Still Thinking About It

No one answered at Carl's house again last night. Worrisome. He is supposed to be renting a room from someone. Why isn't anyone home? But then again they are young people, so who knows. It could be anything. I refuse to let myself obsess. (Not that I am really succeeding...but you know.)

I spent time last night trying to figure out WHY I was so miserable over Frankie.

Hubby, being the brilliant man that he is, suggested that I feel so bad because I feel like I and he and Brian are too wore out to do this again, and yet I am mourning the thought that I would never do it again.

You know that someone has hit upon part of the truth when it makes you start bawling.

And the dear, sweet man let my cry and patted my hair and said, "We just need a break. You need a break. But you know we will do it again. There will be another kid. It won't be soon, and we know that we can't help every kid who is or might be GLBT, but there will be another kid eventually. Even Brian will be ready to do it again at some point. It isn't over."

I dreamed about Frankie all night long. I kept waking up and trying to shake off the dream. I am not sure what exactly the dream was.

I think I just kept trying to tell people the story. I think I keep trying to go over it and make sense of it.

Well, that and I keep re-living what I have come to think of as the 911-night. I remember him slamming his fist over and over and over into that box of ... I don't remember what was in the box. The things were plastic; the box was plastic; the box was sitting on a cement floor; his fist was bloody and he would not stop pounding. How many times did he do that? I try to count in my memory, and I know that is totally unreliable. Was it five times before I said "You have to stop or I will call 911"? Was it ten times by the time I got to the phone? Was it twice that? How many times did he continue before Hubby walked out of the room to nod at me and tell me he had stopped?

And everything before and after that...everything he said that just didn't make sense. How much of it was because he went on respite and we went through all of his possessions? I think that did cause a great deal of anxiety for him -- but I also think that if we hadn't done that something else would have set him off.

If he were a three year old I would have grabbed him and held him tight and said, "I won't let you hurt yourself." But though he is short for his age (5'3"), he has the body of a fifteen-year-old and there was far too much power there for me to restrain. (That and it is against the rules, although rules alone are not that meaningful when someone is in danger. If I had thought I was strong enough to do it, I would have done it.)

I think in my dreams I kept saying to people, "He isn't a bad kid. I just can't keep him safe. He has to be someplace where he will be safe."

And I know the whole thing triggered another trauma, a time when someone I love was in need of psychiatric treatment and did something self-destructive, something that could have killed him before I got him the treatment he needed.

Only Frankie frightens me SO MUCH because he does not believe he needs help. He does not think that his rages are unreasonable. He thinks that the meds that he takes only cloud his thinking.

I am so afraid of what will happen to him when he is 18.

Will he still be too mentally ill to know that he is mentally ill?

And there is nothing I can do. I know that he is where he needs to be.

I just keep feeling bad.

And I am so tired of feeling bad, you know? I want to say to myself, "Self, it's time to shake and shimmy it off."*

And I always feel a little better after I write these posts, even after the ones I delete, and there are a lot of those. I think, okay, I've talked about it. I had (another) good cry. I've come to terms. Now I will feel better.

And then the next day I still feel crappy.

___
*Same Buffy episode. You may have figured out that I am a Buffy fan, but I always love movies or songs or TV episodes that capture those complex, mixed emotions. And "Something Blue" (Season 4) does such a good job of dealing with that phenomena when you are as much tired of feeling miserable as you are miserable.