Friday, May 19, 2023

 Friday, May 19, 2023

     I weighed 144.5 this morning after eating twenty-two nuggets. That’s not good. It was a nothing day except for overwhelming grief. I was having a tough time. I worked on updates and some gardening. 

     I was supposed to have a session with Adolescent D. His mother canceled because he had to finish a boatload of assignments before the end of the school year. I spoke to her the other day and asked if he told her what we were working on. No, he hadn’t. I couldn’t tell her because he hadn’t permitted me to say we were working on completing some of those assignments. Moreover, I was working on his resistance to doing the work. He had a video assignment to interview someone on the Big Island. He refused. He said it was weird. Weird? Why? It just was, and he wouldn’t do it. We are talking about a fifteen-year-old boy. Good luck in getting all his work done. I am proud to say that he is academically capable of getting it done now, if not getting good grades on the completed work. Step one. If you spend your life avoiding doing something, you can’t get better at it. It’s a truism. Why is anyone surprised by the outcome of avoidance?  

     I asked his mother if she saw any differences in him. I was hoping for more personality changes. I want him to take the wheel of his life and take responsibility for where he’s going and what he will become. I told him once I feared he would wind up a twenty-five-year-old man holed up in his bedroom in his parents’ home playing video games. He had seen this as a possibility himself. His mom didn’t report any changes in this regard. She knew he had all these outstanding assignments and was doing nothing to get them done. However, she did say she was blown away by the improvement in his reading. She also said he was filling notes books with notes he was taking. She hadn’t looked at them. She didn’t know if they were his own words or if he was copying text. Either way is good with me. I know one person who wrote their way out of a learning disability. What good news! Whatever he was doing was on his initiative, and it had something to do with print.  

    B texted me photos of Elijah at his graduation. I had been invited. I cared about Elijah, but I didn’t want to go. Sitting through tedious graduations is not my thing unless it is a must for a family member.