Tuesday, February 7, 2012

2 Steps Forward 14 Steps Back Part TWO

He was out of it the next day. 

He started working in the garage first thing in the morning and got mad when I told him it was time to stop so that we could take my grandson to the park.  I felt pretty bad about that because my days of babysitting my grandson were numbered and I was trying to have as much fun with him as possible before I didn't get to see him three days a week anymore.  My son knew how important that was to me, but he let his own agenda get in the way of my feelings.

He grudgingly came with us, but slept all the way there.  Then, he slept while my grandson played on the splash pad and in the water canyons/rivers area.  He lethargically played with his nephew on the playground.  He acted very out of it.   Usually he loves to play with his nephew and likes going places with us.   My grandson was having a lot of fun, but could not get my son to interact with him at all.  And then he slept all the way home.

My worst fears were rearing their ugly heads. 

The sparkle was gone. 

The fun and happiness in him was gone.

Something was wrong.

The minute we got home, he went right back out to work in the garage again.  I told him that if he was so tired, he probably shouldn’t work anymore that day.   Then, he told me what he thought about that.

I said that it wasn’t worth it if he was going to ruin relationships, get overworked, and be overtired.  But, he wouldn’t listen to me. 

And that night, all heck broke loose, again. 

I opened the garage door to check on him and I smelled some kind of fertilizer or bug killer.  When I asked him what smelled so bad, he jumped all over me and said, “What?  Did you think I was huffing something?”

Hmmm, did someone have a guilty conscience or what?

I said, “I wasn’t thinking anything.  It smells really bad in here and you need to open the big garage door and get some ventilation going so that you don’t get sick from smelling all of this stuff.”  I discovered that he had broken a bottle of bug killer when he decided that it was trash and threw it into the garbage can.   It should have been no big deal, but he refused to open the door.  So, I had my husband open the door, then I kept the door from the house to the garage opened and turned the air conditioner on high so that it could blow fresh air from the house through the garage.  This was step one towards that night's chaos.
    
Later, he came to me and asked me if we had any burn ointment.  He said he had picked up a torch and it turned on without him expecting it to and it burned his finger.  But, then he asked me if it looked like he also had a burn on his lip.  So, I knew that he had to have been screwing around with the torch because it is not possible for a torch to “accidentally” turn on.   I assumed that he had learned his lesson, so I told him to go run his finger under cold water for about 5 minutes and didn’t say anything else.
Shortly after that, my husband went outside to get something out of his truck and when he looked into the garage, he saw what seemed to be my son attempting to light something on fire in his hand with that same torch.   He shouted at my son to stop playing with the torch and that led to another scene of yelling and unreasonable behavior.  My son started calling my husband names again and claimed that he was just trying to fix the torch so that it wouldn’t accidentally turn on when someone else touched it and that my husband shouldn’t have freaked out on him.  He was mad that he had been yelled at when he “was just trying to make sure that no one else got burned by the torch.”
Seriously.  When you see your kid doing something dangerous, you are not going to mildly suggest that he stop.  You are going to speak sharply so that they will stop immediately—before they have a chance to get hurt.  But, my son was sure that he had been treated unfairly.  He got right up in my husband’s face demanding to be apologized to for getting yelled at.
He went on and on and became very disrespectful.  No matter how much we tried to tell him that he didn’t need to be so upset and that we weren’t mad, we were just making sure that he didn’t do anything that would hurt himself or the house, it didn’t stop the tirade. 
He said terrible things to my husband, which really hurt his feelings (mine were kind of hurt, too—so I knew how he felt).  He came to me and said that if our son was going to keep acting like that then either he was going to leave or our son was going to have to leave.
I just love that.  It seems to be one of those things that is going to be an ongoing theme around here.  My son is going to act like a little s#!% and my husband is going to want to escape or send our son away.  Neither situation is acceptable.  I am not giving up on our son.  I am going to deal with this crap and I am going to keep trying to make things better.  I am going to try to help him have a good life.  I don’t want my husband to give up on him and I don’t want my husband to give up on me.
His wanting to leave was just not fair.  It seems like I deal with our son 80% or 90% of the time all by myself anyway and then my husband wants to go somewhere else and leave me to deal with everything 100% of the time. 
I tried to get him to understand that blow-ups were going to happen no matter who was here and that he just happened to be the target this time.  If I were the only one there, I would have been the target. 
He stayed.
But, you could cut the tension with a knife.
My son was definitely doing something that was making him either act like a zombie or overreact to everything.
And nobody talked to each other for the rest of the night, again.