Act Two started when the girl started texting to ask for her shoes back. Now, she didn’t text Kaylyn because Kaylyn didn’t like the cell phone we gave her (it wasn’t an IPhone, you see), so she did not deign to keep it. Rather Kaylyn had given out my husband’s cell phone number. I only found out about the texts coming to my husband’s phone after several days of them. Apparently he had directed Kaylyn to text the girl back to resolve the problem. Kaylyn solved the problem by deleting the text conversation she had with the girl so that we wouldn’t know the content.

Meanwhile as we asked her why this girl thought Kaylyn had her shoes, Kaylyn strenuously insisted that she had no idea. I’m a firm believer that if it doesn’t make sense, it isn’t true, but Kaylyn was unmovable in her denial that she had no knowledge of the shoes. It was only when I texted the friend back and asked her to contact me about the problem directly that the whole story came out. The girl was actually very nice. All she wanted was her shoes back. When I showed Kaylyn the detailed text about when she had borrowed the shoes, she finally cracked! Yes. All this time she had been lying. Lying to the friend that she didn’t know what shoes she was talking about. Lying to us that the girl must have her confused with another Kaylyn. Kaylyn and I drove over the girl’s house and reimbursed her for the missing shoes.

I don’t know how to help Kaylyn. How is she ever going to have friends if she continues to burn them? I’m sure these fifteen-year-old girls talk. If Kaylyn doesn’t slow down, there won’t be any girls left to be friends with that she hasn’t already burned.

Kaylyn said she was afraid of getting in trouble, that’s why she lied. I know her fear has nothing to do with us, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “What were you so afraid of? Did you think we would beat you? Set you on fire?” She said no, she didn’t really know what she was so afraid of. She also said that when she lies, she doesn’t feel ashamed of herself for having done something bad like not returning the girl’s shoes. Then later she feels so much more ashamed of herself. But the kicker is that she has never managed to incorporate the lesson (that she experiences over and over and over) that she feels worse (and gets in more trouble) for lying than for telling the truth.

To see and feel the effort and passion she put into that lie, and to know that she didn’t care one whit about the girl and her shoes, or how the girl felt about not getting her shoes back—especially after she’d been kind enough to lend them to Kaylyn—to see that all Kaylyn cared about was self-preservation breaks my heart and makes me ill. How do you help a girl that’s so desperate she can’t even see how she’s alienating every girl she frantically chases after? Of all the problems any of my three RAD kids have faced, this is the most disturbing. I’m not sure Kaylyn has the capacity to have any friendships if she’s so driven by irrational fear and primitive self-preservation. All I can say is I’m grateful for the counselor. Maybe she can offer some hope. I know mine is sinking for my poor, sweet, good-girl of a daughter who is so desperate I can’t reach her.

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Apparently, like all of us, Kaylyn prefers fun, interesting, happy, dare I say cool people. Unlike most of us, however, she hasn’t yet realized that sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes you get stuck at the boring people table. Suddenly it all made sense, the nine years of girl after girl after girl dumping her. All this time, I’ve wondered and wondered exactly what off-putting social behavior was provoking all these dumps, and Kaylyn has been no help because her standard answer has always been, “I have no clue. I don’t know what I did.”

Now the picture was all too clear. I’m not saying the light went on for Kaylyn as quickly as it did for me, but after an in-depth conversation (which included reading the note together several times), Kaylyn realized that she has been using girls until better girls came along. Say, for example, that at lunch today, Kaylyn sat with Mabel. But tomorrow, if Gertrude is available — and she’s so much more fun — Kaylyn will totally ignore Mabel and hang with Gertrude. Then the next day if Gertrude isn’t available, Kaylyn will try to go back to Mabel, but suddenly Mabel isn’t speaking to her anymore, and Kaylyn has no idea why!

And if Gertrude IS available, Kaylyn will drain her dry, trying to walk with her between every class period, eat lunch with her, walk home with her, and try to hang out after school. Obviously plenty of BFFs do exactly that, but unless you’ve been given your very own BFF key, it’s just obnoxious to push yourself so hard on only one girl.

