Heaven help us with our youngest.
Okay. This seems, initially, like it will be both a relief and difficult to face. It's one thing to have thoughts and feelings, but it is a completely different thing to own those thoughts and feelings by putting them into words.
My fiance's 2 boys came to live with us two years ago. I love both boys to death, but our younger one is making everyone in our family miserable. My fiance's relatives have all asked me how I handle the youngest, and they have also admitted that they have never cared to be around him. It makes me sad for everyone involved, but they are justified.
Our youngest is obscenely selfish, disrespectful, manipulative, a liar....and several other things as well. We have tried everything we can think of to help him, including therapy, but he only gets exponentially worse. He was 10 when he managed to manipulate the therapist. That was truly terrible.
It blows my mind that one 11 year old boy is able to make everyone around him miserable. My fiance is angry and frustrated all the time, our oldest is annoyed and on edge, I am constantly either aggravated or numb. Family members and friends dread visits with him. We are all at the end of our ropes. Sadly, we would rather keep him in his bedroom and out of the way constantly than try with him anymore.
I feel terrible to say this, but I cannot bring myself to put one person's happiness ahead of three people's. My fiance feels the same way. We either ignore him and three of us are happy and functional, or we continue to try with him, he continues to get exponentially worse, and we all suffer. We do not have the money for any kind of boarding school or military school.
Every day I go back and forth between completely exhausted and disgusted with our youngest and what he is doing to our family, and disgusted with myself that I would ever even contemplate giving up on a child. We are at our wit's end, and I don't mean in a Nanny 911 kind of way. My fiance and I, as well as several other family members, have come to the conclusion that there is something wrong with the boy. Surely there must be something wrong with the hardwiring in his brain for him to continue to act in ways that make his life continually difficult. Doesn't every child want love, help, and support? Why would one continually bring negativity upon himself and suffering to the family he says he loves, if he could help it?
At this point, though, no medical professional has been able to help, and some he has been able to manipulate, severely.
This is not something that I feel I can talk to my parents about. They certainly see the way the child behaves. It did take them a while though. As I said, the boy is very manipulative. My family would be very upset to learn that the family I am about to marry into is as emotionally unhealthy as it is.
I'm sure that we are probably terrible people for ignoring the boy. We only started this a week ago, and three of us are already greatly relieved and so much happier. We are all exhausted. It feels good to say these things, but I admit I fear judgement on this matter. I know that I never could have imagined a situation like this until I was in one. I didn't believe that situations like this truly existed. I attributed stories like these to extremely poor parenting. Now, I don't know what to think, and we feel that there is no help, only a light way way down at the end of the tunnel that is him turning 18 and moving out.
Oh, and let's top it all off with the fact that this child makes me not want to have any biological children; which my fiance and I were at one time very excited about. Can you imagine adding a baby into the mix with this boy? What if there is something wrong with the hardwiring in the baby? We'd be right back where we started with another 18 year sentence, minimum.
I'll end this by saying that I truly truly hope that there is at least one other parent or stepparent out there somewhere that can relate, or at least does not think the worst of us.
Heaven help us.
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Thank you both, sueu2 and
Thank you both, sueu2 and taushalove.
We did try to have him tested in two schools, but he managed to get them completely off track and convince them that his troubles all stemmed from his terrible home life. It was very difficult for us to navigate that. Whatever it was that he said to the school officials turned them against us. Both schools then began sending him to the counselor twice a week, and neither counselor would ever communicate to us what it was he was saying or what we might do to help the situation.
Terrible actions include, but are not limited to making up gross lies as to where he has been. He occasionally goes outside to play and disappears for hours. When we manage to get him back, he tells us that grown men were chasing him and trying to steal his bike, beat him up, follow him home. We find out in the end that he was in a child's house that he is not allowed in, and went somewhere with that child and their parents without asking us. He tells the parents that he has permission to go. Also, every time he goes outside, he has rules that tell him how long he can be gone, where he can go, etc. If we keep him inside though, he just has temper tantrums, destroys his room, scares me, angers everyone.
He seems compelled to lie over everything, from what he had to lunch to where he was outside. He is also compelled to argue. We try sitting him down to discuss school, grades, behavior, etc, and he will yell over us. When he starts that we stop talking and just tell him repeatedly to "Stop talking", and he only yells louder. The last time this happened, my fiance had to get up and clamp his hand over the boys mouth, while he continued to yell in my face, through my fiance's hand!
These are only two examples of what we deal with on a regular basis.
When he is punished, he tells the world that he is neglected, unloved, and emotionally abused. We regularly hear that he has told adults that we love his brother more than we love him , and that his brother gets everything he wants while our youngest is forced to live in a cold corner.
Only an hour ago we got him back after one of his famous disappearing acts. He was gone for 4 hours, and came home with us just as happy as you please, telling us all about the marvelous time he had and trying to convince us that we'd given him permission to be where he was as long as he was.
I sent away for information on a couple of military and boarding school options last night. Supposedly they offer payment plans. The grand total still comes out to around $22,000 per year though. It's tragic to our family that there do not seem to be any options out there for troubled children from less than wealthy families. I really did think that I would find a state program or something, anything really.
Your comments were a welcome relief this evening after our latest disappearing act, and I thank you very much for them. This is the first time in two years that I haven't felt alone. My fiance is very supportive, but not even he can understand how particularly difficult this is for me, as a first time step parent.