I haven’t finished the story of n’s admission to the hospital last Friday, or the story of his time in the hospital. I will leave that for another day and just skip to the news today (Thursday January 27).
Category: Family
Fame
Claire doesn’t get a lot of space in my blog. She’s succeeding in school, learning and growing. It isn’t all rosy. She feels anxiety and stress, but I see her life flourishing.
She has been co-writing a play with her friends Caitlin and Jamie, and they applied to produce the play at the 2005 Winnipeg Fringe Festival. They call themselves the Angry at Apples Company. The play doesn’t have a name yet. I don’t understand the rules, and it involves a lottery. They were drawn yesterday, and they are in. Claire is planning to take credit as a co-writer, and to produce and stage-manage the play. As I understand it, she is not planning to act. I don’t know much about the play, and Claire isn’t talking. But she hasn’t had the Spanish Inquisition yet. I don’t know if she expects the Spanish Inquisition …
Breakdown Coming
N continued on the same course for another two weeks since I last wrote about him on January 9. The more drugs he did, the more things went wrong. The more things went wrong, the more drugs he did. He called me asked me to drive him to the hospital last Friday (January 21) and he was admitted to one of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry wards. I don’t think I can deal with everything in one post, and I will talk about what has happened after he left CFS care on January 6, through to noon on Thursday January 20 in this entry.
Benjamin
My niece Carly, Frank and Jan’s daughter, has delivered her son, Benjamin David, born January 17, 2005. Carly was my parents’ first grandchild and Benjamin is my parents’s first great-grandchild. Congratulations to Carly and her partner Dave. Congratulations to Frank and Jan, the first grandparents in our generations of our respective families, and to mom and dad – great-grandparents. Photo courtesy of great-aunt Teresa, my sister. The proud grandfather is hoping to take grandson on his first deer hunt at about age 4. Or perhaps just skiing in Beaudry Park, hoping to see a deer.
Another Year
When I last wrote about n., (Dec. 15) he had gone from trying to show me that he could live at home, back to living on the street, and then back into a hotel placement with CFS. He was able to continue with the TRY program, but it wound up for Christmas. The successful students finished the classroom work December 22 and are moving into job assignments in January. N. is supposed to go back for a remedial week starting January 10, and hopefully into a job placement the week after that. But he is homeless again, choosing not to stay in a new placement that CFS gave him after serious misbehaviour towards the workers supervising him in the hotel placement.
Extra Snow
It’s back to work this morning. We had decided, before Christmas, to close the office Monday December 27, Friday December 31, Monday January 3. The first stage of the blizzard arrived on December 30 and the city was largely shut down. The city kept major streets and bus routes plowed but there wasn’t much happening on December 31. Stores opened and retail employees seemed to show up for work. The liquor stores did a brisk trade and people were stocking up on groceries, shovels and snowblowers.
Cold Shoulder
When I went to my parents and shovelled them out today, after the blizzard, my father wanted me to come in for coffee but he said my mother was mad at me. While her memory is failing, and while she is becoming delusional (she has advancing vascular dementia) she recalls that I told her, 3 weeks ago, that her memory was failing. This has been translated into a false attack on her, and she does not want to see me. My father agrees that she is demented and paranoid, and he tells me he has to humour her.
Blizzard
Steve and I had planned to ski on Thursday December 30 but there were weather warnings. There was sleet by 1:00 PM and a strong winter storm was blowing by 3:00 PM. If we had gone, the road back would have been treacherous.
Triangles
N. went to the youth shelter on Mayfair after the Broken Glass episode, Monday evening, December 6. When a worker at the shelter called me, I asked if he had contacted his mother yet. My question was based on my belief that n. still thought his mother would help him if she thought I was being mean to him. The worker said he had been on the phone to her.
Broken Glass
N. came home at 9:30 PM. He wanted to come in. He admitted to skipping classes again but he said, once again, that he had to do it to be sure that Danielle was all right. He said he had seen her in the morning, at school. He admitted that he had been planning to cut his classes to see her and that he had lied to me to get bus tickets. He said that Danielle had told him not to cut classes again, and he promised he would not cut classes again. He wasn’t wearing his jacket. He said he had lent it to a buddy, which tells me how he spent the rest of his day. He said I did not understand his feelings, how badly he needed to see Danielle. I said that he had broken more rules, blown off school, and lied to me. I gave him another jacket and a bus ticket. I said he had to go to the shelter and stay in CFS care for at least a few days, and to keep going to the TRY program. He said he would be too upset and stressed to continue in the TRY program.