difficult child 2 in Juvie

[rlsnights]

Long story short - I took his door off as promised. He blew up and roughed me up in front of wife who I had called and insisted come home so I wasn't alone with him. We called cops but he had taken off by the time they got here.

He came back several hours later. Will I take him to Gamestop to buy a game? I said - Why would I do that? He says It will be a game we can all play together. No, I said.

Next was wanting a curtain for his doorway. No, if you need to change your clothes you can go in the bathroom to change.

I'm going to watch Netflix. No, you have not earned that privilege.

I hate you. You (meaning wife and I) are mean to me. I want you to take me to psychiatric hospital where they are nice to me.

Uh, no. psychiatric hospital is not for a vacation from your family. You are welcome to call the intake line and discuss it with them.

difficult child 2 goes in kitchen makes a show of getting a knife from the drawer, takes the house phone apart and locks himself in the bathroom.

wife arrives home from work and we tell him he has to come out of bathroom. He is silent. We ask if he is going to hurt himself with the knife. He says I have lots of sharp things in the bathroom I can hurt myself with. wife says he has to open the door. difficult child 2 says he wants to go to psychiatric hospital and wife says No. difficult child 2 says you guys are joined at the hip and you both say the same thing and I won't come out.

I call cops. They come immediately. They inform him they are breaking down door if he doesn't come out and by the way they have their Taser with them.

5 minutes later he is handcuffed and in squad car having mouthed off to the cops. Cops and us discuss whether he goes to psychiatric hospital or Juvie.

Since he had mouthed off to cops, told them we were mean to him and he wanted to go to psychiatric hospital where they were nice to him and he had gotten really aggressive with me earlier (grabbed me and shoved me against kitchen counter, threw a full plastic water bottle and hit me in the head) they took him to Juvie charged with assault.

His hearing is Monday afternoon and they are not releasing him in the meantime.

Probation officer told me at the hearing it will mostly be about what services like wrap around our family/the kid needs. I plan to tell them we need help getting him to school among other things.

 

[DDD]

I hope this results in additional support services for your family. Hugs DDD

 

[Castle Queen]

I personally think you and wife did a beautiful job handling the situation. Hopefully valuable help will be forthcoming.

 

[JJJ]

You and wife did a great job.

I would recommend going through the whole house and locking up all sharps, drugs and fine breakables.

Also, enjoy the weekend. It is very important to grab the respite while it is here. Go on a date with wife, take easy child/difficult child out to dinner or let him have friends over for a small gathering.

 

[HaoZi]

difficult child 2 says you guys are joined at the hip and you both say the same thing

Proof positive that you're not just on the same page with him, but that he's noticed it and has realized he can't manipulate you against each other.

 

[Nancy]

I'm sorry it's come to this but it was predictable. Something had to happen to de-escalate the situation.

FYI when we took difficult child's door off her room we did allow her to put a sheet up for privacy. We were still able to come into her room to check at will but it did give her a sense of privacy that she needed. Little good it did in the end because she is now out of the house and doing drugs.

Nancy

 

[susiestar]

Please take pictures of any bruises on anyone that he has caused, of anything that he damaged. Try to have them available when you go to court.

I am glad that the two of you presented a united front - that is a huge step for wife and is what difficult child needed to see. Do something nice for wife and elt her know you really appreciate her standing firm with you.

This had to be hard to do, but hopefully it will be enough of a wakeup call for him to straighten out. if not, keep calling the police when you need to. It is great that they are keeping him until he sees a judge. Some places won't do this, esp if it is over a weekend.

Make time to do some fun/recharging things while he is gone. Esp with your other child. You all need this!

 

[klmno]

difficult child 2 goes in kitchen makes a show of getting a knife from the drawer, takes the house phone apart and locks himself in the bathroom.

wife arrives home from work and we tell him he has to come out of bathroom. He is silent. We ask if he is going to hurt himself with the knife. He says I have lots of sharp things in the bathroom I can hurt myself with. wife says he has to open the door. difficult child 2 says he wants to go to psychiatric hospital and wife says No. difficult child 2 says you guys are joined at the hip and you both say the same thing and I won't come out.

I call cops. They come immediately. They inform him they are breaking down door if he doesn't come out and by the way they have their Taser with them.

