The Consequences Talk

1. You lied to us. You said you were spending the night at [your friend’s] when you had no plans to do so. You called and texted to let us know you were safely in for the night when you weren’t. You called from [the village] to “let us know your plans” when everything you were saying was a lie.

2. Because you have done this we cannot trust you to spend the night anywhere because we can’t trust that you will be where you say you will be. Calling or texting to check in will no longer work because you have shown us that you have used the cell phone to lie to us. How can we believe your updates?

3. You placed yourself in danger. You drove on a difficult and dangerous road in the wintertime without emergency equipment, and without letting us know when you were leaving or arriving so that we could come look for you if something bad happened on the road.

4. You placed yourself in danger by being in a situation where people were drinking, partying, and not being responsible for themselves or for you. It is in exactly this kind of situation where bad things happen fast. Maybe you were drinking and partying along with everyone else, or maybe you weren’t. Either way, the result is the same. You were not being responsible for your personal safety.

5. We are glad that nothing bad did happen to you, but as a result of taking these kinds of risks, something bad could have happened, and if you continue to take these kinds of risks, something bad eventually will happen. Also, we recognize more now that you are not yet responsible enough to look out for your personal safety. As we continue to be responsible for your safety for you, your freedom will be limited in ways that you will not like.

6. You broke the law. Your driver’s license does not allow you to drive with passengers under 21. This law exists to protect you, your passengers, and other drivers. Because you have broken this law, you will not get the full regular license when you turn 17, but you will keep the provisional license for another six months.

7. You drove from [the village] with beer in your car. Maybe it was yours, maybe it wasn’t. The result is the same. If you had been stopped by a police officer, you would have been ticketed or arrested. Having a passenger passed out and stinking of alcohol wouldn’t help your case any.

8. Driving with four gas cans in your backseat was a foolish thing to do. Breathing the fumes is harmful to you and your passengers, and could impair you as the driver. The fumes could ignite causing a fire. Being in the trunk or the backseat does not change this. And now you have gas spilled all over the back seat and back floorboard. The whole car stinks of gas, and this shows that you are not taking proper care of your car.

9. You manipulated us. You were grounded on Sunday because of your English grades. When this threatened your plan (and we know you’ve been planning this for a while) you got all teary and said all the things you knew we wanted to hear. You did this so that we would soften your grounding and let you spend the night at [your friend’s]. Your actions totally cancel out everything you said to us. We realize now that you were lying even then. This is an ugly, ugly thing to do.

10. You broke our trust. Quite simply, how can we believe anything you say? How can we trust you will do anything you say you will do? We can’t. Trust is built slowly over time and torn down in a moment. If you ever want us to trust you again, you have to slowly show us that we can trust you in one small way at a time.

11. You have lost the freedom to use the telephone. You can earn this back by being cooperative and having a good attitude around the house.

12. You have lost the freedom to be on the internet. You can earn this back after you have earned back the phone and continue to be polite, upbeat, and positive around the house.

13. You have lost the freedom to hang out with your friends unsupervised. In time, we will work to make sure that you have opportunities to spend time with your friends, but this will have to be earned back.

14. You have lost the freedom to drive your car. You will ride the bus to school in the morning and walk to [my] office after school is over. You can work on homework there until 4:30 when [I] will bring you home.

15. How long all of this lasts will depend on you. If you are cooperative, polite to us, continue to do well in school, and stay upbeat (that means act like you are in a good mood, even if you don’t feel it), then you will earn these things back faster.

Refusal

As expected, Friday, the day of Jme’s interview with the military academy, came and went and she never approached us about it. It never came up. The night before, the night of Thanksgiving, she left to stay over at her sister’s house. We reminded her of her appointment, but she just kind of blew us off.

Jme’s school counselor, Ms. Ross., sent an email to Wifey and me this morning to tell us that Jme had come to talk with her this morning in school. Her email said that Jme had come in specifically to ask if there was any way she could enroll in the military academy without talking to the two of us about it. When Ms. Ross told her that there was not way to do this, Jme joked with her about running away. Ms. Ross closed her email by inviting Wifey and me to meet with her in the afternoon to talk in more detail.

