Boy Trouble...

Yelena has had a "boyfriend" for a couple of years. He is a boy who she met at camp so (conveniently) she only saw him about four weeks a year. We will call him Sam.

After the summer she met Sam she came home with a very jam packed suitcase. When I was throwing everything into the wash, I found a note from her to Sam. I think she never gave it to him because she still had it but she wrote it. It said something like: "I will meet you after dinner behind the dining hall and I will show you mine if you will show me yours." I think that was the moment when I first started thinking about contraception or (an even better solution) getting her tubes tied.

Last summer when she went to camp she told me that she was going to kiss him. I said "Nothing more than that OK?" She agreed. When she came home I asked her if they had kissed and she said that they had and she was very happy. I thought it was all very sweet (not sure about innocent though).

Last summer, I picked her up at camp and she was upset about Sam. She asked to use my cell phone to call him and I did let her have it. And, yes, I listened to the conversation... Apparently something had happened and she wouldn't really tell me what it was but when she spoke to him, she wanted to talk about this "thing" that had happened. She said it was all a misunderstanding and he hung up on her. She called again, they talked for a few minutes and he hung up on her again. She called again and he didn't answer the phone. She tried a few more times and then stopped.

In the middle of the winter she decided to give it another try and called him again. This time he spoke to her and they made up and they were all lovey-dovey again. He sent her a Valentine and a birthday card and they talked on the phone frequently. She seemed happy.

A few months ago she told me that they spoken and he had broken up with her again. She was crying and distraught. It made me very sad and I asked her to tell me the whole story. What she told me was that she had told another girl in her bunk (let's call her Lauren) that there was another boy that she really liked. I asked her who that was and she said it was Ethan, who she had met in second grade. She hasn't seen him since fourth grade and she is now in eighth grade. Apparently, Lauren told Sam that Yelena had another boyfriend and Sam was angry so he broke up with Yelena. Yelena was sure that Lauren told him that because she wanted him for herself. Yelena also told me that Lauren had tried to kill her and was then sent home in the middle of the summer. Where the truth lies is anyone's guess.

So apparently, Sam was talking to Lauren again and she encouraged him to break up with Yelena. Then Sam told some of his friends at school what had happened and all his friends told him that he should break up with her so that was what he did. I told her that she didn't want a guy who breaks up with her because his friends tell him to.

Yelena is in eighth grade and at the end of the year they have a "Moving On" ceremony. The ceremony is at 6, then there is a dinner at 7 (her teacher said that this means pizza) and then a dance until 10. About a month ago, Yelena came home with the very happy news that someone had invited her to the dance! I asked her who it was and she said that it was a guy in her science class named Nick (all names are changed to protect the guilty). She said it was no big deal as she has known him since 6th grade. I asked her what she was going to wear and she said she wasn't sure. She said that she was "consulting" with her best friend trying to help her figure out her outfit for the ceremony and party. Yelena is a tomboy who wears nothing but basketball sneakers, blue jeans and her father's T-shirts which she steals with alarming regularity. Her best friend is what Yelena would call a "girly girl" and always wears really nice clothes, is interested in fashion and looks very put together. Yelena is going to help her get dressed?

The other day, I was at a school event and I asked her teacher about Nick. She said that she had never heard of anyone named Nick. She asked another one of the teachers who accompanies Yelena to her science class (which is a mainstream class) if she knew anything about Nick and she also said that she had no idea who he was. I am starting to get worried here.  I asked them to see what they could find out. A few days later, I got an email from her teacher that went like this:

We found out about Nick and he is a very popular 8th grader who plays football.  Yelena says hi to him but Kathy (the other teacher) has never seen them talking to each other.  I do not know how accurate this is that he asked her to the dance.  She has never mentioned it in class or to any other kids.  

I talked to the staff at school and they said 8th Graders do not typically ask each other to the dances, they go in groups.

I am starting to get very worried here.  I had told a friend about the situation and she asked what I was going to do and I told her that I was just not going to mention anything else about it and see what happens.

