Image result for laughing woman cartoonPeople have said to me that now that I am ill, they are sure that my acting out teens are rallying around me. I know that you Hazardous Parents are laughing just as hard as I am at this. Of course they aren't. In fact, it's escalated the behaviours of two of them and caused one whom I had hoped was successfully launched to return home (nothing short of armed guards at the door was going to stop that one) and re-create her norm for havoc.

I've finally got some support for one of them starting next week and this is a learning point. I've been amazed at how slow the professionals are to get working with our family. This outreach worker has had our file for weeks but first she had to have vacation (ok, I get that) and then she somehow managed to take two weeks to set an appointment with my teen so that won't even start till next week. You'd think with something like this they could be moving more quickly. Also, we've had Child Services involved for a while now because of the violent rages of one, and this social worker was always quick to call a meeting or do other tasks. Now, we can't get her to return our calls.

I've also got to figure out how to keep supporting my non-acting out teen (I bet you're surprised that I have one of those). He has always been a joy to raise, and is just about to graduate high school and go on to a career in the military. We were able to make sure that all the attention and energy didn't get sucked up by the acting out kids by giving him special times together and making sure we had quiet times to just talk about his life. This July we were planning that my spouse would take him and our same age granddaughter on a trip to Thailand or somewhere fun and exotic. That trip won't happen now. I worry that now that I don't have any energy he will disappear into the background of the chaos that the others are causing.

I'm also fairly consumed with trying to find a way to cut short the relationship re-building that would have taken the next few years to do. With one of my teens, I have just said "We don't have any time, we have to heal what is between us now" and she was able to hear that and we are working on it (not that it prevents her from taking a bottle of rum to bed with her at night), but the others are not so easy. I know there are other cancer parents out there, so if you have any suggestions on this, I would greatly appreciate hearing from you.

Well, onward and downward, but I'm not dead yet, so I'm going to keep trying.

Image result for rose




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hello friends - I had planned this blog in hopes of gaining insight into how to manage the kids while dealing with severe health issues but I find my strength is rapidly diminishing and I might as well stop while I can still write. However, I will give you an update. After finding out my own devastating news, my spouse of 33 years was diagnosed with liver and kidney cancer, so she too will be "moving on". Its odd because I'm a non smoker but got lung cancer and she is a non drinker and got liver cancer. Well, I guess one can never, ever anticipate what lies ahead. As for our acting out teens - they raged and acted out even more for a while, but the youngest two, although still smoking pot a few times a day - have ceased raging and have become affectionate and helpful. Yesterday they cooked me the most wonderful birthday dinner and set up the dining room filled with flowers and my grandmother's table cloth for dinner. They are also open to counselling and are activel
Read more
Image
So, my youngest 3 seem to have established some new rules. I don't believe they've been sitting around having a group discussion, but they are each responding the same way for the moment. The rules currently imposed by 3 of my teens are 1) be drunk or stoned part of every day 2) Mom can never, ever show any signs of having cancer 3) Mom can never, ever, be sad about having cancer 4) one has decided that being even ruder and angrier at me is the way to get through this 5) stick together and don't let anyone new or healthy into the group. (For those of you who don't know - my 5 youngest are full sibs, so they have the same tempers and the same attitudes and the same genetic vulnerability to addiction, and they were all exposed to drugs and alcohol on a daily basis while in utero and the youngest 3 girls hang out in the same social network). These are hard rules because I'm a therapist so of course I want to discuss this with everyone; and, I find myself crying at t
Read more

Hard days ahead....

Image
Have you ever noticed how positive change tends to happen after hard work and good planning; yet, bad changes happen out of the blue and in an instant. That's what happened for me when my doctor said "Brenda, you have cancer". Suddenly I found myself living on a new planet with new rules and new worries and no energy to deal with any of it. I've read how people go into shock or denial and have to take time to process this kind of information - but as any Hazardous Parent knows, there isn't time for that kind of thing in our kind of family - the first thing comes to mind in any situation is "How will this impact my family?"And as I walked out of the dr.'s office I was hit with the harsh realization that this was going to trigger major abandonment issues in my three youngest who are currently teens in the peak of their acting out years. We were already dealing with their drug use, their refusal to attend school, rages, regular visits from poli
Read more