The Real Storm

Last weekend I wrote about the potential snow storm that was being predicted. We were told to expect anywhere from one inch to one foot. The storm came a day later than expected, but we did end up with a foot of snow and a snow day on Tuesday. Which means the rest of my family had the day off, and I had to work from home...while they were all around.

But the real storm has been in our house. My son has been going through some really bad times lately. We've been dealing with school suspensions, bus suspensions, teachers who are at the end of the their tether, and a very discordant home. My husband has been handling it remarkably well, but my stress level has been astronomical and I've had some really dark moments of the soul. And of course I'm sick now.

I'm honestly feeling pretty hopeless these days. We have tried everything we know how to do. I can't even begin to name all of the books we've read and different methods and techniques we've tried. Plus my husband has been teaching for about 20 years and I have a degree in psychology and ran a before and after school program for several years; so we're not people with no clue how to handle children. We met with a new therapist last week and are reading yet another book and trying something new again. My husband is convinced it's the right thing to do, but since this past week has been one of the worst ever for our family, I'm not as solidly on-board. Although I do understand that sometimes things have to get worse before they get better, so I'm trying to stick with it and see if it works out in the end.

I don't even want to be at home right now, except that I do want to be with my daughter. That is actually where many of the negative feelings are coming from. We've only got 3 1/2 years left with her, and I don't think she gets nearly the attention she deserves because we're almost 100% focused on her brother these days. For whatever reason, he's being particularly horrible to her so it's a bizarre feeling when my maternal instinct to protect her is being turned against my own son.

Luckily my employee returned from maternity leave, so work is better. I still haven't been able to focus on the projects that I need to complete at work because the cloud-based software we use introduced several bugs into the system when they applied their weekly service patch last weekend. So that's been a bit of cluster, but once the system is back up this morning I'm hoping to find that those problems are fixed, and keeping my fingers crossed that they didn't introduce any new problems with last night's patch. But despite all of this, work has been my refuge this week. Which makes me sad and grateful at the same time.

So the upshot of all of this is that I had hoped to start posting more once my employee was back at work and things calmed down a little bit. But the issues we've been having at home have resulted in me being in such a dark place that I wasn't able to write anything that could be shared with anyone else. Here's to hoping that this week will be better.