How have we been? Better.. always better in different ways. I do really think Penelope has made huge strides when it comes to the bond between us. I’m so thankful for it. I treasure the times when she embraces it and we can really be mother and daughter. It gives me strength to work on me for a change. The problem with that though is her strength she gives me is not reliable. I shouldn’t use it. Because it causes me to be too connected, which in turn causes me to crash when she is crashing. Then I become engulfed in the flames. Well, that’s a bit dramatic.. haha. I don’t know how else to describe this feeling. I get too wrapped up. It makes me crazy and I can’t seem to see things too far ahead or remember things.
Okay, so I say things are better and I will explain. School is going better, compared to this time last year. We are doing more things together and Penelope is good about it. She appreciates me more. She is starting to take responsibility for things. Though, most of the time I have to talk her through it before she will acknowledge her responsibility in it. Her gut tells her to blame everyone else and act like it was out of her control. Most kids do that, sure.. but she is still learning cause and affect. Also, I think she still needs to work on her problem-solving skills. I think the issues she struggles with related to cause and affect impact these skills. She tends to look at all the hurdles as barriers rather than choices and opportunities. “I can’t do that because…” Instead of, “What are other options I can try?” She still takes things that belong to me without me knowing but doesn’t break them or hide them. She will tell me she took it and have a reason why that she feels is justifiable. So there is still work to be done there. She doesn’t claim things are hers when they are not. She used to do that all the time, I believe, as a way to pick a fight with me.
Overall, she is doing well. We both have had some emotionally draining moments the past couple of months… of course. It would be amazing if we hadn’t! I feel like I don’t manage through them as well as I use to. I’m much more sensitive to things now, if that’s possible! Penelope is more empathetic than she used to be I think, but I do have a hard time reading her to determine to what extent. She carries herself like most teenagers do, relatively aloof. But we talk about situations or if we see a movie with some social dilemma, I try to talk to her about it to get her opinion on it. She recently had issues with her friends at school. I know I don’t know the whole story and made the decision I didn’t need to. She wasn’t going to tell me. One day she went to sit at the same lunch table as her friends, where they all always eat, and she was told she wasn’t welcome and that her and that group was no longer friends. Have you ever had this happen to you? I have. I was pretty devastated by it. Penelope was initially, and sent me this really sad email about her world collapsing. I picked her up from school that day and we talked about it a little bit. I tried to not pry or try to solve her problem for her but listen. She didn’t really say too much, just that she had no clue why it happened. Which I didn’t believe but dropped it. Each day for the next couple of days she’d report that things were the same and she didn’t know why but she didn’t seem upset by it either. I told her 9 out of 10 times this stuff is all a misunderstanding and told her about my experience when it happened to me. Interestingly enough she listened and was curious about the situation. (A friend’s boyfriend was my twin brother’s best friend and would call the house everyday. He and I would talk when my brother wasn’t home to take the call, which was a lot. It didn’t occur to me that saying “Oh yeah, Greg told me that last night on the phone” in response to some juicy gossip she was sharing with a group of us in our English class would have been read that I liked her boyfriend. Oops.) Anyway, about a week later I started to ask that question “Did you find out what the problem is?” but knowing that she was just going to lie again, I said “It’s been long enough that it would have come out by now, so what was the reason?” She hesitated and said that it was a misunderstanding like I had said. One of the girls overheard a conversation Penelope was having with someone else but took it out of context. Told everyone that Penelope was spreading a rumor about one of them. But Penelope claims she was actually defending that person in the conversation. I wouldn’t be shocked if Penelope was the one who spread the rumor, only because the reason kids do that is lack of self-esteem and trying to get ahead. Penelope would be someone like that. But then I also know she ….appears… to be very loyal. Even keeping a secret for an ex-friend who a few years later started bullying her. Even though this girl had Penelope wanting to quit school on numerous occasions, Penelope still keeps that secret. “Because I promised.” However, it doesn’t matter. Penelope is back to being friends with her friends and what is important is that she worked it out.
