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My Profile
Fairytales for a Practical Princess - 2008-11-30
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11:54 a.m. - 2004-08-06
Today is Wolf’s last day of summer school. For the next month it will be the Mom and Wolf Show all day. I am dreading the next month. Sad, but true. I love my boy but he is exhausting. I think I’m still decompressing and recovering from the first 5 years of his life too. Five loooooong years of mess, rampage, and chaos. Constantly, constantly, constantly dealing with Wolf. When a ‘break’ was overseeing Wolf’s bath and I could snatch a couple minutes of sit-down time. I’m serious. Bought every bath toy I could afford so my off-spring would play longer and I could sit on the closed toilet and skim an article in a year old People magazine. This was as close to ‘Me’ time as I got. So when faced with a whole month of being with Wolf I hear the prison gates slamming shut again and start to shake. Think I'm exaggerating? Check out what my regular day was like 3 years ago here. In some ways it’s not as bad as it used to be. He doesn’t (literally) climb the walls anymore. He hasn’t tried to cover the bathroom in toothpaste and Comet since we moved to the new house. He even voluntarily wears clothes. However, he’s traded destroying the house for destroying my sanity with endless chatter. The kid never shuts up. He asks hundreds of questions a day, but has no interest in the answers. He just asks because he’s discovered it’s impossible for me not to respond to a question. He asks, then he has his foot in the conversational door and he goes on blithely ignoring all gambits to distract him. There is no pleasure in ‘conversing’ with Wolf. There’s no give and take, there is only Wolf. What Wolf wants to talk about. And what Wolf wants to talk about is Wolf. All little kids are self-involved. To be honest, everyone is self-involved to some degree. My kid goes way beyond ‘normal’ self-involvement, though. He honestly doesn’t care what anyone else has to say, he just wants a constant bath of approval and attention. I married a bigger, meaner, older version of Wolf. Mike has never learned to look past the end of his own nose. All that matters to Mike is Mike. He sees all interaction solely from his point of view. Everything is about him. I will be goddamned if I’m going to let my kid turn out like his father. I do not care that my son’s neurological problems are mostly to blame. He’s not stupid. He can learn. He will learn. Wolf is going to join this family and society at large. I think it’s integral to his development. All fine and dandy for Mike and his weird family to take pride in being nasty, withdrawn, and social zeros. Iconoclasts and misanthropes of the first water, they hate pretty much everyone. Being an Army family aided and abetted their contempt for all beings. They’d move just about the time they’d made enemies of everyone on post and never had to stick around to face the consequences of their emotionally stunted and often cruel behavior. I will not doom my son to an arid and hostile life just because nobody taught him any better. The way my husband and his family carry on is NOT okay. So what that socialization is harder for them than most people? So fucking what? Everyone has a cross to bear. Out there somewhere is the girl my son will eventually marry. I do not want HER cross to be my son and his awful locked heart. It’s going to be intense around here for the next month. I’ll be whining a lot. The task of bringing Wolf into the light is daunting, and obviously Mike is no help. I’ll need you guys more than ever. It helps more than you know that outside my house of self-absorbed noogies, there are folks who care how things are going with me. Yours about to be incarcerated, ~LA
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