So this afternoon, Wifey and I went up to Jme’s school to meet with Ms. Ross in person. Ms. Ross told us a number of things that we already know: Jme is a great kid and very sharp; that this year she started out fine but that something had changed in the last few months; that she wants to chart her own course, even if it is a destructive one. She also told us some things that we did not know: that Jme had apparently gone to her appointment with the military academy recruiter without our knowledge, but that she had been turned away since she didn’t have the completed application with a signed permission slip; that Jme had said that she was “very unhappy” living with us, and that she wanted to go to the military academy in order to protect herself from her own bad choices that might result from her current unhappiness; and that she could not, and would not, talk to us about any of this.

My thinking continues to be that if she is not mature enough to come to us and have a conversation about what she would like to change in her life and why, then this is evidence that is not yet mature enough to make these kinds of life changing decisions on her own. If she cannot tell us why she wants a change, or that she wants a change at all, then what cause would we ever have to make any change, much less the one she might want? This is endlessly frustrating.

I am feeling very hurt by this. And frustrated. And angry. And rejected. Part of me wants to send her on her way and be done with the responsibility of her. But the larger part of me loves her too much and knows that we cannot simply give up on her and abandon her to wherever her own choices might lead. Even if that is what she wishes. I think she is feeling some of the normal exertion-of-independence feelings that teenagers have when they are on the cusp of adulthood. For her, perhaps some of her other life issues are exaggerating this.

I tell Stephanie all the time that we must be the adults, we must remain in control of our emotions, we must not let her choices get us too emotionally riled. It’s easier said than done, and I am often the one who needs to keep my emotions in check. Jme swings wide between being upbeat one moment, to being sullen and angry then next, and then suddenly back to wildly animated.

When she emerges from her room and from a bout of what I’ve come to call “mystery pissed,” it really bothers me see her bounce around here being all chipper (and fake?), telling overly animated stories of her friends or something that happened that day to someone at school, when apparently she is feeling a fundamental unhappiness at the direction her life is going, the directions we have helped to steer her. If she won’t share what’s going on with herself, I don’t really want to hear about some crazy thing she saw while driving home.

We have chosen her. We have made the decision to love her. And as we’ve told her, we will never leave her. We will never sever our relationship with her. If she wants it severed, she will have to take that initiative and sever it herself. Maybe this is what she is trying to do, but without her telling us about it, even that is a mystery.

We have tried so hard to make her a part of our family, but we may never be a part of hers.

Initiative

Today I met with the recruiter who led the orientation meeting yesterday. I wanted to give her some background information on Jme and share some of our concerns about Jme’s participation in their program. My hope was that, when I explained that Jme did not fulfill any part of the definition of “at risk,” the recruiter would tell me that they would flatly turn her down. She didn’t quite say what I had hoped.

She did say that the decision to enroll Jme in the program was ultimately ours. And of course we understand that, but we were hoping the academy would refuse her so that it would not have to be our decision; it would simply no longer be an option.

Here’s the catch-22: We have to sign the permission slip allowing her to join before she can have her personal interview with the recruiter. Once she is in the interview, the recruiter tells me that she would ask Jme why she wanted to sign up, and how she was doing in school. If Jme said she was currently enrolled in school and making progress toward graduation, then the recruiter would tell her that she was not eligible for the program. The recruiter also told me, however, that Jme could then turn around in that same conversation and say, “Fine. Then I’m going to drop out. Now can I join?” and she would suddenly become eligible again. I think that’s ridiculous.

Since we don’t have any guarantee regarding the outcome of this interview, we are not going to let her go in to it with a signed permission slip. So that’s not an option. Which means we are going to have to tell her no sometime between now and her scheduled interview on Friday. If she ever asks us about it, that is.

The application packet has to be completed before her interview. It has a fairly extensive list of things that need to be acquired: a physical, a TB test, a pregnancy test, a shot record, school records, etc. There are also other people to coordinate with. These things will take some time and some coordination to complete, and she has only a week.

As I’ve mentioned before, Jme is going to have to talk to us about this decision and explain her thinking behind it. I mentioned this to her tonight; “You know you’re going to have to talk to us about this, right?” She said she knew what she had to do. A cryptic response. I mentioned that there were a lot of things she had to do in the application packet; she asked me, “You don’t think I know what I need to do?” Okay. Fine. Let us know if you need anything along the way. See, my thinking is that she will not plan ahead, she will not get this done on her own, she will not ask us for help, and she won’t ever come to us to talk about this. If that is the case, then next Friday will come, and she won’t have her application completed, and she won’t be able to do her interview.

