chaos

Fudge thrives on chaos. I think that it makes him feel calmer inside to know that everything around him is turned upside down. He has spent a great deal of that last week of his life creating chaos both at home and elsewhere. I am worn out and close to the edge, I have yelled at him more times than is good and now I am paying the price because he knows that he is annoying me so he just keeps doing it.

Luckily for me P was home last night and I was in a good mood this morning and P was home this morning as well and we out crazied his crazy behaviour and moved on. He was going on and on about being yelled at even though no one yelled at him so I had him close his eyes,I spun him around, put his hands on his head, stick out his tongue and say I love you. It worked, it broke the pattern but oh my he was making me crazy.

Last night he turned a little tiny thing into a huge 20 minute tantrum, it was really just a little thing that he did to annoy Calvin, no one was mad we just wanted him to repeat what he said... you would think that we pulled a gun on him the way he reacted to the simple request to repeat himself. Dinner was late, we listened to him yell, both boys were in tears and P and I just stood there looking at one another wondering when we got an invite to live in crazytown - who lives like this - trauma mamas and papas that's who.

I am a better parent when I have had enough sleep, caffeine, food and P is home. I can parent just fine without P but he helps keep things calm by dealing with Fudge's increasing behaviours and at least 3 times this week I have needed him to deal with Fudge because other wise I would just yell at him.

Fudge can trigger my anger in a way that shocks and worries me. He knows how to push my buttons in a way that I have never encountered in a small person before. I know that, it helps that I know that because it allows me to process his behaviour and it also helps me to step away and let someone else deal with him.

Today when we were at the optometrist I sent Fudge in to the exam room alone because I knew that if we were together I would just constantly be telling him to stop playing with things and fidgeting while the optometrist was going to be a whole lot more patient than I was. I sat in the waiting room and knit instead until I had to go in because he needs glasses, like his brother, which is a whole different post for a different day.

It has been hard to learn where my edge with Fudge but I know now and whenever I can I pass the reigns to P. I  need to say that I commend single parents, I do not know how you do it, really I have no idea. I also need to say that P keeps me sane and makes me be a better parent. Sometimes we disagree but mostly we are on the same parenting page and that makes being a mother to my boys a whole lot easier.

Sometimes I do not want to to admit it...

Sometimes I do not want to admit it but there are days when Fudge is the last person on earth I want to spend time with. There are days when I force myself to tell him that I love him. There are days when I put a smile on my face and say fake it till you make it lady, you can do this. There are days when I would like give up and stop trying to help him heal.

Being his Mom has been really hard for the last year.

Before that it was easy because Calvin took up all the space with his behaviours. Calvin was raging and yelling and hurting us and so Fudge was the complaint well behaved child. Then Calvin stopped raging and started attaching and Fudge did not know what to do. It was his experience that Calvin's behaviours would cause them to move and so if Calvin was not raging and making life miserable for everyone then he better step in and fill that space.

He has done a stellar job at being a first class shit disturber for the last 10 months.

The difference between Fudge and Calvin though is that Fudge is not a rager, he is passive and he is smart and he works hard to push you right the the very edge and then he stops. He works hard to create chaos and make  people angry, I mean that, he really does work at it. His teachers comment on how he seems to be trying to push kids away at school and at home he is often sweet and caring towards his father and horrible to me. He is doing on purpose, he is trying to make himself unlovable because he believes that he not worthy of being loved.

We are working on changing that for him, we are working on getting him to heal but oh my goodness it is HARD.

When he is in trouble we always talk about the hows and whys of what we have done. His newest behaviour is to wait me out, he thinks that if he refuses to answer me for long enough eventually I will give in a yell at him. I have resolved within myself to not let him win this one and so I will not yell or do any of the other things that he would like me to do in order to feed into his negative self image. I just wait.

We had one of those waiting days yesterday, It literally took 4 hours before he would answer a simple question and out of respect for his privacy I am not going to get into what that conversation was about but needless to say after 4 hours I was pretty tired of waiting. I finally let him know as we got towards 9:30 that I was done for the day and that we could resume this conversation in the morning. I pushed a little and held out a carrot (or a threat depending on your point of view) about our plans for this afternoon that he did not know about and let him know that if we needed to continue this conversation tomorrow they would not be happening.  He started to cry, real tears, not the crocodile ones he does so well. I pushed a little harder and finally he answered.

"I (insert behaviour) because I like the way it makes me feel" he said. It was the truth, you could see the shame he felt about admitting to the fact that he was doing this on purpose in his eyes. He clearly had never been that honest about this before and he was taking a huge risk by saying it aloud

I just about jumped for joy, but I was tired and he did not need to see me jumping up and down because that would of confused the poor tired boy. The point is he was honest, it took four hours but he was honest about a choice that he made and honest about the reason that he was doing it.

That my friends is huge, a huge monumental step for a boy who is so very afraid of being loved. Fudge trusted me enough to admit that he is doing something on purpose, doing it because he enjoys it regardless of it's impact to others. He trusted me enough to share something that he had probably never said aloud before even though he was terrified of what might happen when he spoke those words, he did, he said it.

I hugged him. That's what I did. Then we talked about the behaviour and how it needs to change. We talked about how sometimes even though we like something that does not make it ok. We went to bed and as I tucked him I said to him, you know it would of been a whole lot easier if we did not spend 4 hours getting here, he agreed.

Today he is in a good mood and is doing as he  is asked, well except at breakfast but that was not a big deal, just some poking to see what Mom is going to do when Dad is sitting right there. So I am going to keep on faking it on the days it is really hard and enjoy him on the good days and trust that he is going to attach, even if it does take a really long time.