It was a revolutionary idea to Kaylyn that she invite Gertrude to sit with her AND Mabel. It also seemed to help Kaylyn picture the idea of a bouquet of flowers. One flower is the girl she walks to school with, one flower is the one she eats lunch with, one is the girl she sits next to in English. So instead of squeezing one flower to death, she can enjoy each flower lightly and each flower can enjoy her back. And as the counselor said, once you crush (i.e., ignore) a flower for a cooler flower, you can’t get that flower back.

So far so good. I think Kaylyn may actually be able to learn this social skill. She’s come home excitedly from school the last two days telling me “the bouquet thing” is going well. Now if I could just get her to respect some boundaries.

Photo credit: http://www.123rf.com/photo_7933595_bouquet-of-dahlia-flowers-in-red-dotted-vase.html

A little background: sixteen-year-old Tender Heart had witnessed an awkward situation between my daughter and two other girls (one of whom has bullied my daughter in the past). The cool girls were talking about going to a dance, and my darling, sweet, totally socially clueless daughter said, “Oh, fun, I want to come with you.” The cool girls back-pedaled like Wylie Coyote about to go over the cliff….”Uh, we were just talking, we’re not really going. blah blah blah.” So Tender Heart went out of her way to arrange a group of girls to go to the dance and invited my daughter to go with them. My rivulets of gratitude for this girl’s kindness turned to stone cold pits of frustration at my daughter when I found out Kaylyn ditched Tender Heart at the dance and hung out with Bully and her friend. And when I say “hung out” I mean stood next to as long as they would let her.

Kaylyn also managed to finagle a ride home from Bully’s friend, whom I had never met and did not know her parents, and didn’t even know Kaylyn hadn’t come home with Tender Heart until TH’s mother called me. TH’s mother called me because Kaylyn told Tender Heart a few days later that she was thinking of killing herself to get people to say nice things about her like they did about a little neighborhood girl who recently died.

I know Kaylyn well enough to know (as well as anyone can know) that she wasn’t serious, and I monitor her and our home environment so closely that I don’t know how she could manage it even if she tried. My gut told me Kaylyn was just thinking out loud about how she could get people to say nice things about her and was oblivious to how it sounded.

I asked TH’s mother why she thought Kaylyn didn’t have any friends. I got two big reasons: she lies (puffy, transparent lies) to make herself (she thinks) more popular, and she cuts other girls down to make herself (she thinks) look better. When TH’s mom asked Tender Heart if she thought Kaylyn was really serious about killing herself, the girl answered that she had no idea since she could never tell when Kaylyn was lying or telling the truth. Ouch.

When I talked to Kaylyn about it, she first denied having talked about killing herself, but finally admitted it, denied doing it for attention, said she was just having a bad day, and it sounded like an escape valve. First I told her that when she thinks about killing herself, what she’s really saying is, “I never want to go to prom, I never want to graduate high school, I never want to get married, I never want to hold my baby in my arms, I never want to have a career doing  nails (her current ambition) because suicide is a permanent end to everything. Second I told her to talk to me about those feelings and not teenage girls because they don’t know how to handle it, and if she’s trying to make friends, being the heavy girl that talks about suicide probably isn’t going to get her invited to a lot of parties.

Then we talked about the lying and how that kills any chance for real friendship with nice girls. The saddest part of the whole conversation was when Kaylyn burst out, “But I won’t have any friends if I don’t.” In nine years as her mother, nothing has broken my heart more than to see her desperately wanting friends and showing herself to be utterly incapable of understanding how she’s preventing friendships from happening. She also said she knew it was wrong when she blew off Tender Heart at the dance to go stand with the other girls, but she wanted to be with the other girls. How heartbreaking is that? TH was sincerely kind and Kaylyn was “bored” by her; she wanted the cool girls, even if they didn’t want her. Ouch ouch ouch. For both of us.

I told Kaylyn it was a good sign that she knew it was wrong to blow Tender Heart off, that it meant her conscience was working. I told her she knows what to do to be a good friend. She just has to choose to do it. I hope for her sake she gets the hang of this relatively soon because it isn’t that big a town and there aren’t that many more girls to blow through.