It isn’t that we are totally avoiding the subject or shirking the difficult work of confronting her about it, I just think if she really wants this to happen, she is going to have to take responsibility for making it happen. We’ll help as we’ve always done and are always willing to do, but she is going to have to take the initiative.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about how we can say yes to this request. I think she is fully expecting a “no” answer from us. I would like to honor her thinking and give her a voice and a say in determining her future (and surprise her along the way). Under what circumstances could we say yes? I think the only way is this: Tell her yes, she can go. But first, she has to finish her junior year in high school. That alone would put this decision off for another seven months, during which time her desire or other circumstances might change. It also removes the peer pressure of her friend/cousin who is, in part, talking her in joining up along with her. Apparently they have been making these plans together.

And if she is still committed seven moths from now, then at least she could be fully done with her current school, never to come back. She could go to the military academy and finish her last credits required and get her full regular diploma. Then she could go on to enlist in the military or whatever other route she chose. At least that way there would be a natural progression. I can’t imagine the alternative: after spending six months in this entirely new setting, she would not want to go back to her old classrooms, and her old bedroom and old chores and rules with us. No one would.

We’ll see what the week brings.

Tangent

Something’s been up with Jme lately. She has always had her ups and downs, but it seems as if she has been in a consistent downswing lately, and the level of interaction, the level of trust, and the level of communication between her and us feels like it is significantly lower lately. As Wifey and I have talked about causes, she thinks it correlates to the reemergence of MJ, who has never done anything but bring her down in one way or another. Today, he would never come around here, and she would never talk about him with us. But we’ve seen little signs here and there.

On Sunday, Wifey was asking Jme about her grade in Spanish and encouraging her to do some assignments that she hadn’t turned in the previous week. Jme was in one of those moods and throwing down some attitude. She responded to Wifey harshly by saying that she didn’t care, and that she was going to enroll in our state’s military academy. This was pretty much news to us.

She has talked about the military academy in the past. Once, before she had started counseling, she hatched a plan to run away when she turned sixteen. Her plan, as best we uncovered it, was to run away and join the military academy along with her cousin. Her sixteenth came and went and things were going really well at that time, so that’s all we heard about it.

This time around, we asked her a little about her plan. She told us there was an orientation meeting here in town on Wednesday. She wanted to go to the meeting with her cousin because it was their plan to go through this experience together. Wifey asked her if she wanted us to go. She said no, that it was only for youth, not for parents, and that this was the only such meeting. Of course, Wifey did some checking and quickly found that Jme was wrong on both counts. Parents are encouraged, and it’s one of a number of meetings coming up over the next few months.

She didn’t want to talk about it, but we also saw that she was suddenly feeling very anxious. Her anxiety was causing stomach aches and nausea. She said she was sick and certainly carried on as if she were. Wifey gave her some Pepto and some good mothering, but we also had a pretty good idea as to the root cause of her pains.

On Monday, I asked Jme about this meeting. She said she didn’t want to talk about it, and she was clearly in no mood, so I let it go. The next day, Tuesday, I asked her about it again. I told her that if she wanted to go she needed to tell us something about it or it simply wasn’t going to happen. She grudgingly came over to where I was, pulled up the website on my computer, and showed it to me. I told her she couldn’t go alone. Wifey had previous plans, so that meant she and I were going. She acquiesced, and we could tell that she felt better almost immediately. Where she didn’t eat a bite of her dinner and claimed to be too nauseous to eat, as soon as we talked and it was determined the we would indeed go to this thing, she bounced off from that conversation and started to look in every cabinet for something to snack on. She was relived to have a plan, to have something definite, and not have this big Conversation still looming in the undetermined future.

Today, she and I went to the orientation meeting. She has talked often about wanting to enlist in the military after high school. She has talked about college, and about trade schools, and about JROTC, but enlisting in the military is the only real consistent thing she has talked about. It holds some appeal for her. So when we walked in to the national guard armory, where the meeting was to be held, she was immediately wowed by the Humvee and other military equipment there (wonder why they had that parked inside so prominently?).

After a brief presentation, they showed a slick promotional film about the training, the camaraderie, and inspirational stories of kids who got their lives back on track after being in this program. It looked fun. It looked exciting. It looked like some kind of summer adventure camp. I think if I were a teen with only a tenuous connection to the life and people around me, I would absolutely want to go.

