Our Island Family Life

I wasn't even fully conscious this morning when Connor woke me up and told me the boat left without him. I told him to leave me alone. I was furious. Instead I just lay there and berated myself for not calling his therapist last week. Then in that half sleeping state I realized this was the same thing and the same time of year he had holed himself in his room before. Am I a stupid idiot or what? November, December, January and February were hell. Maybe I didn't notice as much because he is admittedly liking school, is more social than before and has a better handle on how he deals with arguments with his siblings. It still happens of course but less often and he usually isn't an instigator like he used to be. He is still pretty detached from the rest of the family but it's improving.

So, I got up for the day I made a big breakfast for everyone. Will was the only one not home. Cade was getting ready for school and my work was cancelled again for the day. I spoke with Connor while I was cooking and told him I wasn't going to beat him over the head with a huge conversation. I told him at 9am he was going to call his therapist himself and schedule an appointment. Even if it's a long way out before he can get in. He nodded. I then told him that when this all started he wasn't getting up on time. We tried different strategies and now after a few failed attempts he was now getting up in time to get ready to leave and in plenty of time to make the boat. One of the big things I was pushing was that he needed to be able to do this himself. I would help him plan, brainstorm and I even paid for a new alarm clock just for him. What I would not going do is get him up myself. After all, he is going to be 15 next month. He isn't going to have his mother around to wake him up for work every day for the rest of his life. I really would like a speaking alarm clock where he could hear me telling him to wake up. That would be really funny.

Anyway, the issue now is that he doesn't leave in time and the boat leaves while he is almost there. Then he has to turn around and walk all the way home. He blames the boat. I want him to be able to see he needs to take personal responsibility for missing the boat and not blame something else. We made sure the clocks were set to bay lines time. I told him he needed to leave when Will does. So far, not much luck. I am thinking of setting the clocks ahead but then that would defeat the purpose of his own responsibility. What bugs me is that people do sometimes miss the boat. Your clock might be off. You might misjudge the time. The car doesn't start and you have to run. Things like this do happen from time to time. Various reasons. The thing is, for the rest of us this happens only once in a while. A couple of times a year maybe. Connor is taking advantage of something that can happen and people can agree has happened to them before. Sean does that. He winds up getting out of things using plausible excuses. I do not want Connor going down the same path. Sean also blames others and other things than being responsible for his own actions and Connor is doing the same thing when he blames the boat. I told Connor while we waited for the appointment we would try another strategy for leaving the house on time. He agreed. Also while he is at home he has to do chores all day. Being here isn't going to be better than being in school. He has to go to the school website and get his assignments and then work for me. Without complaining at all. I called him down to make the call. He was not happy. I could tell even though he wasn't overtly angry. He was just twitchy. He was walking around and around the table with the phone and rubbing his back. We are waiting for a call back now. After he hung up he tried to leave. I told him I wanted to talk to him about what days were good for an appointment. He barely listened and walked away while I was in mid sentence. I had to get him to calm down. Stand still and look me in the eye. I asked him if he was unhappy with making an appointment. He said he was. I reminded him this is what we had agreed to. He said he didn't agree he was being forced. I ignored that since it wasn't true and recognized it was just his mood. I asked him if he thought missing school was good for him. He said no. Then he tried to say how therapy wasn't going to help him and there was nothing wrong with him. I didn't think it was a good idea to remind him that he did this before. Instead I told him I didn't think there was something "wrong" with him. He could tell me he was fine all he liked. What I wanted him to understand was I had to make my decisions based on actions and outcomes. I know he has good intentions and is fully capable to make up his work. The current results I have to work with are: he is missing days which if he doesn't stop will force the school to hold him back a year, missed work which even though he made it all up for last trimester still caused his school website to be slow in catching up to reflect it, that in turn got his father on his case for the wrong reasons which was uncomfortable for everyone, it also made him choose study hall for his intensive week to make up his new missing work instead of something else he could have used for credit or for fun. I asked him if any of these things were good for him. He said no. I said based on this I am going to try any options open to me to help him. He said again it wouldn't help and we should keep trying different ideas. I said we would and that maybe his therapist would have ideas we haven't tried and maybe we could go further in the CBTherapy that would help as well. I told him we were having a longer conversation than needed because of his attempts to run away from me. He just gave me the usual uh huh thing. (Mental scream)

So, there it is. I am stressed about this but my money situation is getting pretty bad. I am trying to ignore it since there is little I can do about it now. I did call DHHS last week but I guess I have to call again. I wake up with headaches every morning because of this. At least today I'm not crying. I was a total mess yesterday. I wasn't focused on one thing. It was just everything. Like I said, it was just one of those days.