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Initially he became uber-responsible, skipping lunch at Arby’s with his friends so that he could go to the library and catch up on work. He came home a week ago saying he no longer had an F in History. I asked him how he managed that. He said he had done well on the test. “Really?” I asked, since he had gotten Fs on the previous three tests. “How did you manage that?” He said, “I paid more attention in class and studied for the test.” Excellent, I told him. Great job, Mom, I told myself, a little too enthusiastically perhaps.

Last weekend he was his familiar disrespectful, yucky self, the same one I would regularly see when he was lying and saying he didn’t have any homework so that he could watch t.v. Being the “Great job, Mom” that I am, I gave him a chance to write an essay about his feelings. I pointed out to him that he was acting the same way he always acted before when he was lying to me about schoolwork. I reminded him that he wasn’t in trouble with me for not doing schoolwork now since it was his choice, but that if he wanted to confess in the essay about missing assignments, he might feel better.

Sure enough, his essay was all about how he’s decided not to do the big Algebra assignments anymore. He still does the little ones in class, but not the big homework ones because he “doesn’t like to use the textbook.” I was the picture of solicitous patience as we discussed his choice. I told him that was a fine choice as long as he was prepared for the consequences, e.g., failing the class, having to repeat it during summer school, not being able to get that second part-time job because he would have to attend summer school instead, etc.  I reiterated that it was his choice to make, but that if he was so agitated about it that he needed to be yucky, perhaps he wasn’t comfortable with the choice he had made.

Then, as the crowning moment of my new non-supervisory level of motherhood, I hugged him, told him he was a good kid, and I knew he would make the right choice. And if he didn’t, well that’s why pencils have erasers.

We shall see what the great independent one chooses for himself next.

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Case in point. I went to dinner with two girlfriends Saturday night, and we had a wonderful time, talked for hours on the outdoor patio while listening to live music. Maybe because Mother’s Day is usually tough for my family, we’d had a really rough week, and I shared some of the incidents, essays, conversations, consequences, etc. with my friends. They were obviously trying to be helpful, but one has two extremely poised, popular, dare I say gifted teenage girls, and the other has no children yet. So I had some technical overlap with the one friend in that we are both parenting teenage girls. But her situation is full of school volunteering, competitive soccer, academic awards, and fun banter with her daughters and their friends. Her house is the house all the kids want to hang out at. My situation, on the other hand, is full of counseling, horse therapy, failing grades,  emotional walls, and loneliness for my kids who do not possess the social skills to make and keep friends. Can we really parent the same way?

My friend without kids? Forget about it. She shared her growing up with me, and I told her she sounded pretty RAD herself. She was always mad at her parents, even before they divorced, she never went to school, lied all the time, and didn’t care about any of the consequences they gave her. She said there was nothing they could have done to make her care. Absolutely no overlap between our frames of reference, technical or otherwise. When she talks about parenting, she’s talking about how her parents parented her, and how she wishes they had parented her differently. That’s simply not the same thing as being a parent yourself, as any of us know who used to have lots of great ideas about how other people should parent their kids. Then we had our own and nobody better say nuthin’ to us because it’s an impossible job.

My parenting is so structured, in part because that’s who I am and in larger part because I believe that’s what my kids need to function. Their brains are so chaotic and their emotions are so disregulated that order, consistency, and routine are critical. They need to reject me emotionally (and have done so for nine years now) because it feels life-or-death to them not to get close to anyone (especially a mother) who can hurt them again. That is simply not covered under “teenage girls are just selfish, she’s just going through a stage.”

My friends are too kind to say it to me, but I know they think I’m a Hitler, or as my mom used to say, Captain von Trapp without the whistle. The comment that got to me the most was when my younger, probably-RAD friend told me, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but if I were your daughter, I wouldn’t be happy. Why don’t you ease up on her?”

At the time, I answered, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but if you were my daughter, I wouldn’t care if you were happy, I would care if you were good. I would want you to be happy as a result of being a good person, not because you’re getting what you want.” I explained my thinking that if my daughter can’t control her impulses, can’t discipline herself to work, can’t be trustworthy and honest enough to form healthy relationships, she’s not going to be happy anyway. Even so, I thought about her comment all day today. Of course it hurts. I don’t want my daughter to be unhappy because I’m her mother. If there’s something I need to change, I’ll change it.

