Just read some old messages of mine - not here

[PatriotsGirl]

and realized just how many years I have been in turmoil with difficult child. I read messages I was sending back and forth with some one about my daughter being involved with people in gangs when she was 13. Just a reminder of the heck we have been through here...wow. Life really is peaceful with this not in my face anymore.

Not much of an update - she sent me a few pictures of herself over the weekend. She looks fantastic. Absolutely beautiful, really. Looks like she took the picture with a new cell phone, too. She claims it is a sticker on the old phone but that is not true - the back looks completely different. Why would she lie about having a new phone??

I don't understand. I thought she would look sad. Defeated. Crappy. I thought life would be so uncomfortable that she would be begging to come back home. She has not asked. Not once. She hasn't asked us for a thing except her cellphone (which I do keep on purely for selfish reasons - it is okay, I can admit that much and my husband has let it go because he realizes it does keep me sane.).

I just don't understand how she is getting by just fine. It really is true - we picture their situation to be sooo much worse than it actually is. I picture her living under a bridge, digging through garbage for food, etc. It doesn't look to be the case - at all. The picture was taken in a nice bathroom and she looked fantastic....?

 

[AnnieO]

Sweetie - that's one of the mysteries... Many of our difficult children seem to skate through... I don't get it, either...

 

[dashcat]

I think, in part, that they have a very different scale of what is ok and what isn't...what is happy and what is unhappy ... You would be miserable in her situation. A easy child would also. It is the paradox of what makes them difficult children.

Dash

 

[elizabrary]

Mine does the same thing. I think they are such good manipulators that they are always able to con their way into the next decent situation. I've always said Kat is nothing if not resourceful. My brother travels to China a lot for business and he hates it. He talked one time about how miserable my niece was when she went with him (she is 2 yrs older than Kat). I said you could dump Kat in the middle of a field in China and she would have friends, a place to stay, food and new clothes within 2 hours. It is a talent, too bad they don't use it for something productive. Just think if they used their charming ways to go into sales- they would all be millionaires!

 

[AnnieO]

I said you could dump Kat in the middle of a field in China and she would have friends, a place to stay, food and new clothes within 2 hours. It is a talent, too bad they don't use it for something productive.

I think Kat and Onyxx may share brains...

 

[PatriotsGirl]

It is definitely a skill. Especially since she has stolen from so many people and has been written off by many. She seems to keep making those new connections, though. I often said she would make a great lawyer, but she would excel in sales, too. She probably does, just not selling anything legal...I do still have my suspicions that she is a dealer or at least a middle man. Too many different phone numbers coming in and out of that phone for only a minute or two at a time....

 

[susiestar]

Oddly enough this is one of gfgbro's very strong traits. He can make friends even with-o speaking the language. At 14 there was that air traffic controller strike and he was supposed to fly from some friends in Mass to my aunt's in VA where my folks would get us a few days later (I was already with the aunt). My parents got held up a couple of days. Gfgbro always wanted to see Difficult Child so he changed his airline tickets to have a LONG layover in Difficult Child so he could sightsee. Of course he didn't TELL anyone - we spent several frantic hours trying to find him before we figured it out.

He has been all over the world, and lived in conditions that are pretty incredible -good and bad incredible. After he spent a season inAntarctica (where he actually met and had a short private chat with Sir Edmund Hilary, one of his heroes) he wound up on a cattle station or sheep station in New Zealand. After a month therehe was put mostly in charge while the owners left town for a few days. I thought it was a big joke when he first told us about it, but he had documents, etc... giving him legal authority while they were away.

Years later he went to India. No plan, no hotel room, nothing. He stayed a couple of days with friends of our family. The rest of the time he did what the locals did. Except for the days he spent on a bench at the bus station, sick as a dog because he mixed alcohol (that he smuggled in and could have been BEHEADED for in that area) and an antibiotic he brought in case he needed it. He stayed with a number of families that he didn't know while he was there. I truly admire the courage to take a trip like that and the ability to make friends that easily, even when you don't speak the language!

I didn't know that a lot of our difficult children had this talent. I just thought it was my bro, Know what I mean??

What is okay and normal and even desirable for a difficult child is so fundamentally different than it is for the rest of us. I don't know that any of us turly CAN understand their choices. The difficult children are included in that list of bewildered people.

 

[HereWeGoAgain]

My dtr has the same ability to make friends - she is very beautiful and can be quite charming - but as far as keeping the good ones and discarding the bad ones, and being able to "get by", she doesn't do very well at all. She thinks that she is street smart, but in actuality is quite gullible. She never seems to think that people might lie to her or take advantage of her despite tons of experience to the contrary (fractured fairy tale thinking!) She assumes that nothing will ever go wrong, never has a fallback plan or contingency, is incapable of learning from mistakes no matter how often repeated.

 

[Star*]

I don't know - Pats girl -

A lot of the things that I was so worried about when I said GET OUT - did happen. It was scary. He has eaten out of dumpsters, he has been homeless, he was bathing in the park - he was exposed to kids doing serious drugs, his biofather is beyond a bad influence and was arrested two or three times, he's been around temptations like theft, and things that we figured would have surely put him in prison for good, he's been in the hospital, suicidal, without support, without clothes, hit by a bus, hit by a car - had no one to take him to the hospital, arrested for miscellaneous things and didn't smart off to the police and told the truth, and the temptations that were sat right in front of him? To do all the wrong things? Drink, dope, be stupid and further ruin his life on his own accord? He didn't.

He did - managed to find a place to live, fix it up, he saved money and bought a car, is trying to get a license, will not drive that car until he does, has been putting his dog first and making sure she's taken care of, got rid of the friends who were into drugs, and tried to talk to the ones he felt were over the edge but stays away from them, has actually a good rapport with the police there, broke down and got foodstamps which put him in touch with schooling, and job applications, I mean it's on his accord hes doing things.....It's not how I would have liked it to go - but it's going. He's turning out to be proud of HIS life and that's more important than him being proud of him I wanted him to turn out.

 

[PatriotsGirl]

Yup, my difficult child has all those same traits....