that in the end, he will be stronger for it, and better than he might have been otherwise. I know that pain is the best teacher. But I hate it with my whole heart that my kids had to endure what they did, for the simple reason that they are mine and I would keep them safe if I could.

Of course I know I can’t do that as much as I want, but I think that’s a mommy curse of some kind.