How Did the Therapy go?

Well!  Very well it sounds. Much better than I had hoped for.
She saw Marc on his own for most of the time and did some tests with him to help understand his personality type.

• What would you most like to be if you were not a human being?

For most people and especially adolescents it is good to start with a game - it can have serious intent but it allows time to relax and is more fun than having someone ask you ' Tell me about your problem?'

Then the three of them went in and it seems that it went well. They all left at the end feeling positive and liking her.

So now we can go off on holiday to the UK with lighter hearts.
Marc got to go skiing - the pact is that he agrees to go four more times to see the therapist.

It's funny how when you change one thing lots of others start to move a little. 
I had some insights into it all last night

• Both Jordi and Vilma project their own feelings onto Marc. When the marriage broke up Jordi felt relieved - glad to be free of the constant arguments and unhappiness. He decided that Marc felt the same. Vilma felt abandoned and sad and like a victim of Jordi's selfishness. She decided that Marc felt the same. So what did Marc feel? No one knows yet.
• Both Jordi and Vilma are overprotective of Marc. Perhaps because he was premature and started life in an incubator for several weeks. Both of them find it very hard to deny him things that he wants and neither of them are good at imposing limits when it makes him unhappy. I have noticed that Jordi is very quick to intervene when I try to talk to Marc about difficult subjects - it feels like he almost puts himself between us so that Marc doesn't have to feel uncomfortable.

• Marc isn't speaking much to me at the moment. Jordi says it is because he thinks I stopped him having a friend to stay over night at the weekend. The problem was that Marc was going to a disco - a grown up one which ended about 5am.  We said his friend could stay but then found out that his parents didn't know he was going and this was his reason for staying with us! So we said no and I was firm about it.  This made me think that perhaps he was angry with his grandmother and that is why he never asked about her when she was ill and dying.  And perhaps this is why he didn't want to go to her funeral and didn't seem to care at all about her death. Not long before she went to hospital for the last time Jordi and I went away for a weekend and we gave her instructions not to let Marc into the house - because of the stealing. Of course he was staying at his other home with his mother so didn't need to come here but he rang and rang her phone and doorbell and gave all sorts of reasons why he needed to come in. She respected our wishes and refused but I wonder if this is why he blocked all feeling for her in her last weeks?

Well, that's all for now. How are you getting on with your resident adolescent?

Some therapy

I suppose many people with problem adolescents get to the point of thinking ' let's go to see a therapist'.
We have arrived at that point. We are admitting powerlessness and asking for help.
Here are some things to think about

• Which therapist?  Ask around and try to find someone who has experience working with adolescents and families.
• Be prepared to see several before you find the right one. Jordi went to see someone a few months ago and he went with only his X Vilma. It was a bit of a disaster as she cried and blamed all through the session and they came away with the advice to talk more to RA and stop using punishments. but no alternatives were suggested and Jordi ended up feeling like a ship with no rudder. things happened  - more stealing, no homework done, non attendance at school, refusal to attend grandmothers funeral....but what to do? Just talk? Hard with a boy who is only interested in sending messages on his mobile and grunts in response to any conversation.
• Who will go to the session? Obviously it is best for everyone to go but it's no easy task persuading three people who already have bad relations to agree on a person, a place and a time.
• How to persuade RA to go along? Bribe him? Threaten him?  Pretend it is an appointment with a famous hip hop DJ?
• Should the evil stepmother go too?  Four people in the room would leave little space for constructive thought. In our case especially as the X has a tendency to dominate all discussions with dramatic exhibitions of anger and tears. Also there is the language problem. We would spend a lot of time just translating to and from English.

Anyway, this evening they have all gone to see someone new. Someone recommended by the school so she is experienced with adolescents, hopefully able to see the destructive patterns of a couple who argued their way through 17 years together, and someone interested in helping RA find more postive ways to rebel than just stop all school work and break trust with those closest to him.

I feel I am sounding increasingly bitter here. I am just tired. Really I want to find a way forward so we can live as a family with only the normal difficulties that arise when living together with a growing boy.  I want to keep trying and to stay openhearted. But perhaps you can understand that sometimes it all gets too much?

I will get back to you with how it all went.

Permitting bad behaviour or punishing? What are the alternatives?

We have been thinking about this question. Everyone says 'make limits and keep to them'
 But how?
I found this article useful and am thinking of buying the book.