5 minutes later he is handcuffed and in squad car having mouthed off to the cops. Cops and us discuss whether he goes to psychiatric hospital or Juvie.

Since he had mouthed off to cops, told them we were mean to him and he wanted to go to psychiatric hospital where they were nice to him and he had gotten really aggressive with me earlier (grabbed me and shoved me against kitchen counter, threw a full plastic water bottle and hit me in the head) they took him to Juvie charged with assault.

Lord help you....you have a clone of my son. Probation only served to enable him to become worse because all efforts were so blatantly obviously talling "the parent" to change with threats of charges to me that difficult child milked it for all it was worth and felt justified on top of it- ie, it gave him a sense of entitlement on top of everything else. He is now spending the majority of his teen years incarcerated in juvie prison where he's only getting worse and feeling more resolved to a life of incarceration all the time. I hope you all get a good PO and GAL- assuming one will be assigned since it was an assault on you- and a good therapist, that will surely be ordered and you will have to follow all that therapist's recommendations to the T or you could be found in contempt. It's a shame, but sometimes that approach only widens the barrier between parent and child and is really counter-productive in the long run. I'm sorry. If I had it to do over, I honestly don't know what I'd do but I do know that I look back and see many, many things I wished I had done differently.

by the way- my son isn'typical teen spending so much time in juvy prison over the first incident liike that- he had many tdo's to psychiatric hospital while on probation then the second time he pulled a knife on me, I basicly demanded they do more than probation and whacko therapist with- a behabvior contract that would do no more than negotiate what I'd do differently if difficult child would quit breaking the law, they refused to let him go to the Residential Treatment Center (RTC) I had lined up and sent him to state Department of Juvenile Justice. It's a no-win.

I soooo wish a better outcome for your family.

 

[tiredmommy]

Sending {{{hugs}}}. I know you & wife are strong but I'm sure your hearts are broken too.

 

[Star*]

I agree 100% with J3 - If he's using this or even thinking of it? It's a thought - and he could act on it. Scissors, tools - letter openers. We had to do the same thing. Really stunk - but better than being stabbed. Then? Just when I thought it couldn't get any weirder? Dude shot me with a bow and arrow. Fortunately for me he was a sorry shot.

I also agree with Castle Queen - you did handle this wonderfully -

Sending hugs for Monday.

 

[KTMom91]

Take this time to relax and regroup...sending hugs for Monday.

 

[rlsnights]

Thanks to everyone for their support and suggestions.

As a matter of fact, tomorrow is my 55 birthday. Not really the circumstances I would have liked but we are going to go out to celebrate with easy child and the kids godmother whose birthday was today. It will be a little sad because difficult child 2 won't be with us but I also think it will be a relief that we don't have to compensate for his presence either.

Unfortunately, we know all about securing the house. Had to do that with difficult child 1 about 10 years ago now. We were really hoping we wouldn't have to live like that again. It is really tough because I am an artist and work with scissors and fine knives and wife is a woodworker now with a garage full of sharp and dangerous tools. Having to put everything away and lock up will be very frustrating for me since my studio is a corner of the family room and there's no way to lock my stuff up without taking it somewhere else in the house. Grrr. And I have a show coming up. Naturally. I honestly don't know what we're going to do and I know I can't get it all done by Monday night. So we will have to prioritize.

My brief description left out a lot of stuff. I was trying for something less than 5 pages.

One of the things I left out was how bizarre a lot of his behavior was and how irrational he seemed to be. He was functioning more like an 8 to 10 year old than a 15 1/2 year old. Very, very concrete thinking.

When he asked about going to GameStop for a game it hurt my heart more than almost anything else. He knew he was in trouble but he didn't really understand why he was in trouble and didn't know how to fix it. So he pulled up something he knew I had once said that he thought would please me (playing a game all together) thinking that would fix things. Instead of the expected approval of his olive branch, my gentle response "why would I do that?" was clearly a rejection of his idea. He had no idea why his olive branch was "wrong". He looked crushed and it was just sooo clear to me that he did not get anything at all about why it wasn't an appropriate suggestion let alone recognize the self-serving aspect of his idea.

After the officers got him out of the bathroom we discovered that he had made himself a nest in there. He had a sleeping bag in the bathtub, several pillows, some food, a change of clothes. I guess he really thought he was going to hole up in there for a whole day or something.