Well, tonight my husband and I were doing the dishes and Yelena had already gone upstairs. She came back into the kitchen a little while later and said that she was depressed. I asked her why. She said that she had been upstairs and the phone had rang and she answered it. I have to say right here that the phone is my husbands business phone and normally no one ever answers it including my husband. She said that she answered the phone and it was Sam calling to tell her that he was sorry and that he wanted to get back together again. She said that she told him that he had had his last chance and it was over between the two of them. She was very proud of herself for telling him off and my husband cheered her on. Yelena told Sam that she was in love with someone else anyway. I asked who that might be and she told me that it was Nick. Nick the Phantom...

I had the feeling that no such conversation had taken place and I went on line and looked up the phone calls to that number (Oh, the marvels of modern computer science!!) and sure enough there were no calls received or made on that phone in the past few days. So she did not talk to him tonight.

Such an elaborate story and I have no idea how much or if any of it is true at all. She is also only 15 so I have the feeling we are in for a lot more of this....

Friday at the Ranch

Friday is my day off. Yelena came home carrying a new bag today. It is a black and blue small duffle bag with a Nike insignia on it. She may have had it for awhile - but I am not usually home when she gets home so I am not sure how long she has had it. When, I saw it I said "Oh, you have a new bag." She said "Yes" and I asked "Where did you get it from?" and she said "I forgot." She also has a gold chain necklace hanging out of her pocket which does not belong to her either. 

To Be Continued...

The Mourning After...

Well, this is the thing: my sweet adorable baby girl who I love beyond reason, stole an axe.  This was not a small little hatchet but a large regular sized axe that could cut down a tree (or whatever else which I shudder to think about it.) Axe as in "Lizzie Borden took an axe..." She stole it out of our neighbor's shed (which I thought was locked but my dear baby girl has a way with locks.) My husband spoke to our neighbor about this today and confirmed that it was his axe. He said that our neighbor was "concerned" about safety issues. Yeah, so am I. She has a way with locks and also a way of knowing then to strike if something is left unlocked and unattended for two minutes or less. And she can find whatever she wants in two seconds flat and be out before you know she was ever gone.

When she was a toddler, we would go to the beach and I would turn my head for a split second and she was gone. I would find her later half way down the beach sitting on a stranger's blanket eating potato chips. You know the expression: "May you be in heaven a full half-hour before the devil knows you're dead. Kind of like that.

The thing is that this happened in October - probably a good six months ago and we never knew. So our anger seems a little misplaced right now. Anger? That's not it exactly. There is really a sense of sheer terror about this situation. That axe was sitting under the snow for months. I am sure that she probably totally forgot about it and if we spoke to her about it, I'm sure she would say something like "that was months ago and you are not allowed to talk to me about this now."

Yelena is not self destructive. Her idea of a suicidal act is breaking a pencil in half and making scratch marks on her arm. I don't really think she would intentionally hurt my husband or me but I am also not sure how well she knows her own strength. The only time she actually did hurt me (she threw a paper weight at my head and I had three stitches) she was totally remorseful and very sorry. She is, however, destructive. Everything she touches breaks. I used to call her "my little destructo-matic."

How Long??

My husband and I had built a wood "sculpture" in our back yard a few years ago to disguise our compost pile of leaves and dead branches. Sometime in the fall, I realized that the sculpture had been destroyed. We had a Workaway (http://www.workaway.info) guest from Germany who was wonderful and spent a lot of time working on our garden - I asked her about it and she said that it had been intact the last time she saw it. We were puzzled about who had destroyed it. My husband had suggested an angry neighbor. We didn't think that Yelena had the strength, resources or reason to destroy it.

I do have to say in her defense that when we asked her, she did remove the stone fire circle and pile of kindling with a wooden "teepee" over it that she had built in the back yard. She told us she was just "practicing her survival skills that she had learned at camp." Note: She spent a year in residential treatment for firesetting.

Today was a beautiful sunny day and one of the first days that I really felt that it was time to go out into the garden. Serendipitously, husband and I both wanted to work on rebuilding the sculpture so I went to Home Depot and bought a bunch of 4" nails and dug the hammers out.  I went to look in the woods in back of our house for any additional wood I might use and on my way back, I saw an axe strategically placed behind a tree where you wouldn't notice it from the garden. I knew the moment I saw the axe that Yelena had in fact destroyed the sculpture. My heart sunk. Where did she get an axe from? My husband went and hid it in our neighbors garage thinking that it might belong to him. I had also found a mat knife(mine) and my garden shears (that had been missing for awhile) while I was in the woods.