The four R's are very familiar here

• Resentment
• Revenge
• Rebellion
• Retreat

So lets find something that works!

So many things that I can't keep up!

Recent events

• Maria was in Intensive Care in the local hospital for 4 weeks and RA wouldn't visit. I wonder what he really feels for anyone. Is there a living person he loves? Apart from himself of course.
• Maria died. RA showed no feelings - seemed to be totally disconnected from it all. 
• He refused to go to the church for her funeral. However I managed to sort that by asking my sister in law to speak with him. She got him out of bed and into his clothes in five minutes. He's still a bit careful not to let the extended family see his true self. He was there to see the church full of friends, to see all his family crying,  to hear his father speak beautifully about his mother. That evening he asked if he can move to another bedroom now that we have the whole house.
• He is with us now. We had a talk about money and helping in the house. He seemed more reasonable than usual. He seemed to understand that stealing doesn't help people trust you.
• This morning he was discovered stealing coins from Jordi's collection. This was carefully set out in albums, in date order and going back years. Now there are gaps all over the books which add up to over 100 euros.
• Later the same day - one to remember! - we discovered he hasn't been going to school for weeks. He sits in a local cafe and plays games on the machines.
• An appointment has been made with the psychologist for next week

So what's new with you?

Poker face

It was a shock and it happened the night before I was leaving to return to England. Jordi opened his bank statement and saw several payments made by internet to an online poker game. It totalled over 200 euros. We knew his son Marc had been playing online for a while but he had said it was only for fun not for money. He was underage but at the time it seemed harmless.
Not now!
I left for England with everything unresolved. As always getting back to my old home meant facing a huge pile of mail. The next day I started opening and filing and found bank statements for one account which showed further payments to the online poker game Pokerstars.com. My bill totalled 800 euros - about £600.
The rest of the holiday went by in a blur of phonecalls and speculations. Jordi confronted his son who denied all knowledge of the payments. He got angry and stormed out of the house to go back to his mothers. She - never slow to find fault with Jordi and his parenting skills - believed Marc's story, blamed Jordi for making false accusations and clearly welcomed the chance to score some points with her son.
In the end I managed to convince the bank that my credit card had been stolen and used without my knowledge. I got all the money back. But the loss of trust in Marc could not be so easily resolved and thus began the situation that we still find ourselves in.
Key points that perhaps may be familiar to others are

• the child refuses to admit what he did
• the parents respond with disbelief and/or shame
• sometimes the parent prefers to live in denial of the problem
• sometimes the parent doesn't know how to respond so does nothing
• the child plays on all these feelings and doesn't have to live with consequences - there are no consequences that he cares about.

For me, a stepmother and also a foreigner, it was confusing and frustrating. I wanted to have it all out in a big talk. I wanted sanctions or at least a chance to make him feel uncomfortable but I had to play it gently as too easily I became the ogre who wouldn't allow them to forget what had happened. Jordi once told me I was obsessing about it. He wanted to believe it was a one-off event that would just stop now that we all knew about it.
I am more distanced from the deep feelings that make parents ambivalent. I just wanted something to happen. I had been worried for a long time about Marcs lack of concern for others. In my bad moments I felt he was mad and bad. In a more understanding mood I would feel for his confusion about life and his place in it.
I wanted a visit to a counsellor.  Jordi doesn't like professional helpers and felt he could deal with it himself.
In effect this meant doing nothing at all.
I just had to wait until the next thing would remind him that his son has some deeper problems.

A Little More Information

Everyone knows it is not easy living with adolescents and this is multiplied one hundred fold if you are a step parent. Perhaps even more so for a step parent who has never had children.
I arrived in this family at the worst time. I didn't have the childhood days where we all played games and laughed and cuddled on the couch. I came straight into a situation of warfare. The battles were on these fronts

