Part I: Escalation in the Evening

Before I go further, let me thank all of you who have expressed sympathy on the death of my kitty. I appreciate it.

The past 24ish hours have been pretty intense.

Some of you have read the "raw" version of this on the private blog, but now that a few hours have past I will try to give a more coherent account.

So you already know that after hearing about the cat, Frankie, for whatever reason, was absorbed with his own concerns. There has been some friendly debate about why he was not more sympathetic to the sadness the rest of the family. Let me go on the record saying I don't know exactly why he was not more responsive to our emotions, but I don't think it was a morally culpable sort of selfishness.

But whatever it was, it was just the beginning. He started out anxious because he could not find a toy that his mother had given him (the knight) and he really, really wanted to play WoW. The computer finally made it long awaited trip home and Frankie sat down to have all his expectations for how the game would go completely destroyed. Per our previous agreement, we pointed out that it was upsetting him and that he needed to stop.

The next few hours were simply bizarre. Frankie remained in an extremely agitated state. He was upset that we did not understand that the game did not upset him and that the game was racist against some characters because those characters could not do things he thought they should be able to do. He was frantically upset that he could not find things that were important to him. He was concerned to make us understand that WoW did not cause his frustration, it helped to vent it and without a way to vent his frustration his anger would build up and he might act out violently.

He spoke of how much he preferred living at his first foster home where he could shovel manure to work out his frustration, breath fresh air, and go to a school where they taught him things. And speaking of the school, he hates it, he won't cooperate, he won't do the homework, and he is won't take in his communication book. Because it is a stupid school where he can't learn anything. He called both his social workers to demand to be moved.

And it just didn't stop. Hubby, Andrew, Brian and I mostly let him rant. Every now and then I tried to talk him down, but mostly we just let him storm around the house yelling about which ever topic was upsetting him at the moment and waiting for him to calm down.

Hubby thinks that this behavior was a direct result of our setting limits on WoW -- that everything he was doing was to convince us that he had to be allowed to play in order to vent his frustrations and that if he didn't this is what we had to look forward to. I'm not so certain.

In any case, it was extreme and exhausting. I wrote the social worker an email telling her what happened and then I sent everyone to bed. That usually works for Frankie. Being alone in his room usually calms him. Not last night though...