I have always said here that even if I felt 100% sure that my instincts were correct, I would be the first one to admit it when I was off. I hoped to be off, I hoped that my natural pessmistic/realist self (and honestly, sometimes you can’t tell if one side is winning out more than the other until the event passes. It’s kind of like that whole line between bravery and stupidity, and there’s no way to tell which side you land on until you can see the outcome) was blurring what good could possibly come of this.
I haven’t turned into Pollyanna, trust me. I don’t believe for a moment that the next five or even ten years are going to be easy ones - for Brenna, for Ailish, for our whole family - but I have seen changes, and they are really good ones. Changes that, dare I say it, may actually give our family a sense of normalcy that we haven’t had since Ailish was first hospitalized in 2003. Now we are on the cusp of some pretty huge, tumultuous things here - high school, junior high, a change in schools for Kieran, so I have no delusions that our world will be stress-free. But for the first time in a very long time, I can imagine having three children in my life, every single day. I can imagine an entire year of holidays *together*, without involving an airplane. I can imagine being a family. Maybe not an average, every day family, we’re still held together by a motley cocktail of pharmaceuticals, but a family nonetheless.
I was so terrified of this visit with Brenna. Honestly, it wasn’t even Brenna I was worried about. I just felt like we had barely gotten Kieran and Ailish to a place where I could leave them in the room together and not worry that someone would get hurt, I didn’t know what adding arch enemies to the mix would do to us. I very carefully scheduled her visit so that the first few days would have Ailish’s last days of school, giving them a break from each other. Plus, giving Ailish a day where the attention was focused on her was really good for her. Brenna was very loving that day towards her - even if Ailish grimaced when Brenna hugged her, I could tell she was trying. Then Brenna got her day with Grammapoppa, which helped to separate them, and the next day we let Ailish stay home, to separate a little more. Then yesterday, Ailish was able to spend the day with Grammapoppa and her cousin. I think the most important thing is to carefully maneuver to give each of them some down time, some alone time so they can re-group. But honestly, despite a few little jabs here and there (which is totally normal sibling stuff), they have both done really well.
I am well aware that this is honeymoon talk. It’s quite a common phenomenon in residential and in home visits. A child can keep it together for weeks, even months, and then everything just falls apart. But the real key here is not that Brenna is behaving, it’s that Ailish is behaving. She’s taking it out on us, little manipulations here and there, but it’s livable.
So we asked for and received an extension for Brenna to stay until next Tuesday. And then yesterday morning, I began to ponder if even two weeks is long enough. I called Brad at home and asked if he thought I was crazy to see if we could extend it even more. He said he had been thinking exactly the same thing. I have no idea how long we’ll be able to extend it, and believe me, I’m just as surprised as everyone else that we’re even asking for such a thing, but the thought of being a whole family is so tantalizing. There are things I have forgotten, when things have been different for so long (nearly three years). Having all five members of my family in the same car, and not a rental car, my car. Having to buy milk two days after I bought the last round. Running errands with all three of them, except this time, I’m not going crazy - they behave in the stores, they don’t ask for anything that they don’t have the money for, they are helpful, and with cell phones, I can leave them in the make-up or toy aisle for a few minutes and grab a few things. Sitting down to a full table, and reminding myself to make a few extra servings. Knowing when I fall asleep at night that every single one of my children is safe and sound and sleeping peacefully, not crying, alone, in a bed 1,000 miles away. When I hear one of them coughing, I can just get up and give them some cough syrup - I don’t have to get a nurse’s approval.
We haven’t had any of this in 32 months. Even when Ailish came home, it wasn’t the same. When Brenna came to visit in January, Ailish wasn’t here. This is it, the first time. I didn’t realize until now how badly I want it back. How badly I want to leave the world of residential just as much as Brenna does. I want her to be in high school here, I want her to be back in our Girl Scout troop, for real, not just in name. I want to be able to say, “Hey, you are getting a little tall for those pants,” and take care of it that day, not wait for her to call and tell me, then I have to track the jeans down, then I have to ship them ground, so the whole process takes two weeks. I want us to be *us* again.