Yelena came outside and asked if I would buy the soundtrack from Frozen for her - her new favorite obsession. I said what I had been told to say at the Attachment Institute: "I have to talk to Daddy about it and as soon as we both feel close to you." We had been talking a few days ago with her therapist about restitution (the restoration of something lost or stolen to its proper owner, recompense for injury or loss) for an incident that had occurred a few months ago that had landed her at a hospital CBAT for two weeks.

What had happened was that Yelena had broken into the room of one of the students that we host from foreign countries that come here to learn English. Yelena had taken her iPad, removed the cover and threw it away and then erased everything that had been on the computer. The student was enraged (as she had every right to be) and started to yell at Yelena who immediately went upstairs and put on her karate outfit and came back downstairs ready to fight. When my husband tried to intervene, she told him that it was none of his business, shoved him and knocked him down and then hit him. He took her to the ER when she had calmed down a bit. I was at work at the time but met them at the ER where she stayed for 24 hours before they found a bed for her about an hour away from us (it was a holiday weekend, naturally). Our three students were gone the next morning.

So, today, when she asked me to buy her music I reminded her that she still needed to provide restitution for that incident. I know, I should not have brought the subject up but I felt that we were all forgetting about it. Not that everything else has been wonderful. She took a shower and changed her clothes two out of five days that she went to school this week. She drew on a lampshade. She left the kitchen a mess several mornings and evenings, etc. We had discussed this before and I had suggested she write her student a letter apologizing. She asked me what she had to do and I told her that she should think about it and I was sure that she could do this. She asked another couple of times and I mentioned the letter. She said she couldn't write a letter because she didn't know the woman's address and then because she couldn't write in Turkish and I said she could write it in English. She stormed off.

When we came back into the house, she shoved a folded piece of line notebook paper at me. I read it. The letter said: "Dear F. This is a letter of apology. I am sorry about what happened. Best wishes, Y.
ps The turkish coffee was great. LOL" I said that I would have to talk to Daddy about it. She screamed for my husband to come "right now" and shoved the letter at him. He put the letter on the table and walked away. She screamed for him again. I said something about attitude and tone of voice. She went after my husband and he reappeared in the kitchen saying he was going to the Y to work out and left. I didn't get to the part where I was going to compare a $600. iPad and the loss of about $400. week in income from the students to a short slightly sarcastic note.

Yelena and I were standing in the kitchen. She crumpled up the letter into a ball and there it across the room. She reached for a jar full of pencils and pens and started breaking them all in half. I said nothing and left the room to go upstairs. I went in my bedroom and sat down at my desk. She followed me upstairs and came over to me and opened up all the bottles of her medications which were sitting on my desk and dumped them onto the floor. I went towards my bed to get my purse, put my phone, my kindle and my keys in it and tried to get to the door but she closed the door and was blocking the exit with her body. I lay down on my bed and started to read. She came over and unscrewed the lightbulb in my reading light then picked up a book I had been reading and started to rip it to shreds. I said nothing. I didn't react, I kept on reading. I have a shelf where I keep a bunch of photos of all of the kids - she started taking them out of the frames and ripping them up one by one. I said nothing. I didn't react. I kept on reading. She came over to me and grabbed my kindle from me. I stood up and wrestled her for it. I didn't get it but I made sure it was turned off and went to leave and she blocked the door again. I asked to be let out. She said "I have you trapped and there is nothing you can do. You are powerless." So I said, "No, not really" and went and picked up the phone and said "I can call 911". I dialed three numbers at random and acted like I was waiting for them to pick up. She said OK and gave me back my kindle. She was still blocking the door so I went back to the phone to dial 911 again and she said "OK" and moved away from the door. I had my purse so I walked down stairs and put my shoes on and walked out the door into my car. I drove for a few blocks and then called a friend and asked if I could come over.

I probably got to my friends house about 6 or 7 pm. We talked had dinner, watched a movie. I came home about 11 pm. All the lights were on in the house. The kitchen was a mess - she had made french toast for her dinner and didn't clean anything up. She had been in the bedroom that our sons used to share - lights were on, books on the floor, trombone lying on the bed, ouija board on the floor. I went upstairs. No further damage to our bedroom but nothing was cleaned up. I went into her room to check on her and she was fast asleep. I leaned over to give her a kiss and she stirred, looked at me and asked where I had gone. I told her and then said "Good night sweetheart, sleep tight."

