Thanks Janet.
Tonight's major drama is mostly my fault and I feel terrible about it. I made a bad judgment call and did something that I should have realized was going to totally set him off. I had managed to side-step or handle direct confrontations/power struggles with him all day without any blow ups. This despite his best efforts to pick fights with me.
Finally it's the end of a long difficult day. My own issues like medication side effects and cycling made everything harder, I am majorly frustrated with wife who set us all up by relaxing the rules while I was in the hospital, and I let myself get lazy and treat him like a normal teen who hasn't done what he said he'd done and so gets the natural consequences that he was already warned would happen.
Yes I should be able to dispense the promised and natural consequences for his bad choice at any time of the day but really - 11 pm is not the right time to take away most of his pillows because he refused to put pillow cases on them after being told he had to do so. Really, really bad decision on my part.
I am supposed to be the grown up. The one who is supposed to de-escalate things, not make them worse.
That doesn't excuse his behavior which included threatening me with his fists, grabbing me and threatening wife too. It certainly doesn't excuse his threatening me with the baseball bat he went and took out of our bedroom closet (didn't even know it was there, wife had hidden it) when wife got out of bed to come see what all the yelling was about.
The main reason the cops took him wasn't because of the violence. It was because he had finally retreated to his room and started beating on himself, sobbing and then just went silent. By the time the cops arrived (our daughter called 911 because she thought we couldn't get to the phone) we were concerned that he was feeling like hurting himself worse and he wouldn't talk to us at all. He refused to speak to the cops or get up from the floor until they got him in a come-along hold because he refused to say whether he had any weapons. They took him outside in cuffs. He still refused to answer them when they asked if he was going to hurt himself.
So they took him to the hospital.
I feel so bad for him, for us.