Until

I haven't written in a long time. Let me catch you up. I left off in September 2012. Believe it or not, I don't even remember what events caused me to write that September blog and declare that I was near the limit. Clearly I made it through.

In December 2012, our girl stole a laptop from her school. This was her umpteenth and final strike as far as the school administration was concerned. I remember their asking me if I thought she would do better for the rest of the year. I remember saying, "No, and in fact I can guarantee that if you let her stay, there will be more incidents. She is terrified to graduate. She will work hard against that success. If you let her stay it must be with that understanding." They were done. She was expelled. Kind of amazingly, after a brief mourning period, she picked herself up off the ground. By February 2013 she had passed the GED and gotten a job at a major retailer. Summer 2013 was up and down. She failed her summer class, the first attempt at college courses, but did well at work. At her other mom's house she stole and went through some very intimate items that made it evident that she could no longer go back and forth between our houses. So it was just the two of us until she got her own place, with a roommate, in November. Everything seemed to be going great, until...

Until.

The word "until" is very often followed by "December." Unlike Christmas, the self-sabotage season never really ends. But there does seem to be something special about December. It could be what they call an anniversary reaction. (Here is a great article on the science of anniversary reactions.) Of course we have no idea what the anniversary is.  Or it could be a self-sustaining cycle: disturbance in December, gets cleaned up by spring, good feelings kick in by May-June but cannot be sustained for more than 5-6 months. So again, disturbance in December. This cycle may be creating its own anniversary reaction.

Until what hardly matters. The few people I have told about this all said the same thing: "And you were just able to start relaxing." And I thought of what David Banner said in the Avengers movie, when asked the secret for keeping "the other guy" (the Hulk) under raps: he's always angry. And that is exactly how I keep plugging away at this RAD parenting thing. I never relax. I never believe my own lying eyes. I never allow myself to imagine the best without calling to mind the worst. But I've written about that before. Then I called it "the asterisk." Another word for it is "until."

So this time the "until" was until she got caught within 10 minutes of pointlessly pocketing a gift card, got fired, got her first official criminal charges. Until success caught up with her and feeling good just felt too awful, and she had to get back to her comfort zone. Success was a rare condition. Stealing was an old reliable. Like all humans, she gravitated toward the familiar.

Through it all, I believe in this person. Not just because it's my job, but because I see it. I see it in her ability to have relationships, which so far surpass the expectations for a person with her background that it boggles the mind. I see it in the spaces between the untils, which get a little longer and a little better each time. I see it in her ability to regulate after dissociation, to work in therapy, to work the rest of the time too. 

But that doesn't mean I don't get angry. At her but not just at her. At her mother. At the child welfare system. At myself. I get angry but I tend to short circuit when I stay angry. I struggle with anger as an emotion because it is very uncomfortable. It feels out of control to me.

So... maybe that's what I am supposed to learn. Maybe until I get comfortable with anger, she will work to make me angry because that was the cosmic deal we made for this lifetime. Maybe, now that the consequences are all on her, I need to focus on my own damn until. Maybe, at the very least, I can show her how to kick that desire to run into the comfort zone. Can't hurt to try. Challenge accepted.