Long Weekend Update
Labor Day weekend was jam-packed full of activities. It was very tiring. I know this may disturb Guy to read this, but part of the stress was having his father visiting from out of state.
My own father has mellowed out quite a bit with old age. The last time he tried to physically discipline his adult child (me, shoving) was more than a decade ago. I have a good relationship with him, and he's also great with Sunny.
Guy's father may have gotten worse. I don't know. Guy remembers him as a really great dad. I know for sure that he successfully imparted the value of hard work and staying out of jail. That seems like kind of a low standard, but way too many parents don't make enough effort in that area.
But my father-in-law is always putting people down. He puts down his ex-wife, his daughter and his son. He builds me up, but I'm sure he's putting me down behind my back. In fact, he sort of does it to my face, with back-handed compliments. He told me, "I have to hand it to you, I didn't think you had a lot of maternal instinct but it turns out you're a great mom." If I had even half an ounce of his regard for his judgment, I'd be insulted, but I had no problem ignoring it.
He's always talking about what a loser his son is, and what a great move Guy made marrying me, because I rescued him from being a loser. After you tell a "joke" like this about fifty times, it stops being funny and turns into an unhealthy obsession. I married my husband because I love and respect him, not because I'm some kind of freaking missionary. Then he'll switch to compliment mode and tell Guy how great and successful he is, not like his sister, who's such a loser, and he's so proud of the way Guy turned out and depressed about the way his sister turned out. You see the pattern? Every compliment is an excuse to tear someone else down. He'll talk about how puzzled he is about why his daughter has such low self-esteem -- oh, was it something he did? -- and I have to bite my lips each time. If he was this way when they were growing up, it's a miracle either of them had any self-esteem at all.
Again, I don't know that. I do know his personality changed a lot around the time he was divorced. I'm hoping it changes again soon, because as he is now, he's pretty hard to put up with. And I don't trust him with Sunny. At one point after an outing, he said, "You've got a lot of patience -- I felt like hitting him with a blunt object". Typical back-handed compliment. It didn't come off as funny a la Bernie Mac (by the way, I really liked his show and was sad to hear about his death). It just came off as mean-spirited. Yes, Sunny's attention-seeking and boundary-testing behavior can get annoying, but there are so many more positive things about him. For the first time he meets his grandson, can't he set aside the negative? It's not like Sunny is having screaming fits or setting fires, he's just abnormally persistent when he wants you to play Uno with him.
Luckily, my mom was around most of the weekend as well, which took some of the weight off my shoulders.
Again, I just have to hope that he starts forming a more stable image of other people (and himself) and stops this wearisome good guy/bad guy game he's always playing.
In non-father-in-law news, Sunny is doing well, but he's been wetting himself more during the day. It's never a lot, so it's probably going undetected at school. He says he does it on the way to the bathroom because he needs to go so bad he can't make it all the way to the bathroom. I've reminded him again and again, don't wait until you really have to go, go before... but I think some of it is due to anxiety and is beyond conscious control.
After school, he's getting reminders every 30-60 minutes to "drain his tank". Even if he says he doesn't need to go, I ask him to just go in the bathroom, assume the position and count to ten. Sometimes I hear a flush, so it works. I'm also buying him a vibrating watch from a bedwetting specialty store. I'm going to set it to off every hour as a silent reminder to excuse himself at school. From Googling around it seems daytime wetting is often associated with ADHD... kids get such a tight focus sometimes they forget about their bladders until it's too late.
His behavior has been mixed at school. I talk to his teacher a lot. He does the same thing to her he does to us: follow us around like a shadow and constantly asks for attention. The short attention span and attention seeking are getting him some bad behavior marks, but I'm confident the teacher is holding him to realistic standards. We're working on a 504 plan. As long as he pays attention, his academics are great. He gets concepts more quickly than most of the other kids, and she has to compensate for the fact that he often finishes his work before everyone else.
She says he's popular with the other kids, which I expected. They get exasperated with him sometimes, but really like him because he's outgoing and always has fun ideas to share.
He got a very good behavior mark yesterday AND had dry underpants! Yay! If he gets at least one other good mark, he gets his usual weekend 30-minute video game allowance.
