HE'S BACK, or,
WE ARE NOT THE BRADYS

Well, Angelo is back. I got up about six a.m. and he was sleeping on the glider in the front yard.

We had locked the doors, as we always do at night, on the assumption that if he did show up, he'd ring the doorbell. We also sleep with our bedroom windows open, and one window is right by the back door. I think if he had come through the gate and tried the back door, we would have heard him. Once again: ah, well. I unlocked the doors this morning and went back to bed without waking him.

Then I overslept, after a bizarre dream in which I had no control over anything in my life (gosh, wonder why?). In my dream, the dog was having unexpected puppies in a crate. While I rushed around looking for a basket and a blanket so I could get the pups out of the crate, Tillie called from camp to say something was wrong. I had to put her off to get the other kids to be quiet, and she said, "Oh, forget it" and hung up, leaving me wondering if something terrible had happened to her. While I continued to hunt for blankets and also for the camp number so I could call back, the little girls had one problem after another.

Then I woke up, to find that it was 8:01. School starts at 8:15, and it's Field Day, and they didn't want to be late. Sometimes it's hard to distinguish between a dream and real life.

Anyway. When I got up to rush the little girls to school, Fred and Alan were already gone to work and school. I assumed that Angelo was at school too, and didn't look in his room.

Then, about 11 a.m., I heard the shower. Angelo had a late night and apparently took a nap. Then he got up, got ready for school, and set off on his bike. I have to admit I was a bit short with him on his way out. This will be an unexcused tardy, and he'll get In-School Suspension again. (I could call the school and excuse it, but I won't.)

There are many problems here, based on personality--his and ours, I guess.

We'd like to know: What happened yesterday, from your perspective? What were you thinking? How did you feel? What's going to happen now--are you sorry and going to try harder at youth group, or do you feel like it's their/our fault? Do you even know anything happened to upset anyone else? Why didn't you ring the doorbell? Why do you always come back here, even when you are mad?

He will answer: None of these.

We'd like to say: Okay, here's the rules.

But we can't. We can't set any rules for him, because he won't abide by them unless HE believes they are important. (It's an important distinction. He doesn't smoke or drink or do drugs, and he does do his homework, because HE's decided that those things are important. Which is good--but if we ever have a major clash on just what is acceptable morally, we'll be in trouble, because he will assume his version is correct, not ours.)

If we try to motivate him through punishments (you can't use the computer or video games until you do this or that), he will bring forth his amazing knack of figuring out just what drives a person nuts, and then doing it.

Last time I tried the "no computer" approach, he followed me for four days. It started as soon as he got home from school. I'd go through a door, only to immediately hear it open behind me as he followed me and silently watched me. I'm an introverted person and while I'm used to being trailed by preschoolers, I can't handle this from a sixteen-year-old boy that I don't really know that well. After half an hour of it I'm ready to climb the walls.

With Fred, Angelo asks the same question over and over. "Can I go to E. B. Games?" Over and over, every few minutes, regardless of the answers he got before. It punches Fred's buttons.

I am sure that to many people with kids, even older adopted kids, this would sound pathetic. As I read in a Jean Kerr book, "We're bigger than he is, and it's our house."

But you try talking to someone who never, ever, ever, has a conversation with you unless it is on his terms. If you try, he will simply stare into space, put his hands over his ears, and say, "Never, never, never" over and over.

You can't talk to someone who won't listen. And who won't say anything for us to listen to.

Really, I am totally lost here. No idea what to do about this. Our experience with our teenage from-birth kids was totally different. Yes, they went through 5th-grade Syndrome, but by the time they got to about 8th grade, they'd turned into real people who can reason and cooperate. High School is easy. So once they are big enough that we can't pick them up and put them in time-out any more, there's no reason to. It all works.

An orphanage story:

When Angelo and his brother were at the orphanage and we were in process of adopting them, for a while the kids had to wear armbands. There were two different colors of armbands, depending on whether the kid in question Did or Did Not already have an adoptive family. This was so that American and Canadian visitors to the orphanage who might be interested in a child would know which kids were available.

An American volunteer at the orphanage emailed me this story. She was helping to replace the worn armbands on the kids. They were out of the Has A Family color, so everyone was getting the No Family Yet color. She assured the kids that they still had families, it was just that they were out of the other armbands.

Most kids accepted this. Angelo and his brother, however, did not. They REFUSED to put on the new armbands. She was so impressed by this that she re-wrote their names on the old armbands and let them keep those.

She, and I, interpreted this story wrong. I thought, "Way to go, kids!" I thought that this meant that they really, really wanted a family--they really wanted us to come get them, they could hardly wait to be part of the Flintstone clan (our blog alias).

What it actually meant was that they were very stubborn and had a strong sense of pride. At the orphanage, getting an adoptive family was the only thing available to achieve. They'd gotten one. They were Top Dogs because of it, and they weren't going to let anyone take that away from them. I don't know if they had any idea what it would actually be like to become a Flintstone, or if they believed it would ever really happen. What mattered was that the other kids saw that they had the "successful" armbands on.

The things you learn once they get here.

It wasn't like this for the Brady Bunch. You plug the kid into the correct formula and you fix him. No problem. And it only took half an hour.