So angry

I yelled at Brian this morning. More than once.

He starts school on Tuesday and he is not getting up in the morning. I don't think it should be my job to get a fourteen year old boy out of bed in the morning, and I also find that I am not willing to let him deal with the natural consequences of not resetting his time clock. (Falling asleep on the public bus and end up back in Our Small Town, nodding off in class and missing assignments.) So I have been waking him up.

At first I got angry because he would say he would get up and then just fall right back to sleep. So I kept going into his room and waking him up again, getting more angry each time. This, you may have guessed has been going on for more than a week. The past three days I have followed his dad's advice and not left the room until he is sitting up with his feet on the floor. That seems to work, until I find him 30 minutes later asleep on my bed or the sofa in the rec room.

Today I got really angry. I yelled, loudly. I used bad words.

After I found him asleep the third time I stood over him while he put on his shoes and socks and then took him outside. I made him walk around the block quickly, which involved pulling him at one point. And I lectured. I told him that this wasn't my job, that it was his job. That he should understand the importance of being able to be awake in the morning and he should be forcing himself to stay awake. I forcefully expressed my concern about falling asleep on the bus or in class.

He responded with the "I'm not doing this on purpose" excuse, which just made me angry again.

I told him that the next three days either his father or I would be getting him up early and making him take walks and stay awake. While I said this I thought about how much Roland likes to sleep in in the morning on the weekends and how he will probably SAY he will help, but he WON'T wake up and help. That might not be true, but right now it feels like it will be. I also thought about the work that I should be getting done and wasn't getting done because I was busy doing other people's jobs for them.

When got back I went into Brian's room and found the bleeping trombone that Roland bleeping told me he would return last Saturday and clearly didn't. So I put the fricative thing in the car, along with my penitent son, and drove the bleeping music store and tried to listen to the young woman with a tiny, soft voice while loud music was blaring from a huge set of bleeping speakers right behind me. I told her that I had touble hearing her and then did that thing that people who can't hear do where they speak really loudly, which is not because we can't hear but because we are trying to MODEL WHAT WE NEED. She smiled at me patronizingly and said something I couldn't hear. Anyway, I told her that they bill us automatically and could she please check to see if we had already been billed this month. She looked through their records while I stood in front of the fricative speakers wondering if she would think I had given up if I walked out of the store while she did it. She found out that they had billed us and went to talk to the manager, came back and said that they would give me a partial refund. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that is what she said, cause she gave me money.

I don't like the way that I behaved with Brian this morning, but I am totally out of other ideas.