But a couple of things stood out to me during the presentation. First, basically the mission statement of the school states that it targets “at-risk” youth, and it goes on to define at-risk as either already dropped out of school, or in danger of not completing high school. Elsewhere in the presentation, an instructor claims that this is a “last ditch effort to get [these youths’] lives back on track.” Well we don’t think Jme quite qualifies as “at-risk,” nor is her life necessarily off track. And if it is, we haven’t nearly got to the last ditch effort yet.

At the end of the presentation, the recruiter basically said, Are you ready to sign up now? and gave the hard sell. Most of the students there were ready, and the recruiter nearly brow beat the one student who said he was not sure. The next step is an interview alone with the student and the recruiter. We’ve scheduled that for next Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. I’m not sure what is going to happen between now and then, but there must necessarily be a few serious discussions. The candidate is supposed to bring the completed application packet, which includes the parental permission slip, to the interview on Friday.

Jme’s best interest is our sole motivation. We want to do what is best for her, and what will give her the greatest chance of maximizing her potential in life. We have been very glad to see her do well in school. She maintains B’s and C’s, and she has been involved in after school activities and hangs out with a select few of her school mates outside of school. She has been showing all the signs of doing well there. We think she is absolutely on track to graduate next year and do whatever comes next.

One of the real selling points of her current school is that the vast majority of them, like 98% or something like that, are college bound. These are upper middle class kids whose parents value education and ensure that their kids do well. Those are the kinds of influence that we feel she should be around right now. The last thing we want to do is submerse her into a pool of “at-risk” kids with good drug connections. She’s had enough of that already.

And though she would have the opportunity to earn her GED there, we think she should earn her regular diploma. We have learned that military recruiters have a strong preference for regular diplomas over GEDs, and if she still wants to enlist, or do anything else, she should have a regular diploma.

We also recognize that Jme has not had enough of the parenting and mothering and functional family life that every child should have before tackling adult life. She’s never really had a mother, and her father was marginal at best. We think she could really benefit from being a part of an intact family and being loved by a mother for another couple of years.

These are our views. We want to know why she wants to make this kind of change and how she thinks it will benefit her. What does she think this program will do for her? Some of the conversations we will have over the next week will have to include her explaining this to us as best she can. I told her that I am keeping an open mind about this for now, but she is going to have to sell me on the idea, and that is just not the kind of thing she can do very well.

Neighbors and Blogging

I recently wrote a piece about my downstairs neighbors and the mutual exchange of noise our two households have been enjoying. Perhaps I over dramatized and it isn’t really that bad. Perhaps I didn’t over dramatize a bit, and their late night Red Bull fueled war game playing is really deplorable.

Either way, my main point was the dilemma of conscience I faced, knowing that my kids make just as much noise as their video games. I can’t bring myself to demand quiet from them while also asking them to live with the constant noise from above. And so I am prepared to endure a good bit of noise coming up though the floor if it means I don’t have to feel quite as much anxiety about the noise we’re sending down.

Now then, a weird thing has happened. I posted said piece in the mid afternoon. After work, our family went to a birthday party and arrived home about seven in the evening. And though our neighbors were home, there was not a peep to be heard from them. Neither did they have a guest, which has been an almost daily occurrence.

This made me wonder, is there any chance they read what I wrote, feel sufficiently bad about it, and are now tiptoeing around their apartment? I debated seriously about whether or not to publish that writing in a public space, but I figured the odds of them knowing about it and reading about it were sufficiently slim. But that evening I wondered if the sudden quiet and stillness was coincidental or a clear response to what I had written.

Mine is a small community, and though I may not know what the connections are, there are without a doubt numerous connections between us andour neighbors of which I am unaware. As I quickly scanned the list of contacts on my social network of choice, I saw several potential connections.

So I’ve removed that post. And now, in addition to agonizing over our noise generation, I am also feeling bad about having them read about themselves on the internet. Perhaps I shouldn’t worry about it. Maybe it’s all for the best. Either way, I’ll probably never know for sure, and what’s done is done.

This also has me thinking about blogging in general. What can I write frankly without the risk of insulting and alienating others? Should I take that into consideration at all? As we continue to make contacts in our community, it is inevitable that people will stumble across this space without my knowledge.

It isn’t my goal to piss people off. But maybe I shouldn’t worry so much if that is the result. How do I reconcile the value and utility of honestly processing my experiences in this medium (with a rant, as the occasion calls?) with my sometimes crippling sense of propriety. It’s got me thinking.

Change a'Comin.

Tonight I had a first conversation with the department head in the school where I’d like to teach next year. I got her name from a friend and called. We had a friendly, brief conversation. She indicated that the prospects were good for teachers in my field, that there are often openings in the district, but that there are currently no pool of teacher applicants in my area.