The other emotional hurdle Penelope has been dealing with is reconciling with her Dad. It’s more of a starting over with him. The goal is to create a healthy relationship and not revert back to the way things used to be. She saw him at for the first time soon after Christmas Break began. Usually I tell her about something that is going to happen that will cause a reaction from her right before it’s about to happen to prevent meltdowns but I felt that she needed to know in advance. To spring that on her.. just didn’t feel right this time. It had been quite a while since she had seen him. She has grown quite a bit. Her initial reaction was good. She was happy about it, but didn’t flip out. But over the 3 days following…. Um..That night was fine. The next day she woke up okay but sad. Then that night BAM! She had what I was later told a bad panic attack. She couldn’t breathe, she kept going to the bathroom to throw up but nothing would come out. She cried and cried and just said “I’m not strong enough! I can’t do it! I can’t see him!” I asked her what she was scared of and she said she was scared she would become unsafe and do something bad. This didn’t make sense to me at the time.
I told her that it was okay if we cancel. He will understand (no he won’t) and will wait until she feels strong enough (no he won’t). Then she became upset with herself for feeling that way and started to sob “I’m so sorry Daddy….” She has a lot of guilt. So much guilt about her Dad. She shouldn’t but she does. I think she feels like she abandoned him, instead of vice versa. There is a part of her that feels like if she was still with him, he wouldn’t have made poor decisions he has made since she has been with me. It’s hard for her to remember that he was making the same type of poor decisions when she was living with him and she doesn’t have that kind of authority over him. The other thing, that her therapist pointed out, is that as part of her coping/healing with her past, she had built up a wall between her past and her current identity/life. And she has to keep them separate. Her Dad is part of that dark past that she is afraid to go back to. That’s why she felt like she would do something bad. Even though we all know that she was a victim of abuse, she holds herself accountable for it. We’ve worked on breaking down that image, she still will go to this mindset that she is a bad person who just does bad things. Anything that is bad that happens to her is because she deserves it. Her mother neglected and eventually left because she wasn’t lovable enough, or worth staying around for. Her father allowing that to happen and then perpetuated the message by never being him and having her cared for by different people who abused her sexually and physically. I still feel like I don’t know the extent of the abuse from him directly. Specifically around the pseudo wife she became. Sharing a bed from age 2 to 8, when she moved in with me. Seriously? If it was my other brother, I wouldn’t have the same concerns. But I grew up with George and know what he is. Okay.. I’m just making myself mad again at this point. It kills me that besides having had to suffer the abuse, she owns it.
So at the end of the night, early morning, we had decided not to have the visit. She felt calmer and supported. I didn’t tell her Dad. Not yet. She asked me the next day to call him and tell him she couldn’t see him. She was calm but sad. I told her I would. I called my Dad and asked him to do something with her and have a heart to heart. She needed her Papaw. After their conversation, and a commitment from Papaw that he would be at the visit/dinner, she agreed to go forward with the visit. She slept well that night. I did tell George what happened, when he called the day of the visit to make sure things were still a-go. When I told him, his response was “Uhh, okay. So what time should I be there?” As long as he gets to see her, that’s all that mattered. Jerk.
The visit itself was interesting. But Penelope’s therapist (Mrs. Insightful) completely explained it. Penelope was non-stop blah blah blah blah. And it was all about her, she just went on and on and also to an extent challenged him by making a point to tell him, for shock value, how she loves black, and vampires and wants to become one and wants to be Goth, but also wants to live in Japan or South Korea and go to college there and etc etc. To sum up what she said “This is who I am and what I like, take it or leave it!” Her therapist said it has to do with her identity. She was saying “This is who I am now and I’m not going back to the person I was no matter what you do or say!” It was an interesting thing to witness. George didn’t say much at all, not that she gave him an opportunity to very often, but when she did, he still didn’t say much. He was scared to do anything wrong and ruin his opportunity to see her.
