Difficult times call for insane levels of over-compensating

Brae has had a rough year.

Okay. So. I've had a rough year. Working through the wreckage of a divorce and trying to navigate a path through single parenthood-land has not been fun.

My parents have had a rough year. Accommodating your adult daughter and her toddler son during the years in which you should be swimming in the boredom caused by an empty nest has not been fun.

But, Brae? He has had the worst of it all.

It's like 'losing-a-father-to-his-less-desirable-than-a-disease-infested-streetwalker-girlfriend bad.'*
Or, 'having-to-cope-with-an-emotional-basketcase-of-a-mom-who-can't-be-bothered-to-get-up-and-blow-her-nose-uses-her-shirt-sleeve-as-a-tissue' bad.
Or, 'abandoning-all-that-he-knows-and-has-been-taught-for-the-last-four-years-of-his-life' bad.

So. I've over-compensated. Or so it seems.

Brae has been granted some leniency since the split.
I attributed his anger and frustration to the vacancy in his life that was opened when his father split, so I made excuses for him. I tried to allocate all of the blame for his behavior to myself and his father and pamper his emotions with soft words of encouragement and gentle reassurances.

Sometimes he hit, kicked, screamed.
Sometimes he got wild with uncontrollable emotion.

Sometimes became all the time before I realized it.

NOW we are having trouble in school. He is hitting his friends, screaming when he gets mad and last week an unlucky teacher received a kick in the shin.

We are working on the level of his anger. He gets frustrated and acts out with aggression. It's not something I can reason away anymore. It's effecting other children. It's effecting teachers. I know, it's effecting him. He needs the structure, the discipline, the punishment. He needs an outlet for his anger and to learn that things wont always go the way you want, people wont respond in ways you want them to and that's okay.

We count now, '1, 2, 3, 4, 5' and breathe. We lose our monster trucks when we act out aggressively and we get a sad little face on our 'choice chart'. We have immediate time outs, because there is no warnings when you hurt someone. And we cry. A LOT. Because it's been a difficult year. And we are just realizing, that life isn't fair.

A tough lesson at any age.



* I am exaggerating here. Of course his girlfriend is not THAT un-desirable. To him. Or else he wouldn't date her. I, however, will call her whatever I want. Like a toddler. Because I can. Nana, nana. Boo. Boo.