Tim and I had, with practice, learned to control the worst of Jumoke's behaviours.  Our hope was that after the behaviours had been controlled, that they had disappeared.  Jumoke's week at Walt and Alex's house showed us that we had only put a lid on the boiling pot.  We were able to keep everyting inside the pot, but we hadn't changed the stuff inside the pot at all.

Going to Walt and Alex's house was, in essence, taking the lid off the pot.  We were disheartened and frustrated to hear of things he was putting the family through, mostly because it showed us that we had not really taught him anything.

I had asked Alex at the beginning of the week to not mention me or Tim or anyone in the family to Jumoke.  If Jumoke wanted to talk about us, yay!  If he wanted to call us, yay!  But I asked Alex not to initiate any communicatoin about us or to offer for him to call us.  We had told him he could call us day or night, anytime he wanted to.

I knew he wouldn't call at all. I also knew he wouldn't miss us and talk about us.  But there was a small hope that I was wrong.

I was not.

As far as Jumoke knew, Mom and Dad were completely out of the picture.  By Friday morning, Alex was wearing down and asked me how she could make him do the basics of what she asked of him. I had to sadly tell her I didn't know.  The control we exercised came from 4 years of trial and error and growth.  Other than keeping him right by her side and instructing him how to do each tiny thing and not letting him out of her sight, we didn't know of anyway she could start to get him to do as she said.  She has seven other children. Giving her days over to Jumoke were just as distasteful as having him do as he please with her and her household.

I am very familiar with that particular catch-22.

I was very concerned about his continuing to hurt Alex. I was grateful he wasn't hurting the children, but actually, I was shocked that he had the nerve to hurt a mature adult.  He smacked her hard in the bottom, and when she reacted in shock, told her "I just couldn't help myself."  He jumped on her body with his body when she was sitting down or standing up.  She picked him up once to hug him, and when she was lowering him, he dug his fingernails into her arms and scratched her deeply.  He would sit next to her on the couch and dig his toenails into her legs, scratching her.

She hated to consider that he was physically abusing her. After all, he was only an 8 year old boy.  But she was becoming weary of watching out for her body day after day.

No, he has not harmed me physically since the first year.  And then he was a smaller, four-year-old boy.  I had hoped that hurting adults was a thing of the past.  Apparently, without his daddy's oversight, it is still very much a part of his thinking process.

I was also very concerned about his lack of respect for Alex.  She could ask of him the simplest things, and he would just turn and walk away.  He also refused to obey me, but with consistent team work, sometimes involving Tim driving 30 minutes one way from work and often involving me standing right by Jumoke every minute of the day, we had come to an uneasy place where he would generally follow Tim's instructions when Tim wasn't present. It was always a fight, but we had days where Jumoke would do his chores or obey with less of a fight.

Lastly, I was concerned about the climbing into bed with the adults thing.  Our children often climb into our bed in the morning hours before wake up time. It's a nice warm cuddle time.  However, Jumoke has never participated in this.  Partly because we had to train him to stay in his bed till we woke up because of the havoc he wreaked in the house when up on his own.  But partly because he just wasn't interested.

To climb into bed with adults that he personally has no intimate or affectionate relationship with was concerning to me. I didn't know what it was about the thing that bothered me, but it seemed very un-Jumoke like, and not knowing what was in his mind bothered me.  It boded ill to me.

There were other things he was doing that were un-Jumoke like, and of course, he was exhibiting the same behaviours we saw consistently here at home.  But it was the things that we would not have characterized Jumoke by that caused us the greatest concern.

Alex and Walt were saying that they wanted to see this month of respite through, but they were feeling the tension. They were getting weary. Their children were beginning to act tired.

I decided to chat with Jumoke, asking about his week, doing the basic mother thing with her boy while her boy is gone off somewhere..."I love you. I miss you. How are you doing? What fun things did you do?"

And then I addressed some of the issues I was concerned about.  I told Jumoke that I did not want him to hurt Aunt Alex again. That if he hurt her body again, that Uncle Walt would pack him up and bring him down to Daddy and he would have to deal with Daddy about how he was treating Aunt Alex.  I told him as well that we expected him to join in and help with the chores and that he must quit ignoring Aunt Alex when she told him to leave the television alone or get off the computer.

I did not address the bed thing because I didn't see it as a disobedience issue. There were many areas of disobedience that I did not address as well.  I basically wanted Jumoke to know that Aunt Alex and Uncle Walt were keeping communication lines open with Mom and Dad and that we were aware of his behaviour and it was not acceptable to us.  Because of our ability to control him (somewhat), my hope was that he would back off just a bit and give Alex some room to breathe.

I got Alex back on the phone to tell her that he would either back off and start calming down or he would explode all over her house, depending on how he took my words.  Before I could speak, I heard a door slam and Alex said, "My word! What did you say to him? He's furious!"

I apologized.  I had a pretty good idea how the day would go. So I warned her and gave her some tips for surviving it.  I could tell by her voice that she was rising to the challenge.  After all, this woman has a lot of experience dealing with hurting, raging children successfully. Walt and Alex had pretty much decided they could not adopt Jumoke, but the door hadn't been closed entirely.  There might still be hope.

By that evening, the hope had completely died.  They were pretty sure they couldn't last even thru the weekend. Tim knew he needed to get Jumoke out of there. "Good friends shouldn't do this kind of thing to each other," he said, referring to subjecting Walt's family to our child.

(continued in Part 3)