After that, she did pretty good through the break and back to school. The next challenge was the school trip to Chicago. All the 8th graders each year get to go to Chicago for 3 days 2 nights. I think I was more of a mess than she was before that trip. A few times within the couple months leading up to it, she felt she wouldn’t be able to do it. But as the date got closer she became more excited and couldn’t wait. I was mostly concerned about her being in a big city with lots of chaos (130 13 year olds) and getting overwhelmed and not coping well with it. Her 6th grade class spent the same amount of time at a YMCA camp but her Intervention Specialist was there during the day so I felt like that was her safety net. Not this year. Then, two days before the trip, I found out that her assigned adult/chaperone was her 5th grade Intervention Specialist – who we despise. Also, around that time, I had a meeting with the school for Penelope’s 3 year IEP re-assessment to determine if she continues to qualify for services. She still qualifies, but the assessment result.. WOW. If you didn’t know this child and read this assessment, you would think she should be highly medicated and have a helper with her at all times – because she can barely function on her own. Her academic testing seemed a little below where I thought she was. For a child who gets As and Bs in most classes now, being below grade level on Reading and Math seemed a bit contradictory. Then the room observations – they were of Social Studies, which is her least favorite class, and Math, which is her smallest and most lax’d class environment. The observation notes made it sound like she needs to go back on her ADHD medication. Highly distracted and off task, grumbling when she didn’t get her way, and breaking rules without taking responsibility. Okay… then the Questionnaires related to behavior. There was one for me for my observations at home, and then one done by her Intervention Specialist at school. I learned in the meeting that the scoring goes 0-14, with 7-14 as average, 4-6 as below average and 0-3 as critical. My scores were 3/4/6/7. Their scores were 3/0/1/3. I was just like.. “What?” This part I believe upset me the most. They said that it’s common for the parent’s results to be lower because their norm is skewed. Okay.. I can understand that. They also said that they had to “judge her harshly” in order to get her to qualify. They never said “We fudged it so she can get services” but I questioned if that was what I was suppose to take from that, because they can’t come out and say it. But they also said that she definitely needs services and qualifies for them. I want her to have services but I felt very defensive. I mean, those scores… if that is where she is now, then what was she before? We talk about how far she has come and all but none of that is reflected in her assessment. All through out the year, I ask her Intervention Specialist “How is she doing? What are her biggest challenges?” And 9 out of 10 times the response is “She is doing good.
All those questions, shaking my foundation of how I felt where we are headed and where Penelope actually is, was not a good place to be when getting ready to send her off to Chicago. I was a nervous wreck the entire time. She called me a couple of times. She had some moments. I took no news as good news. Meaning she was busy having fun. She called me Saturday night and did this whiny voice “I miss you!>” It made me cry because it’s probably one of the few times I’ve actually missed her too. That might sound like a harsh statement but, if you know are life, you’d understand. It touched my heart how sincere her words were. It made me wonder how much she has grown emotionally. Is she really bonded with me? Does she really miss me? It made me think about the spending money I gave her and wondered if she was going to spend it all on herself, or buy me a souvenir. Not that I wanted her to spend her money on me, but the notion of it and what it would mean. Of course, she spent the majority of her funds on herself, but she bought a present for me, Grandma & Papaw, and her Dad. I will say she did call and ask if her cousin D (who she isn’t allowed to see since the assault) would like something that she had found because she wanted to buy it for him. I had to tell her that even if he would like it, she wouldn’t be allowed to give it to him. She just responded “Oh…” and moved on. Anyway, the gifts she bought everyone were definitely Penelope. She bought her Dad this skull necklace, her Papaw a coin with a heartfelt Irish saying, me a large yellow Japanese parasol, and then (poor) Grandma got a postcard. Grandma took it in stride. Penelope said she didn’t see anything that she thought Grandma would like. I will have to agree, she is hard to buy for. But I was a little embarrassed for her.
