Good morning, seo
:O)
When things are quiet with our difficult child children, it is natural for us to question ourselves about what we thought we saw and how we handled things. We love our children, and we want them to be okay. For most of us, those quiet times are where we turn to condemning ourselves for what has happened. We come to believe it was our fault that the difficult child child did whatever it was. That if we'd been better parents, if we'd been stronger people, if we'd handled this or that episode with more wisdom, this would never have happened to our child.
This is especially true if the child has found somewhere else to live, and the problems stop.
We begin to see our children as victims, and ourselves as poor parents. We begin to magnify every little wrongness in our interactions with our children. We seek out new ways of understanding them and begin holding ourselves to a higher standard, sometimes to impossible standards. We convince ourselves that if something like this ever happens again, we will know just how to handle it, because we've learned everything we could about how to be better parents.
This is a time for you to be very good to yourself, seo.
Take advantage of the quiet to recover your strength, and to do things you enjoy. If you are questioning anything that happened, journaling about it might help you put things into perspective. It will help to talk to other parents about what has happened, and about the outcomes for their own children.
It could be that, with less freedom to act out, difficult child will do better living with his grandparents.
And while I hope that for you and for your difficult child, I don't think that is what will happen.
You mentioned finding yourself talking about your son without the usual emotional trappings that come with talking about children we are worried about or grieving for. When that happens to me, that is an indication of denial. It happens when we are so hurt, so overwhelmed, that we go numb. It seems like a fine place to be, given the emotional Hell we have been living in. The problem, at least for me, is that I find I have numbed all feeling.
Maybe, I will begin eating too much sugar. I mean, enormous amounts of things I don't really taste. It's interesting that, when I am eating too much to cover the numbness, the things that satisfy me are things that are very bad for me. I can decide to eat healthy foods in enormous quantities instead? But I will still eat the bad things in quantities just as enormous. As though I were punishing myself.
And that is exactly what I AM doing, of course.
I sort of go around in a fog. Find myself functioning, but realize I wasn't even consciously thinking about the task at hand, at all. For each of us, the way we cope with denial will be different. Some of us will drive more recklessly. Some will drink more. Some, too much exercise.
That is why I say you need to relax and take care of yourself now, seo. You need to recover yourself. You have been through a very hard time. If difficult child does well with his grandparents? Great! But if he doesn't, you are going to need to be as strong and healthy as you can, to get through what might be coming, next.
Please keep posting, seo.
Barbara