I’m confident that I can find a job teaching in town next fall, so my excitement doesn’t come from hearing about a promising job market necessarily. I guess I am more excited about the change that’s coming; about a new chapter of professional life. It’s excitement mixed with anxiety over how well equipped I will be when the time comes.

The Shack

With no family waiting for me, a truly unlimited amount of work to do at the school, and only a dark, cold shack to sleep in, it makes sense that I spend most of my time at the school. I wake up around 6:30 to a cold room where the fire has gone out hours ago, and the warmth has seeped through the floor and is gone. I jump up, squiggle my feet into my shoes, grab my coat, and walk to school. It takes about forty seconds to walk that far.

After the kids are gone for the day, and the custodian has cleaned and vacuumed, I stay at the school, usually sitting at my desk reading books or writing papers for class. I email, talk to Wifey, surf the internet, make a dinner usually consisting of a frozen entree, some leftovers from home, or a can of something microwavable. With an unlimited amount of work to do, my quitting time is dictated by my level of exhaustion. I fight the sleepies for as long as I can, but when I recognize it is a losing battle, I call it a day.

I put on my bib overalls and heavy coat, put on my headlamp and gloves, and head home. I walk in and close the door behind me, and I am plunged into complete darkness. There are no windows other that some decorative ones in the door, and those I have covered, not wanting to advertise to every passerby whether I am home or not home. I reach for my headlamp to illuminate what is directly in front of me, and immediately set to work on a fire. Within about ten minutes I can get a fire fairly roaring inside the stove. It takes a little longer than that to heat the rest of the building.

The structure itself looks a little abominable from the outside. It is about three feet off of the ground, where most cabins are built right down on the ground. It has an interior loft, so it looks very tall from the outside with no windows to outline a first and second floor. I have heard it described by another as a big outhouse.

On the inside, it’s actually pretty cozy. Standing in the middle of the downstairs, the room is sixteen by sixteen. If your back is to the door, there is a woodstove across the room in the left hand corner. On the left wall is a make shift table of particle board perched on two black plastic saw horses. On the right wall is a queen sized bed that Wifey found for free on an internet based community sharing bulletin board. It’s pretty comfortable really. There are no sheets on it, only my mummy sleeping bag, my down pillow, and a rectangle Coleman sleeping bag that I use as a final cover.

In the far right corner there is an aluminum utility ladder propped against the wall that provides access to the loft. Up there is more empty space, which honestly, I like. It’s minimalism to the extreme. I have a cot up there with a thermarest. I have slept up there a couple of times because the heat lingers longer up there than down on the floor level. The only reason I don’t do it every night is because the cot is not as comfortable as the bed. I’ve thought about moving the bed up there, but it would be very difficult to get the queen bed up that aluminum ladder by myself.

So as the fire begins to warm the room from twenty below, to zero, to twenty above, I stand right up next to the stove where the warmth first starts to come through. I usually stand there with a book, reading from the light of my headlamp (ironically, I have been reading The Shack while standing in the shack). I have a Coleman fuel lantern, but it is difficult to start in extreme cold, so I do without it most of the time. As I can, I start peeling off layers: first my coat, then my overalls. I take my pillow and prop it up by the fire to warm. I hang my sleeping bag from a nail I’ve put in the ceiling so that it can warm. And this process takes about an hour to get to acceptable sleeping temperature.

After reassembling my bed, and giving the fire a final stoke, I pull off my shoes and slip into my sleeping bag fully dressed in jeans, socks, and fleece pullover. I set my Timex next to me to function as my only alarm clock. Hunkered down, I read for another couple of paragraphs until sleep takes me.

In the morning, I can sense to cold through all my layers. I know I have to make the journey from this sleeping bag to the school as short as possible. When I finally muster the resolve, I spring from my bag, squiggle back into my shoes without bothering to untie them, put on my watch, grab my coat and keys, and I’m out the door, not bothering to build a fire as it will be eighteen hours before I return.

Only a time or two have I gone over there at a reasonable hour, built a nice warming fire, and spent the evening reading in the quiet. But those two times have been nice. It is relaxing in a way that being at the school is not. Though the school is more comfortable by far, I cannot ever truly relax there. I am always conscious of my movements being observed by others. I am always on guard. Only in the cabin can a truly relax, and I don’t do that often enough.