My Upside-down World

First (and most important) things first. THANK YOU

I’ve never experienced a community as supportive and care-giving as this place. You guys really gave me a needed boost. I have been, at best, a spotty participant here lately but you guys have hung in there with me. I am amazed and more than a little grateful!

I have taken some positive steps since my last entry. I’ve even managed to cross some items off my To-Do List. Funny thing about those lists: One item comes off and two more jump on!

One of the things I have done is to my an appointment with my daughter’s guidance counsellor at school. Chickie is, at best, a marginal student. She is not lacking intelligence, but is EXTREMELY lacking in motivation. She is now in high school and the school is a magnet school with special programs in science, math and dramatic arts. Chickie, the drama queen, is enrolled in the drmatic arts program. The school has been rated as one of the 10 best in the nation, but Chickie is just not getting with the program. She is, Goddess save us all, a teenage girl. That has it’s own set of challenges. The schooling is just one symptom. I see the counsellor on Thursday. Here’s hoping that we can work something out – short of a cattle prod (maybe) – that will help Chickie out.

I don’t understand people. OK – that was a subject jump, but it’s all related – trust me. Right now I have temporarily taken in a 19 year old friend of Chickie’s who’s mother died a few months ago from cancer. The short story is that following Mom’s death, Dad went a little bonkers, took the kid’s share of the insurance money and threw the little darling out on the street. How can you do that to your own child? I don’t understand.

I dropped Chickie & friends off at a party Friday night. I was fairly confident that things would be “OK” since the parents had rented a clubhouse to contain the little darlings and there were parents in attendance. Imagine my surprise (to put it mildly) when I pulled up a couple hours later to find no less than 6 police cars in the parking lights with blue lights a-blazing. I got out of the car, intent on finding all my little ducklings. I was soon stopped by a police officer, who was frisking a child as she spoke to me, asking me what I wanted. What do I want? I want to know what the F@*&

is going on here! That’s what I want!! What did she think? Do I look like a thrill-seeker hoping to get frisked?

Turns out they had contained all the kids and were only letting them out one by one AFTER they had been frisked because there had been a report of a “weapon” at the party. After rounding up my ducklings and getting them into the car, I asked them what was going on. Seems that there were not only reports of a weapon, but there actually WAS a boy with a gun at the party. No, he wasn’t planning on using it. He just seemed to think it was cool to have one. Right. OK. Anyone besides me see a problem with this logic? And to top it off, my ducklings seemed to accept the fact that the kid was there with a gun in much the same manner that I would accept that someone was at a party with a purse. I don’t understand.

I pride myself on being cool with the kids. I don’t get hysterical about much of anything. When I have found, on occasion with both my kids, friends smoking weed in the back yard, I simply told them to put it out and not to bring it into my house or onto my property again. No screaming, no lectures… just the facts. We don’t have problems and there is rarely a repeat occurrence. BUT I WANTED TO SCREAM AT THESE KIDS ABOUT THE GUN

It’s a gun, for pity’s sake! What part of dead don’t they get? Even at this young age, they have had classmates and friends die – at least one by a gun. I am no stranger to guns. I enjoy target shooting. I have owned guns. My father is a licensed collector. There are no guns in my home at this time for just this reason – kids and guns don’t mix. I want to shake them all until their teeth rattle. Instead, we discussed it. Discussed. Rationally. I haven’t a clue whether anything I said sank in. I hope so.

So…. all right….. maybe I haven’t lost my grip entirely. I think I’m still hanging on by one finger – but things like this sure make hanging on slippery!!!