This blog is my place to vent and share resources with other parents of children of trauma. I try to be open and honest about my feelings in order to help others know they are not alone. Therapeutic parenting of adopted teenagers with RAD and other severe mental illnesses and issues (plus "neurotypical" teens) , is not easy, and there are time when I say what I feel... at the moment. We're all human!

Friday, June 18, 2010

I'm sooo tired - MHMR


I'm sooo tired, as Lilly Von Schtupp said in Blazing Saddles "I'm not a rabbit. I need some reeeessst. I'm tired." I stayed up till after 4 am last night trying to update Bear's now 34 pages long time line (I was looking for something else and ended up doing this instead).
Bear had his first meeting with the new psychiatrist. Whom I like. I just wish Kitty could see him too, but she's not got enough issues to qualify for the MHMR program. (Of course I have no idea how I'd fit in more caseworkers and people so I guess it's a good thing she doesn't need it.) Instead she'll be doing this video medication management stuff. I'm not entirely sure about the qualifications of her new pdoc. This lady seems to not have a lot of experience and my kids' meds are not simple, even Kitty who is relatively stable right now.
Soooo embarrassing while visiting with Bear's new pdoc there were two women in the room. One looked kind of familiar (actually they both sort of did). Normally when there's interns or something they introduce themselves, but they'd already had an individual meeting with Bear so I thought maybe they forgot. After awhile I asked them straight out who they were. They both just looked at me like I was kidding and said, they'd both been to our home! One (the more familiar one) was Bear's new case worker. *mortified blush* The other was the mother of a friend of Bear's (from the special school), and it had been a long while since she'd been to our home (Bear recognized her though). We joked about Bear needing a friend's mom at his pdoc appointments. Turns out she's the family support person at MHMR.
I don't really understand this place. After 4 years of doing it on our own, I'm not used to getting any support. Now we have a caseworker who comes weekly, a skills trainer who comes weekly, a family support woman who says, "Call anytime and don't forget to come to the monthly support groups (which are during Kitty's therapy so not an option)," and they were trying to help me find Summer programs for Bear (didn't work because theirs stopped at age 14 - which surprised everyone there apparently. They'd spent at least 10 minutes looking for the forms). I met with the man helping me get Kitty's paperwork set up for her new pdoc, and spent about half an hour with the financial aid person (set up another appointment that's 2 hours long to see if Bear qualifies for SSI when he turns 18)...
We were there 2.5 hours for what I was thinking would be a 30 minute med management appointment at most... umm, with all these appointments when am I supposed to work? Needless to say Bear was not happy about having to sit around and wait. Especially because he missed swimming. We picked up the rest of the kids and rushed to the church to watch all the vacation bible school kids sing. Kitty and Bob's classes were in the first group (5:45-7) and Ponito's class was in the second (7-8). Bear had to be there from 5:30-8:30 because he was signed up for sound and "had to" spend most of his time outside the church watching the sound equipment (and wandering). We didn't get out of there until almost 8:30pm.
Seriously, between the kids' appointments and activities and volunteer work, when am I supposed to work? Work is finally starting to pick up a little so when I'm not doing kid stuff I'm finally doing some work stuff - which is all wait, wait... get it done yesterday! type stuff. Still haven't sent out a lot of resumes or followed up on the ones that I have sent. Not sure how I'm supposed to leave work right now either since we switched all our staff to contract (lost our payroll services) and our only on-site employee needs lots of attention (sales guys need people to talk to!).

5 comments:

GB's Mom said...

Raising kids like Bear is a full time job!

stellarparenting.com said...

hang in there Mary, may Saturday be calm and uneventful for all of you.

marythemom said...

Bwahahaha!! Saturday
Sleep in until 7:45am
8am Hubby goes to teach scuba
8:30am Sister has finally leased her house so the kids and I will be helping her move what's left at her house - piano, sofa, table, dressers.
12:30-2pm Volunteer work at horse therapy place
2:30pm get younger kids dropped off somewhere
3pm Bear's therapy
4:30 pick up kids and get weekly shopping done (Bob needs new bras!)
7:30pm drop kids off with Grandma so Hubby and I can have date night.

Almost forgot! Volunteered to bake 300 cookies for church volunteers going to the prison. Need to start baking and freezing these.

But thanks for the good wishes J!

Mary

Anonymous said...

Um, there is a word you really need to learn to use: "No".
Really.
When Bear asked if he could go to the water park, you did not say "No", you said "I don't think that is a good idea." (I do that sort of thing all the time. I hate saying "no" and dealing with the tantrums!).
But, FAR more importantly, tell the church ladies NO NO NO!
Why on EARTH did you say you would bake the cookies? Because the other volunteers might think you are a slacker? Because their lives are busy too? You are at least as important as they are. This isn't a competition to see who dies first from a stress-induced heart attack!
And hey, on this one, what is the harm in not feeding the inmates sugar?

marythemom said...

S2S - 3 months ago I bought 10lbs of sugar and 25lbs of flour to make 18 dozen cookies for the kids' confirmation. Then I found that I needed almost NONE of the flour and sugar so I had pounds and pounds of both. Then in Sunday school they mentioned that they needed cookies for this prison ministry. Bingo! I thought I'd make a big dent in the flour and sugar. So I volunteered.

Then I found out that the cookies weren't needed until July. No worries, I figured I'd just bake them while I was still in the cookie baking mood and the flour was still good... but someone said we could only use certain recipes so I had to wait until I found out what they were (since then they've changed it to any recipe as long as there are no nuts), and then we stopped going to church, and I gave the flour away before it went bad... and then I got an e-mail reminding me.

Mary