The cops clearly got that he was not thinking straight. There's not many 15 yo boys who are 5'5" and who have never been in trouble their whole lives who will try to stare down a cop while being handcuffed. The officer he was trying to stare down just shook his head and asked difficult child 2 what he thought he was doing trying to win a staring contest with a cop. difficult child 2 told the cop to wipe the smile off his face and if he wasn't in handcuffs he would show the cop who would win! The cop just stood there and looked at difficult child 2 with a sort of amazed look on his face until they finished cuffing him and then told the other officers to take difficult child 2 to the car. The whole exchange was ludicrous.

I talked to our psychiatrist this afternoon. She is terrific and we talked for at least 30 minutes. I told her that it seemed like difficult child 2 cannot make sense of his world when he's like this. Nothing connects to anything else and he lashes out because he can't figure out why things are happening the way that they are. She totally agreed with me. From his perspective random punishment is being handed out just like he is a rat in a cage and someone is shocking him off and on no matter what he does. He's scared and angry and disoriented and feels like he has nothing to lose by lashing out at his tormentors. The tormentors being the people who are trying to help him understand what's going on and why he's in trouble. She said she really hoped someone from Juvie would call her and I gave her the numbers I had for them. She said to go visit him so he knew we weren't abandoning him but that we shouldn't drop the charges. He's getting the appropriate consequences for his behavior even if he doesn't understand why it's appropriate. She said she's hoping we are offered wrap around services and in home behavioral support so we can try to figure out if there's something about our family patterns that is making things worse. She said she suspected that there might not be and the only thing that was going to work was Residential Treatment Center (RTC).

We went to see him this evening. Because I am the "victim" we had to meet in a cubicle with a glass partition between us It was so hard. He sat there huddled in this huge sweatshirt and alternated between silent tears, sullen complaint and hurt uncertainty. He hardly spoke and when he did he wouldn't get close enough to the mike so we could hear what he said without having to make him repeat everything. He said he hadn't slept the night before and he felt terrible. He's cold, the food is terrible (he said he wouldn't trust the meat as far as he could throw the animal it came from and almost smiled when we laughed), there's nothing to do, they have "rubber" pencils (this said with disgust by my artist son), there's another kid who just bangs over and over on his door, they moved him in with the 11 and 12 year olds that are "too young" for him. Sounds like he said a lot when you write it down but that is pretty much all he said in a 45 minute visit and most of it was in response to our questions.

wife is wanting to wimp out. She is worried that this is a bad thing to do "to him". She won't quite come right out and say we should drop the charges but it's clear that's what she's thinking. I told her I'm not willing to do that, at least not until we go to court on Monday and find out what's going to happen next. We need help and it seems like the only place to turn for it is through Juvie. I'm worried that we will get to the point where they are ready to offer us the services we need only to refuse us the services because we aren't eligible for MediCal.

That's what happened with difficult child 1. The school district returned him home after 18 months of therapeutic foster care/SED school placement with promises of wrap around support services. And we got absolutely nothing. Not one single counselor visit - nothing. Oh you don't have MediCal? We thought you had MediCal. Oh we only serve people with MediCal. No you can't pay privately (not that we had the $$). No there isn't anyone else who provides these services in the entire county. Gosh we're sorry, someone should have told you.

I am going to bed. I feel really sad right now. Up until tonight I was fine. The VP at my son's high school called me back about his being absent. She said "you must be devastated" and I was like - no, not really. Maybe we'll finally get the help we need. This may actually be a good thing that this has happened. "oh" she says, obviously unable to imagine such a thing. What I wouldn't give to live in that world.

Peace,

Patricia

 

[HaoZi]

On the artistic tools, would a too-heavy-to-move locking toolbox be an option? From Kobalt drawered toolboxes to something like the ones you carry in the back of a truck depending on what size stuff you need in them, or even a bolted-down locking gun cabinet that's big enough you could put a shelf or something in instead.

 

[rlsnights]

Yes - if I had the $$. My tiny cushion this month was eaten by difficult child 2's on-line gaming splurge.

And I found out yesterday that we will be paying $130 a day for difficult child 2's stay at Juvie.

P

 

[HaoZi]

Ouch! I don't get how they do that.