Escalating Quickly

I started this little blog adventure off with a sweet enough little story, and now I’m going to escalate quickly to darker territory. I’m going to tell you about myself and introduce my family.

I’ve already stated that I am a wife and mother, and I’m going to be straight up honest with you – I have NOT enjoyed parenting. I doubt that I’d have taken to it even if I’d given birth to perfectly gifted little snowflakes. I have the kind of mind and personality that craves challenging employment and the company of adults. But my children, through no fault of their own – or mine, for that matter – weren’t the easiest children to raise. But I’m jumping ahead maybe……

My husband, who shall henceforth be known as GrumpyNut, is retired military. We have three children. Two boys, NutOne and NutTwo, who are in their late teens and living on their own in the house they grew up in (and which we still own and pay the mortgage on) in the smallish town in the south where we landed as our last duty station and where we stayed for the next several years.  They wanted to make an attempt at adulting so we allowed them to remain there when we moved to Ohio last year. N1 is old enough to be on his own, legally, but has some difficulties here and there with mild autism. He wasn’t diagnosed until he was nine. Our previous duty station was in a very small, backwater town and had no pediatric behavioral health services and all we could get from that particular military medical community was that he had ADHD and we should take parenting classes. The diagnosis (once we were transferred back to civilization) was a HUGE relief – he had something neurological and his issues weren’t a result of my poor parenting skills. We got a much later start with him than would have been ideal, but he did respond to some of the therapies we tried with him and he is functioning fairly well as an adult.

N2 isn’t quite old enough to legally be on his own yet, but is quickly approaching, and it’s perfectly legal for him to live with someone else who is of the age of majority. He has made it more than abundantly clear that he has zero interest in being parented. We certainly did try. We started worrying about his behavioral issues when he was just toddling. He was prone to horrible tantrums for no reason and extremely violent outbursts that were physically hard for me to deal with even then – tantrums and outbursts that lasted well past the “terrible” years. We had him evaluated when he was pre-K and got a diagnosis of ADHD. (They liked that diagnosis down there in Backwater.) Even at that age he refused to cooperate with any form of therapy or medical intervention. Later, he was diagnosed with “intermittent explosive disorder”, which means his mental thermostat goes from perfectly fine to Incredible Hulk without passing go or collecting $200. This is an actual neurological condition I did not know about until right at that moment.

Growing up, he stubbornly resisted every attempt to help, advise, discipline, treat, motivate, etc. We are a tall family and he shot up well over 6’ before he was 14. His violent outbursts became more than we could handle and the police had to get involved on several occasions. At 15, he decided he was done with school and that was that. On the rare occasions we were able to get him up and in school, he would act out until the school just sent him home in frustration. It’s like the school system just lost him, and I feel much like I’ve lost him too.

My daughter, AndrogyNut (she chose that as her blog name, btw), lives with us in our new home in Ohio. She is a large part of the reason we made the move. She is an odd little muffin too. She also was diagnosed early with severe ADHD and anger issues not *quite* as bad as her brother, but close. The school system was failing her just as hard as it had failed her brother and by middle school she seemed on the brink of just dropping out of life. She had no friends and spent all of her time alone in her room reading and drawing. She also resisted every attempt we made at therapy or medical intervention. I knew if I didn’t get her out of that school system and out from under the weight of her brother’s behavioral issues, I’d lose her too.

Since the move, she has made HUGE strides. I’m overwhelmed by the transformation she’s made from a feral, Nell-child thing to being an actual person functioning in society. I mean, she’s still a little weirdo with ADHD, but she is a freshman in high school working in an independent study program run by the school system and actually engaging in lessons and learning. She has a little group of friends that are just as geeky and adorkable and she is, and, as of about three weeks ago, is in her first romantic relationship. Her girlfriend is the most adorable little goth thing you’ve ever seen – like straight out of 1993. The boys never really dated so the whole teen-angst-romantic-relationship thing is entirely new to me. Oh boy.

I also made this move for myself. The situation I was in had gotten so bad that I had not only lost myself, but my sense of reality. I didn’t even know how dysfunctional my living situation was until I came up here to visit a friend (a fellow military wife from when we lived in Backwater) and got some distance and perspective. She convinced me that I had to get out and that I had to get Andro out if either of us were to survive. Grumpy was not initially very receptive to the idea, but I kind of only gave him the choice to come along or not, and he chose to come along.

So this is our life now – in the Midwest – which wasn’t even really a real place in my head until a couple of years ago. I mean, I knew it existed, but I knew it existed in the same way I know Mozambique exists.  I figured my chances of living – or even visiting either place – were probably about equal. I’ve survived the hardest part of the parenting thing. I’m finally in a place where I can actually hold a full time job. I kind of randomly stumbled into a position at a huge corporation in a capacity that is somewhat related to PR. Grumpy, who’s worked 40+ hours for the past nearly 30 years at the same basic job (he got a position with DoD directly after retirement doing pretty much exactly the same thing as a civilian as he did when he was active duty). He is working part time now and going to school full time to be a nurse. Our roles are almost entirely reversed with me being the 9-to-5-er and him being more the house-husband.

We have a cute little house with a front yard garden that is, for the most part, a pleasant place to be. Keeping house is much easier now without small children making messes faster than I can clean them up. The environment is much less stressful – enough so that Andro and her friends have decided our house is the best place to hang. I’m happy, for the most part, if a bit fragile. I still have some difficulty wanting to do anything but work and sleep unless Grumpy convinces me to go for a walk or a drive through the countryside. I’ve always been an extreme extrovert but found myself withdrawing over the past couple of years. I feel like I am finally beginning to regain my personhood.  We found a church we like and last spring I sang in the choir. I haven’t seemed to be able to motivate myself back to choir practice yet again this fall, but baby steps.

Baby steps.