So I thought long and hard about Kaylyn and what happiness I’ve seen her express over the years. For nine years, I’ve watched Kaylyn’s happiness come from mastering daily showers, setting boundaries with mean girls at school, getting out her hate feelings toward me on paper so that she could feel more positively, learning to control her temper tantrums, becoming more reliable at doing her chores well, and finally, becoming more attached to me. The last part is only possible when she submits herself to our rules and lets us be the parents, lets us take care of her, lets us make her feel safe.

I can’t explain any of this to my friends. Even if I said it to them exactly like this, they would hear it through their frames of reference, which are loving, bonded, healthy relationships that call forth a modicum of structure in the family, or the fantasy of having such some day. We parents of RAD kids live an alternate reality where the bond comes after and because of the structured relationships. No can really understand until they’ve walked a mile in our shoes, or lived a week in our home as it were.

We live on a parenting island where the truth is understood only by others on similar islands. Thank goodness for good friends who care and want to help, but we have to be very clear about what we’re doing and why. We have to know our kids and know what works for our kids. Or if nothing works, which is often the case, we have to know that we’ve tried everything and are still willing to try more if we come across new ideas. I heard it said the other day that if we pass on to our children only half the dysfunction that our parents gave to us, we’re good parents. That comforts me. I know I can at least do that. And who knows? Maybe when the acute phase of parenting is over and they are developmentally mature, some of this tenaciousness and grit to help them at any cost will pay off. My daughter’s Mother’s Day card to me today thanked me for never giving up on her no matter what. And I never will.

Photo credit: http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02049/friends_2049532b.jpg

I only left him in the room for twenty minutes, and I paid $52 to teach him that twenty-minute lesson. I only wanted to get him to care enough about his education that he would start doing the dang work. While he was sitting there for the twenty minutes, I called our therapist, and we devised a plan. She put it bluntly: If he needs to fail, he needs to fail, and we can’t prevent it.

We saw her together the next day. She said, “The first thing your mother said to me when she called was, ‘I have no intention of leaving Gavin here.’ Your mom is very sad that you don’t care enough about your grades to do the work. She is trying to get your attention so that you understand how important it is to graduate high school.” She then told my son that he was on his own for school, that I wouldn’t be checking his grades anymore, and we wouldn’t be talking about missing assignments in therapy anymore.

I had already come up with that idea as well. I was starting to think that one reason my son was so irresponsible with school is that I was his safety net, and he knew that sooner or later I would catch his missing assignments and require him to do them. I did tell him that I was here if he had questions or needed help with an assignment, but that he would need to ask. The counselor told him, “If you need to fail, you go ahead and fail. We can’t stop you. No one can make you care.”

I talked with Gavin a couple of days later and asked him what he had learned from the experience. He said, “I think it’s time I grew up.” He volunteered that he had taken the initiative to check his grades online at the library during lunch, and had talked to one teacher already about making up a missing assignment.

I asked him if he thought he had been less responsible because he knew I would catch him sooner or later, and he would have to do the work. He said yes. I asked him if he thought he would have been more responsible sooner if I had quit pushing him sooner and he said yes. That made me feel foolish, but at least I’ve stopped pushing him now.

It’s one of the hardest things I’ve done to let him take responsibility for success or failure in school. I know how important a high school diploma is, especially today when even college graduates have difficulty finding jobs. But the bottom line is that I can’t force him to care, and my pushing seems to have backfired. I have to sit on my hands not to check the school’s website for his grades, and bite my tongue not to ask him if he has homework. School is over in about a month, and I’ll know then whether he passed his classes. In the meantime, I repeat the mantra, “I can’t make him care, I can’t make him care, I can’t make him care,” all the while hoping and praying that something will.

Photo credit: mrstreasures.wordpress.com/high-school-diploma.jpg

I’m not sure what special needs my ten-year-old has. He was two-plus when we adopted him, so by definition, he has “special needs.” Clearly he’s never met a rule he wanted to follow or a boundary he wanted to respect. But he’s so cute. At first the therapist thought he was just spoiled, as in, you’ve been distracted by the problems of his older siblings, and he’s so cute, he’s been allowed to get away with too much for too long. That was hard to believe. I’m a very strict mom. My own mother called me Captain von Trapp without the whistle. She meant it in the nicest possible way I’m sure.