• Homework - he very rarely does it and the school repeatedly sends reports of poor results
• School attendance - he often doesn't go to classes. There is a nearby cafe where the boys play table football and they can sometimes be found there during school hours.
• Food - every meal time is stressful. He won't eat salad or vegetables unless bribed or threatened. He likes meat but if it is cooked in an unfamiliar way (remember here that I come from a different culture and so all my food is classed as unfamiliar) Early on I asked him to look at a Jamie Oliver book and chose the things he would like me to make. He refused.
• Computer - now he isn't allowed on the computer without supervision (see a later story about internet gambling) - but when I first arrived he was spending hours and hours playing games and making music. He would agree to stop at a certain time but then refuse when that time arrived. When the password was changed to try and control his access, he just changed it all back again.  We ended up hiding the antennae for wifi - something else to remember every day and of course the hiding places became more and more obscure as he discovered them one by one.
• Washing - he could happily go for weeks without a shower or a bath. When he was playing badmington regularly he might shower at the club but sometimes he just said he had, then his towel was discovered to be dry and clean.
• Hygiene in general.  He almost never washes his teeth. His clothes lie in piles on the floor. His coat pockets are stuffed with old mouldy sandwiches that he has discarded in favour of a beefburger from the cafe. In the mornings he sloshes cologne over himself to cover up the smell

This was just the beginning. And for those of you who are thinking 'this is normal - poor boy, his parents split up, noone helps look after him and now they blame him for having poor habits'.....it doesn't seem like that on the ground.
If only those were the only things. If only he also laughed and joked and sometimes had excited conversations with his father.
He is rude and lazy, cut off and distant, only interested in what money his father will give him and what new things he can buy. He does get excited about somethings - like the idea of a new mobile!
He lies consistently about his life - his homework, money, school ....
He arrogantly assumes that he will get into the course he wants to study computers even though his school results have been terrible each term.
And of course he has good points. We have had many trips away all together and then we relax and it can be fun. Sometimes he and I form an alliance against his father who can also be stubborn and opinionated. When we are away I see more the little boy who lacks confidence and can't go into a cafe to order another coke.
But then the stealing started....and the refusal to admit it......and later the shrugged shoulders when it was proved to be him.
I forgot to mention the guns. Coming from a more pacifist family he of course got heavily into guns from a young age. His father has confiscated so many guns we could start a shop. The house is full of little white plastic balls that are used for ammunition. He goes off with friends to a special place to play war games - noone stops him from going - but it is something of a shock when you see him in the living room cleaning his replica machine gun.
This is my situation. My challenge is to stay cool, keep open and hopefully help a little with his growing up while also maintaining my own boundaries and values. I want to use this blog to gather information about all these issues and find out how other people survive.

A prayer answered

One of the problems we have faced concerning the RA's stealing habit has been that his mother - the X wife - refused to believe he was doing it. On one occasion when RA was caught with a missing 60 euros in his coat pocket, he accused me of planting it there to get him into trouble. OK - I was pissed off with him but when we were all there in the living room talking about it, it was more like a stupid joke. He knew and we knew that it wasn't true.
But a few days later I heard that the X was telling other people that I had put money in her sons pocket. This was when I started to see red. I try to be as honest in my life as possible. If a shop gives me too much change I always return it. I believe in the Buddhist principle of not taking something if it is not freely given. And I care about my reputation. Also I didn't like the X walking past me on the street with her nose in the air and her head turned away.
So I went a little bit on strike. I cooked less when RA was home. I didn't get in his way but neither did I help him. We were still speaking to each other but if he was just grunting on the couch attached to his mobile and messenger then I didn't bother trying to communicate with him.
This wasn't my immediate reaction. First I felt huge rage and then terrible sadness. I saw the future stretching ahead with a fast deteriorating relationship not only between RA and me but of course it would affect my partner and myself. He wants someone who helps him in parenting. I feel totally powerless because my instinct would be to get professional help. Or at least to deal with it head on. But his approach is much more softly softly and he continues to hope that things will change by themselves.
I went up to see my mother in law - in tears. She is also worried by the situation but she wants me to take on the role of helpmate. She feels that this man and this boy really need me and my skills and I must just get on with it. The woman's role in life! Do I remember that once I was a feminist?

Anyway, to cut to the end of this story. So far RA has been only stealing money from us. Yesterday he finally cracked and gave into the temptation to take 50 euros from his mothers purse. Of course he denied it but she knew it was him and she started to go through the rollercoaster of emotions that hit us last year. Anger. Sadness. Fear for the future. Guilt about what has gone wrong.
I heard the phonecall as she talked it all over with my partner. I had to leave the room to hide my smile and my reaction of 'YES'. Perhaps now something will get done about it. EArlier that day I had prayed - please make him steal from another person so we can begin to find a way out of this situation?
And someone heard me