December 12, 2008 The past few years have been difficult for me but they have been especially difficult for the kids. When I left Stuart, because he was still working out of town every single week, we both knew that I would have to take Erica with me. But Stuart told me that I was not leaving him alone in that house and Mikey didn't want to leave, he was too busy being pissed off at me. So, against my better judgment, I let Mikey stay there with Stuart. In reality, I should have made him come with me. Having a vehicle and so much time on his own, the trouble he got into is still with him today. He still has a court case that is a felony charge that they are dragging their feet on. That was about two years ago now and he still doesn't know what's going to happen with it. He's had to pay probation fees, A LOT, he's had to pay restitution but I don't think any of that has done him any good at all. He just picked up a wreckless endangerment speeding ticket. Doing 110 in a 60 MPH zone. He's not even 20 yet. Yes, he's doing good work wise: great job, lots of responsibility, he loves it. He's living on his own after doing a sort of "learn how to be an adult" boot camp with Kevin and me for about 6 months but he's still doing the stupid and dangerous shit that he always has. I still don't believe the boy will survive to be of legal drinking age. I've joked to Kevin about taking a life insurance policy out on him....sadly enough, it was only half jokingly. There would be no other way to pay for a funeral at this point. How fucked up is that, that I have to worry about that? I don't have to but with him, it's just a bad intuition. Which I hope, is me being super super wrong and paranoid but I've felt that way for many years. Mikey is still not happy inside his head and inside his heart. All that rehab that he went through didn't help solve the problems, it just helped him stop the drugs for a little while. But he's dabbled back into the stuff. Not cocaine, which was his problem, but other crap and it's a short slippery slope from certain things to that one thing he still fights against. He's got so much potential but there is nothing more I can do for him as a parent. I tried to get him to talk about the past, his early years before Stuart and I got him. He still does not trust ANYBODY. Nobody. And he refuses to even try to trust someone. He's still looking out for number 1 and he's not even doing a very good job at that. As for Alix, It's been almost 2 years since I've seen her. Two years. Her sweet Sixteen is this December 28. And I'm not going to be able to be there. I am so frustrated that she lives so far away that once again, MONEY is the fucking issue. I'm tired of that. I miss my girl more than I can even think about. To make it worse, Nathan calls and wants me to fly out for her birthday. I told him that unfortunately unless he paid for the plane fare, there just was no way I could afford it. No matter how much I scrimped and saved. It just isn't there. And then he turned around and told Alix that I just didn't want to come, that he had offered to pay for my ticket but I refused. The man is EVIL. And Erica. She hasn't been the same since Mikey's drug dealers broke into Stuart's house one night and completely trashed the place because Mikey had stolen quite a bit of cocaine from them. She has serious separation anxiety from Stuart being absent much of her developing years and she still comes and checks on me every 15 minutes. Being out of her site sends her crazy. She lays in bed and worries. She is constantly getting up and asking me to make sure I wake her up in the morning. Constantly worried that I will fall asleep in my chair while I'm working. She has worries that she shouldn't. She can be carefree and act like a kid most of the time but she knows immediately if I'm upset and she starts hovering like my mother. I joke to Kevin that my mom has a plant because I swear she acts just like my Mom would. It's highly disconcerting to me, that she does this. We're all trying to be as frugal as possible so instead of running the electric heat, we are working our asses off going into the woods and cutting up wood and stocking it and using the wood burning stove in the living room. Unfortunately, this does not do much to really heat the house up. So, Erica told me that she is going to ask Santa Claus to bring her two electric blankets, one for her and one for me. I feel like a fucking complete and utter failure as a parent. Last October, in 2007, Stuart quit traveling to stay home so he could have a chance to have Erica during the week and be an active part of her school and all that stuff. That was pretty difficult decision for me to let her go. But she wanted to go back to what was familiar to her, Raleigh is very different than Sampson County. This past September, she received all failing grades on her progress report and I was absolutely furious at Stuart. He had been struggling since the beginning of her fourth grade year and when I sent her to him I told him that she needed a tutor, ASAP because she was having a lot of trouble with math and comprehension. A week later, Stuart decided that she should come back to Raleigh and be with me and Kevin during the week. So we enrolled her into a better school. But she was still struggling with the work. I mean, 4-5 hours each night dealing with homework. Finally, I asked to have her assessed and she placed in mid-second grade math and end of third grade reading. No wonder she was struggling so much in 4th grade. She lacked basic fundamentals. We made a really difficult decision to place her back in third grade. I felt horrible about it and cried and cried but she has adjusted wonderfully, she has no real problems with her homework and indeed, received a perfect report card and progress report. She sees a Math tutor once a week. She is great and really cares about Erica. It seems to be working out very well. I can see the maturity level in her catching up to where it's supposed to be (they've done a study on the frontal lobes of kids with ADD/ADHD and those without and they have found the kids with ADD/ADHD lag behind 2-3 years in social skills and things of that nature, until they hit puberty and they catch up with their peers) and she finally weighs over 55 lb.! Since she started taking medications for the ADD/ADHD, she hadn't gained not ONE pound in almost 4 years. But in the past year, she's eating better and that's a relief. She's still the smallest kid in her class even though she was held back a grade!!! She feels a lot more confident and can interact with the kids and feel at least on the same level. That's a good thing.
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