So initially we worked on the temper tantrums and disobedience as mere symptoms of being spoiled. When that didn’t work, we took him back in to see the counselor. “Oh,” she said, “I think he’s sicker than I realized.” That was somehow both discouraging and encouraging at the same time. Discouraging because what parent wants to hear that about her child, encouraging because at least it made more sense. So we pulled out the big guns and started grading him on his obedience (A or F depending on his response to a direction). We set it up that he couldn’t play with his friends again until he had earned a roughly 80% average of As over the week. We were sure that would work since he lives to play with friends and has meltdowns when friends aren’t available. But no, he went a month, then two months without playing with friends. He said he wanted to play, but he didn’t change his behavior to be more obedient.

So we brought out the Howitzer: peanut butter. Rather than having him work toward a reward for obedient behavior, we imposed a negative consequence when he disobeyed. For each disobedient act, he was given a peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat bread for his next meal instead of yummy food. Well, you’ve never seen a kid snap to obedience so quickly. The first stunt he pulled after we initiated Program Peanut Butter was to set the timer for teeth-brushing at one minute when I told him to set it for two. Peanut butter sandwich for breakfast the next morning. The second stunt was to not take a shower before bed when I told him to. Peanut butter sandwich for breakfast the next morning. The third and I believe essentially final stunt was to wad his church pants up in a bag behind his closet door instead of putting them in the wash or hanging them up. Peanut butter sandwich for dinner.

Now, I’m making this sound very clinical, but in reality, there were enormous meltdowns each time because he hates, hates, HATES peanut butter sandwiches. In other words, they work! He sets the timer for two minutes every time he brushes his teeth now, he takes his shower consistently every night now, and sure enough, he hung his church pants up this week. In a family with three special needs kids and minimal progress over nine years, it’s almost dizzying to watch my youngest son demonstrate obedience so consistently. I”m not thinking he’ll never be disobedient again. After all, he’s ten. But once the habit is established, we can remove the peanut butter sandwiches as leverage and he can simply be a ten-year-old boy with the “special” need to obey his parents. All hail the peanut butter.

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We’ve tried counseling, heavy structure, essays to help him connect with the feelings that drive this behavior, meetings with teachers, positive rewards when he stays caught up, and negative consequences when he lies and doesn’t do assignments. The last straw was to charge him money for each missing assignment. He has a part-time job at the mom and pop grocery store as a bagger, and is thrilled to have money to spend. That’s how he bought the Playstation. We met with the counselor and agreed on a plan where he would pay us $50 for every missing assignment. That got his attention, or so I thought.

Last Monday when we checked the school website, he had four missing assignments, so he had to fork over $200. Again that got his attention, or so I thought. He even cried. I figured we were home free. And I reminded him that if he could go a month without missing assignments, I would give him my old Iphone.

So last night when we checked the school website again and he had three more missing assignments, I was really at a loss. That’s another $150. If losing so much money out of his pocket doesn’t motivate him, will anything work? Gavin admits he is lazy and doesn’t want to do the work. We all know that. We’ve talked with him and the counselor has talked with him about just doing the work anyway to get it over with so that he doesn’t have to pay such a heavy price for catching up. He agrees. And then he touches the hot stove again. Why? That’s all I want to know.

Last night at 10:30 pm when he really wanted to go to bed, I told him to start on his missing assignments. He got upset, and I said (with therapeutic sarcasm), “Oh, I agree, it’s a much better choice not to have done your work during the week so that you could stay up late on a Sunday night to get it done.” I told him that if he really had no intention of doing school work, let’s drop out and get a manual labor job, but that upset him even more. He wants a high school diploma. But he doesn’t want to do the work to get one.

We all have things we don’t want to do. A large part of school is learning to do things that are hard, that we don’t want to do. How does one function in life without that skill? And the heavy negative consequences (like burning your hand when you touch a hot stove) are supposed to shape behavior away from the negative. Why don’t they work for Gavin? Why does he want to be in this deep dark hole every few weeks? If I could understand it, I could handle it better. I wasn’t mad at him last night. It happens so often that I now just dispassionately direct him to complete the assignments and show them to me. But I don’t know how to help him, don’t know if he can be helped. We see the counselor again on Wednesday, and even though we’ve covered this in therapy innumerable times, maybe she’ll have a fresh insight. I can only hope.