The week off between Camp and School is often the worst week of the year for us.

My husband was going to take Yelena to NH for a few days. Leaving Wednesday and returning Saturday. 

Tuesday evening, she got his cell phone (figured out the code or saw him punch it in). When confronted, she admitted that she had it and gave it back. Then she asked if she could still have her DVD player because she had been honest when we asked and had returned it immediately. She had been watching pornography.With Yelena, she fluctuates back and forth between Disney princesses and hard core pornography. I said that we needed a little bit more than an apology and we decided that for doing more chores around the house, she could have it for 1/2 the time she usually gets it for.

Wednesday afternoon they went to NH. My husband called me Thursday morning and told me that when he went to breakfast this morning, a woman stood up (crying) and said she had lost her iPhone and she was very upset. Something went "ding, ding, ding" in his brain and he went to look for Yelena and yes, she had the iPhone and had been up all night watching pornography. Apparently, she also removed and lost the "custom" iPhone cover and changed the security code. She said she didn't know anything about the cover (it was found later that afternoon). My husband had called to ask me what he should do and I said that he should pack her up and come home. This is the place where I have been teaching art for a week for several summers and it doesn't put me in a good relationship with them. It didn't put my husband in a good relationship with them this morning…

So, I just got home (I work late Thursday night). Gone are my plans for my two days off alone. In any case, my husband didn't tell her that the iPhone case was found so we are planning to tell her that she needs to repay this woman for the case which we are setting at $35. (she just got $15. for getting three teeth pulled). I just spoke with her and the conversation ended in her saying "why do you hate me so much?"  I said that I didn't hate her and I wasn't angry but I am sad, frustrated, confused and frightened. The woman could have called the police and pressed charges and over $250. is a felony. And yes, I am angry I suppose but the fear of what will happen to her and the frustration that we are not getting anywhere is far greater than the fear at the moment. I don't think I know what to do…

Our attachment therapists response:

I am so sorry you all are going through this.  It's so hard on so many different levels, not the least of which is you not getting the break you had been looking forward to.

So much you're handling so well.  You're emphasizing the sad, scared and even shame that go with the anger.  You told your husband to bring Yelena home.  You're not yelling at her.  The only thing I would add is it sounds like you're still talking and explaining too much.  You don't have to ask her anything, you don't have to explain anything.  She knows.  It overflows her shame which she exposed when she asked why you hated her so much.  She knows you don't hate her.  She was sharing her shame.  Bring her home, keep her quiet, have her work really hard to earn privileges.  She just let you know that she needs to work harder to earn privileges.

Also, get away the next two days as much as possible.  Do everything you planned.  You don't have to fix cooked meals for Yelena now.  If you're like most of us you have plenty of stuff to make sandwiches, stuff in the freezer to heat up, plenty.  Keep your plans for a 2 day break!

The next day:

I feel that we are at a stalemate here. Yelena knows what she is expected to do and she is doing nothing - actually making it worse in some ways. I am not doing anything for her but being polite and giving her her meds. My husband feels like if he talks to her he is going to kill her and he left the house yesterday and today for long periods. She is making a huge mess all over the house and breaking every rule. 

We host several foreign students and she took one of our students computers twice yesterday - I don't know what she was looking at. One time, I went into my bedroom and she was sitting at my desk looking at this woman's computer. I know she is trying to get right under my nose and make me scream and yell and take some kind of action but I haven't done anything. She hasn't gotten anything either. Yesterday she said it was such a boring day and she hoped we would do something more fun today and I said I would love to but only if I feel close to her…  

Of course, she told me that she has "gotten over" the incident in NH and has "moved on" and suggested that I do the same. She says the problem is that her father yelled at her, etc. and it's all our fault. "Why did you have to adopt me? I was happy with my birth parents. The only people who really care about me are my birth parents. You should have left me in Russia, etc. etc." 

