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If you were looking for oddities, you came to the right place. I'm an unschooling mom and writer living on the Canadian prairies.
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wild (but not uncultivated) musings of a Canadian unschool momHome | Archives | contact That Alien Boy Again1:11 PM - Jan. 24, 2007 - Add to the Wildness
We've been feeding Spazzerific small doses of vitamin B in hopes of settling some of his moods. He complains of not getting enough sleep, being constantly tired, and he wanted to do himself in again this morning. This is getting to be par for the course around here. I am resigning myself to it and making the required adjustments. And something actually worked today. While Breakneck nearly broke the kid's neck over his math ("Would you at least look at the page so you can see what I'm trying to explain to you???") I watched the Spazz suffer silently with tears and misery and quiet melodrama, and after a couple of questions, I said, "Let me try." Breakneck said, with a touch of belligerent frustration, "Why?" "Trust me," I said, as sweetly as possible. I took over and told the Spazz, "You need to know that you and the feelings are two different things. You're used to your feelings coming as a result of things you think -- like, 'Mommy's mad, I feel bad.' But now, the chemicals that are making your body grow are also making your feelings different. This isn't coming from you. Does that make sense?" He pouted, sulked, snivelled, wiped a few tears, and shook his head No. "Do you just not feel like the same person anymore?" Morose shrug of agreement. "Are you turning weird?" I saw the corner of his mouth curl upward a bit as he nodded. The thing that's wicked about this stage is, the kid goes from crying to laughing to crying at the drop of a hat. I could so totally toy manipulate him back and forth like a puppet right now if I had the same mean streak as the people I went to school with in junior high. Long story short, we talked a bit more about it, and I told him how even though Great-Granddad's brain didn't work right anymore at the end, I could still look in his eyes and see the same soul. "You're still you. You're still the same soul." He flopped over on me and sobbed. "I just want to die.... I don't want to live anymore." "That's okay," I told him. I'm familiar with those feelings. Out-of-whack hormones do that to a person. "When you feel like that, it's your body telling you that something's really wrong, it's missing some nutrients that it really, really needs. It's saying, 'Can't go on without that.' Which makes you feel like, 'I just can't go on!' So make sure you take your vitamins." I held my poor Spazz and just talked to him, and he did the entire rest of his math from inside my arms. I suspect it's been since he was two that I really felt that maternal and attached to the child, because the other babies came along and took away that focus. He's still my child, in spite of all the weird changes. He sat there, and I held him and let him do his math stupid and all over the page, but he figured his fractions (dividing 10 by the numbers 1 through 9, something he set for himself to do). He just needed some security and grounding. I held my boy and I realized I did something right today. And it was good for my heart. I have missed feeling connected to him -- and, of course, now that it's after lunch and he's moved on to a new subject, he's miserable again. So now I'm missing it again. He does have his redeeming points -- he came up to me as soon as I was out of my room this morning, wrapped his arms around me and said, "Here's your morning hug." So remind me I wrote this, the next time I want to kill him. Good grief, what a kid.
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