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We started fostering Justin and his two older siblings when he was sixteen months old and they were eight and five. Two years later, we adopted all three. Even though he is the only one that has no conscious memories of the birth parents, he has been the only one to obsess over being adopted.

He has worried that it makes him different. He has worried that he doesn’t look like us. That one is almost funny because he’s the spitting image of my husband, and most people think we adopted the older two but that Justin is our biological child.

Of course we’ve talked with him about how special being adopted makes him, how badly we wanted him, how hard we worked to get him. I don’t think adopted kids realize that we adoptive parents usually work a lot harder to have families than the biological parents do. I mean the old-fashioned way of having kids is pretty easy. Having to be certified fit as a parent and subjecting oneself to the approval of others before we can have a child can be brutally difficult.

We’ve also taken him to counseling to talk about his “mad” about being adopted. I had reached the point of thinking he just needed to be mad as long as he needed to be mad, and if he was going to have an issue with being adopted, then he would have to deal with that throughout his life.

He would say things like, “I wish I came from your tummy,” and I would tell him I wished the same thing, but we have a different kind of family. “You were in the tummy of a mom that couldn’t keep you safe, and I couldn’t have a baby in my tummy, so Heavenly Father gave you to me to keep you safe.” Justin seemed to be comforted by my explanation, but he kept making comments and asking questions that made me realize he was having a hard time with it.

So when he finally said, “It’s kind of like you’re my birth mom,” I was thrilled. I realized he had worked something out in his own mind that allowed him to see me positively. He said, “You love me and give me hugs, and she didn’t.” I know that’s ten-year-old logic, but it made sense to me. He has no memories of her, and I would bet a great deal of money that she hugged him and loved him, but in his mind, he’s making peace with getting hugs and love from me. It really is the nicest thing he’s ever said to me.

I recently threw myself under the bus for my daughter. I protected her like a mama bear from two girl bullies-posing-as-friends and one mom-of-a-bully who silently mouthed the word “liar” to my daughter as bully number one shrieked at me that my daughter was lying about the bullying. Okay, enough set-up. Let’s just say I, who am the first to call my daughter on even the hint of a lie, believed her and stood up for her, even though it caused an extremely ugly scene at my dining room table, and I lost someone I thought was a friend (the bully’s mother who called me names when I stood up for my daughter).

Fast-forward to last week when the bully suffered a personal hardship. My daughter’s counselor and I both talked to my daughter at length about how the bully was going to be having a hard time and may act out. She had already hurt Kaylyn and we wanted Kaylyn to be prepared in case she tried it again. We coached Kaylyn on how to be polite and kind to the girl in her difficult time (it never hurts to be gracious, does it?), but not to get sucked back in as the girl’s lapdog (my daughter has no boundaries).

It turns out my daughter interacted with the bully but she was afraid to tell me because she didn’t know if she had interacted with her appropriately and was scared she would get in trouble. I asked her, “And you were afraid I would beat you?” No. “Stick bamboo shoots under your fingernails?” No. “Imprison you in the dungeon?” No. “Then why were you afraid to tell me?” Drumroll please . . . “I don’t know.” That’s the part that kills me. I understand she was afraid, but it had nothing to do with me. Is it crazy to want a little bit of our relationship to actually reflect my trustworthiness and kindness?

Our counselor used the “under the bus” analogy today to help Kaylyn realize what I had done to protect her, and how she was showing more loyalty to the bully-friend than to me. To Kaylyn’s credit, she understood finally and apologized to me with a hug. The counselor, who remains brilliant, had Kaylyn write a one-page essay of all the ways she thought she could interact appropriately with the bully, then we reviewed it together. Now Kaylyn should have no doubt in her mind as to the kind, polite ways she can be around the girl while still having good boundaries. I guess you could say all’s well that ends well, but I would just like to whisper once more that it sure would be nice to reap the benefits of what I’ve sown.

Oh well, tribulation builds character. Mine is a skyscraper.

Photo: missysgreenapple.blogspot.com/mama-bear.jpg