She's cooking food and throwing it out, leaving plates full of pizza crusts all over the house, scratching wood tables, cranking up the radio to unbearable levels, wearing her father's clothes, and the list goes on. She also said yesterday "So are you going to keep me a prisoner until schools starts?"
The tension is building to such a point that I feel that something negative is going to happen. I think that she thinks she can hold out as long as we can. I'm fine but I have to go back to work tomorrow and I am afraid of leaving my husband here with her alone. We are planning to go out to dinner tonight by ourselves. I wish we could do something neutral like find a respite program for her but of course it's Labor Day weekend… She wants to end up in the hospital and I don't want her to. She also told me yesterday that she has spent almost all of her life in institutions and she knows I want to send her back to Germaine Lawrence (where she spent last year in a residential program for fire setting). I told her that I didn't send her to Germaine Lawrence to start with and I prefer having her home with us.

The next day:

Everything has turned around and I think it's because we stuck to our guns and did what we were supposed to do 100%.
We went out to dinner by ourselves Saturday night and left Yelena at home alone (a first!)  Her dad has left her alone most of today and yesterday (a first) while I have been at work.

Last night when I came home from work, she was definitely at that point where she wanted to pick a big fight with me, attack me, have me loose control and be able to flip out herself. She did something she has done before - she broke a pencil in half and then drew the splintered part across her wrists and her arms making lines across her arm saying "I am going to kill myself" and then did the same thing on my arm (she drew blood) but I didn't say a thing and then she pinched me really hard on the other arm and also drew blood and I didn't react at all. This was the point where it could have escalated and she would have been out of control but I think that once she saw that she wasn't going to get to me, she started to calm down.
We ended the evening by her asking me to read her a story before she went to bed which hasn't happened in a long time. She wanted TinTin not a fairy tale. And when I came home from work today - THE KITCHEN WAS ALL CLEANED UP AND SO WAS THE LIVING ROOM (more or less)! It was a real switch around. Of course, she also broke into her dad's locked office today - she went in throughout the window (who says this child isn't clever?) but she didn't get anything. Yesterday, she actually stole the whole TV set! Aside from that, her whole attitude has changed. It was night and day. My husband had explained to her earlier that she owed $25 for the iPhone case that she destroyed and she gave him the $10 she had and she has started earning the rest of it (she took out the recyclables tonight and cleaned the kitchen after dinner) and I read her more of TinTin before she went to bed. She said that she worked so hard today (she has no clue) that she wasn't able to clean her room but she will do it tomorrow.

Basically, I did not react at all to her and my husband just stayed away when he felt he couldn't bear to be around her.

It's so amazing. I really feel like she was headed toward being hospitalized and she turned it around totally. My husband had the crisis team all set to come tonight or tomorrow morning. Yesterday, she asked me "Why do you and Daddy hate me so much?" and tonight we were both telling each other that we loved each other and I asked her if she knew that Daddy and I will always love her no matter what and she said: yes, she knew that….

The next day:

Maybe I was a bit hasty to declare a unilateral victory...

When I woke up this morning, Yelena was already up and when I walked into her room and asked what she was doing, she said that she just finished cleaning her room. She had mostly cleaned it up. Still, it's unusual for her to be up that early... When I was looking for some clean clothes for her, I found a metal box that had been in the back of a locked closet. I realized she had been in a particular closet in our bedroom that was way off limits. I also looked in my other closet and realized she had been into a bag with my mother's jewlery in it that had been in a bag in a box underneath a whole pile of stuff. I found the jewlery later in another part of the closet and she claimed she had not taken anything, just looked at it. She was probably up early this morning hiding her loot. Plus one of our students said that she was missing a gold necklace that had been a gift from her mother and my husband had found her in the student's room yesterday walking out with a box in her hand. That plus the fact that she broke into his office yesterday through the window gives me reason to pause.

She has start working to pay back for the iPhone case and she did clean her room, take a shower, clean the kitchen and living room. I don't really understand the stealing.l She thinks it's OK if she gives back what she stole or denies it. I'm not sure if she is getting back at us or has no idea why she steals. My husband wanted to put a padlock on our bedroom door but I think that just makes her want to try harder to get in. I need to rethink my strategies for hiding things. She has been in EVERYTHING probably when we left her alone in the house. On the bright side, she didn't burn down the house...

We were both really upset this morning. He is convinced he is getting ulcers over this. He is searching her room this morning while she is at school and I am curious to see if he found anything...