But this is the part where I have to step in and ask my heart, are you seeing what’s real or what you want to see? Are you prepared if things go downhill? Could you stand another heart wrenching episode like the one with Ailish and Kieran? Could Kieran stand it? Could Brenna? I don’t have answers to any of it. I don’t want to be Suzy Sunshine - I don’t want to be hoodwinked. I hate being tricked, more than anything in the world, I hate looking like a fool. If I have a dour outlook on things, it’s impossible to be disappointed, right? But I can taste this - I can see it so clearly, and it’s so tempting to believe that being a family again is possible. As I’ve told Brenna many times over the last several weeks, she is 100% responsible for her decisions from here on out. I think we’ve given her every tool we can, and what we’ve learned most about Brenna is that if she doesn’t want something, absolutely nothing is going to motivate her. If she does want something, as long as she doesn’t sabotage herself, she can overcome any obstacle. She had to want this badly enough, and I can see that she does. As long as Ailish does not launch a campaign on her, well, scratch that, Ailish will launch a campaign on her. As long as we can prepare her to ignore the campaign, to understand the bigger reason beneath it, and the even bigger reason why she needs to walk away from it, I think we can be successful. Successful. That’s a huge word.
Brenna and I have talked a lot about high school. I’ve tried as best I can to explain that this is for real, this is permanent, and the choices she makes over the next four years are critical to the rest of her plan. We even talked about community college as an alternative if things don’t turn out how she wants, because God forbid, I can see it now, first reporting period out of the gate and she has a D. She would likely throw up her hands and say never mind. She’s so brilliant, I know she can do it, but as she says, there’s such a fine line - she’s so bored if the class is not challenging enough, but if she’s loaded up with too much homework, it will be overwhelming and discouraging if she falls behind. However, I think the biggest sea change in that regard is my own. I finally realized a few weeks ago that this was not my challenge. I used to think that we had until they were 18 to shape them, but I have come to realize more and more that though we can gently nudge them a bit, once they enter high school, it really is up to them. You have Type A personalities who want all AP classes and straight A’s, and then you have kids who just endure the experience, squeaking by on as little work as possible. There are several different variants in between that, but one thing I know for sure, it will do us no good to harass her about her grades - she has to want them. I will be ever vigilant about her friends, and the choices they make, but as far as academic success goes, that has to be her decision. There’s a certain freedom that comes with that, and hopefully it will help us keep the peace a little more, since we used to fight frequently about her homework. The only real challenge will be getting her out of bed in the morning, but she and I also talked about the fact that she is just one of those people who needs as much sleep as possible. Where Kieran can spring out of bed on her own after 7 or 8 hours, and Ailish struggles to wake up, but once she’s up, she’s up, Brenna truly needs 11 or 12 hours every single night or she’s just a zombie. We are working on how we can plan for that because high school starts so darn early! What is up with that, by the way? I still remember 1st period Government, started at 7:15, and I would fall asleep in class every day - ugh!
So we’re still not quite sure exactly what’s going to happen. As I wrote this, Brad texted me to say Brenna’s school called and said if she were going to do an extended stay, we’re basically asking for her to be discharged from the school. You know what’s weird? That’s not terrifying. It was for a very very very long time, and it’s not. Wow, that just hit me how huge that was.
We’ve still got a pile of paperwork to go through, and I know that to do this properly, we should send her back and let her go through the discharge process, but it seems like such a waste of time and money and heartache to do that. Until we meet with the District, we won’t know what school she’ll be attending or what kind of program they will have available to her. All I know is, I called the psychiatrist first to make an appointment because normally it takes 3 months to get in to see him again after being out of the loop, and they told me he had a cancellation and she could be seen July 2. I don’t know, but that sounds like fate to me. I’m going to take all of the positive omens I can.
Heading towards home...
Wow. Best of luck with that. Could they ever go back to this school if they have issues that crop up? This seems like a very good school.
Posted by: Kim | June 21, 2009 at 10:28 PM