The next visit with her Dad was the weekend after the Chicago trip. Let me preface this by saying that the visits are suppose to work up to as frequent as once a month and we are already having 5-10 minute weekly phone calls on Saturdays. George strongly believes that I am bound and determined to sabotage his relationship with Penelope and all the limitations I put on their reconciliation is because I want to flaunt my power and control him. So, in other words, he doesn’t trust me. I can only tell him so many times that is not the case but he doesn’t understand that the limitations are to protect Penelope because.. why does she need protection from him? He didn’t and won’t do anything wrong. So the plan was for him to come around 6pm and he was bringing dinner (as I made it the first time and I’m not going to make that a routine). He had to leave at 8pm because of plans. Two hours is enough time for a visit right now. That isn’t his preference and I know that. He said he was going to leave his house around 5pm, stop at pick up this, pick up dinner and head our direction. I specifically told him NOT to come early. Do NOT come early. We may not even be home until 6pm. “DON’T come early.” We got home around 5:00 that day. I ran through the house and picked up. Around 5:15 I decided I was going to try to squeeze in a shower before he got there. Penelope was playing her video game in the living room. I got out of the bathroom around 5:45. I went to check my phone to see what time it was and it had all these missed calls from George and both my parents. My phone started to ring in my hand and it was George. I answered and he was like “Why haven’t you answered your phone! I am at the front door!” I said “You are early. Didn’t I say not to come early? I was in the shower. He said “I’ve been ringing the door bell!” I said “Penelope didn’t hear it I guess. I’ll send her down (to the front door) to get you.” I got dressed and came out and he was calm now but complaining that the food might be cold because no one answered the door. Penelope apologized. I told her it wasn’t her fault. “Dad wasn’t supposed to be here yet.” Don’t put this on Penelope.
A couple of days later, Penelope tells me she is expecting a phone call from Papaw. When I asked “Why?” She said “I texted him today and told him I wanted to talk to him tonight.” Okay, if it’s a Papaw conversation, than it’s a Papaw conversation. My Dad called me the next day and told me it was about George. How she wishes he was a stronger person and wanted to know why he is the way he is. She loves him but is mad at him for being the way he is. Why couldn’t he have taken better care of her and do things the right way. What I found out was, is that when Penelope opened the door for her Dad, he had been crying. From the messages and phone calls I had received that day, he had arrived about 35 minutes early and from what my Mom told me (because he called them which is why they were both calling me) that he was crying on the phone to her and saying things like “What am I suppose to do?? Go home??” Great…
Then about 2 weeks later, after having her weekly phone call with George, she had an extremely vivid nightmare. She felt like it was real and I ended up keeping her home that Monday. The way she reacted, I was concerned she disassociated. But her therapist said that her dreams can be just as real. She dreamt that her Dad had broken into our home in the middle of the night and tried to hurt us. He was going to kill us. He tried to sweet talk her into coming with him. She said I wouldn’t wake up. She took a long knife and cut his arm off and then stabbed him to death to protect us. She was devastated by the dream. She started sobbing “I killed my Dad!! What kind of person could do that!? I’m a bad person!...” It broke my heart. We had a good conversation about reality and dreams and how our brain is sending us messages. I took the dream as her feeling like with her regular contact with her Dad she is feeling conflicted about what “team” she is on. Because of the way things were in the past, George would do things to put Penelope in the middle and choose between him and I. She had a hard time thinking it was nothing more than her being a bad person and she was just acting very scared. She said she felt like something could happen. She felt like something bad was going to happen that day. She didn’t want to leave her room. It really shook her up. I kept her home. She slept and stayed in her room pretty much the entire day. By that evening I was able to get her to come out and hang out with me. I did send her to school the next day but talked to her teacher about Penelope’s concerns and just needed the routine and to keep an eye on her. She was pretty depressed the next couple of days but we had therapy that Thursday. Her therapist was able to talk to her about it as well and just give her some peace of mind that this is her brain dealing with her feelings and because she has such a vivid imagination, that was the way her brain made her take notice. Her therapist said that one way to see this dream is, her Dad and I in the dream really represent different parts of herself. She is asking herself what kind of person does she want to be? Someone weak and hurtful like her Dad or strong and dependable like her Mom? There are other ways to look at it but it’s common to have this question and this is the way Penelope thinks right now. Who is she going to turn out to be? What traits is she going to have, or want to have? I think that is a plausible interpretation. She said there are many ways to look at this dream. My concern of course is her feeling unsafe. The fact I woke up that morning and every light in the house was turned on and the condo door was locked, dead bolted and latched, which we hardly ever do.
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