I'm kicking his swimming lessons up to twice a week. This is more for my benefit: I'm going to do some water aerobics and laps while he's taking his lessons. He can take or leave his lesson: what he really loves is playing in the kiddie pool afterwards.
We had another interesting talk about race in the car. It's a subject that hasn't come up for a couple weeks. He was asking about Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln, so they must have been talking about them in school. I told him that Martin Luther King was an important African-American leader, that African-American was kind of like another word for black, and that Sunny was also African-American. He said "No I'm not", but it sounded tentative. I know it's a statement he didn't really believe, he just wanted to hear my reaction. I just said, "Yes you are" and moved on with my explanation.
He wanted to know where they each were killed and why they were killed. I told him that bad people, racists who didn't like black people, killed Martin Luther King. He said, "then I guess they wouldn't like me!" I told him that he didn't have to worry, because we didn't live near any racists, and I'd always keep an eye out for them. If there were racists around us, we'd have to move to get away from them. He asked if we could move back to his home state next to his foster family, because there weren't any racists there either.
I didn't react much to that statement. I know he has a utopian vision of us and his foster family all living together in the same house. Once, they joked about moving to Georgia, and he got very excited and hopeful. He doesn't want to leave us and go back to live with them... he's more ambitious than that! He wants to live with both families at the same time.
And I know saying "there are no racists here" is simplistic, but practically speaking, around where we live, any white people who dislike black people are rather lackadaisical about it. The more energetic ones moved away decades ago.
As I've said before, I don't want to have any long serious talks about race and racism and being multiracial until a) he's familiar with a wide range of African-Americans in real life and has positive images to counteract the negatives b) he feels OK about being black. Not great (that's asking for too much right now) just OK. I think we're progressing fairly well towards both goals.
When we were visiting his foster family after the viewing, one of the older daughters did say one depressing thing, although she told it as kind of a joke. She said that when she was out with Sunny in grocery stores, white people would give her dirty looks and black people would give her the thumbs up.
It's odd for me to put myself in that kind of frame. I'm hyperaware when it comes to race, but I'm also semi-consciously blind to it. If I worried about how people fit me into the racial hierarchy all the time, constantly scanned their faces to see what they thought of me, then I'd go completely nuts. So I really have hardly any conception of how other people view me. I've shut down that part of my social perception. In a crowd, I can't tell when people are staring at me or giving me dirty looks or treating me like the background or viewing me positively, unless they come right up to me and tell me. So I really couldn't tell you what your average Dekalb County-an thinks of me with Sunny. Other than people think he's really cute, of course.
Finally, I'm trying to cut down our grocery bills and cook more often. I already cook a lot, but I buy lunches too much. I signed up for Mealmixer.com and so far it's looking pretty good. With Guy doing shopping and cleaning, I'm spending about 30-40 minutes each morning cooking breakfast for all of us and preparing lunch for Sunny and myself, and then about 30-60 minutes for dinner. It also keeps me on the South Beach diet. This summer I've been eating too many meals at my mother's. She's a ridiculously good cook and makes the most amazing desserts (English style banana custard, French tarte tatins, Indian gulab jaman). I have to cut down on the sugar more and save the desserts for once every few weeks.
Sunny's diet is low-sugar but not low-carb. I cook a regular low-carb meal and give him only a small amount of rice/bread/potatoes. Then when he finishes his meat and veggies, he can eat as much extra rice/bread/potatoes as he wants (which is usually a humongous amount). His special favorite is white rice with soy sauce. And then he gets a dessert of either fruit or plain yogurt with sugarless jam. He eats a bowl of cereal with soy milk for breakfast, plus whatever we eat, plus extra cereal if he's still hungry.
I don't know if this low-sugar diet is really helping with ADHD, but it can't hurt, and I'm sure it's going to help with the dentist bills.
Oh yeah, and politics. I have such a deep lack of interest in hearing about Palin's family. Policy-wise, she's a horrible person. Obama's speech was good, and I need to get back to doing more volunteering and voter registration. That's about it.
Finally, thanks again to all the people who commented and/or offered advice about Sunny's situation and his baby brother. I wish I was better at responding individually to each comment, but I really do appreciate them.
Foster Care System Perspectives
