Note: I try VERY hard as a parent and as a person in general, to avoid being negative and ranting and raving and being miserable when we go through hard times with Jaymes. I much prefer to be upbeat, hopeful, and inspiring. However, this is real life and in the interest of being honest and open, as is the point of this website, I'm going to share the not-so-inspirational portion of our life with Jaymes. This was written in an effort to cleanse my brain and relieve some stress, and thus may contain things I would normally never say. For the sake of it making sense, a few things you'll need to know. Batty is a horse, Bute is a horse medication similar to aspirin, in the end the dog vomited up the Bute referred to in this little narrative, and the Child Protective Services case against us was closed. ( :


I hate our society today, how anything that happens to a child is turned on the parent, regardless of circumstances. Kid falls off a horse and breaks ankle, so the hospital social worker calls CPS to investigate. Baby has a tumble off the couch and CPS is called. Neighbors call CPS on you, and suddenly you're a bad parent because you can't watch your kids while you sleep. I can see why so many people don't take their kid to the hospital for things, unless they're really serious. If you come in with an injured kid, you'll get a visit from a sicky sweet social worker who will subtly ask insulting questions, then she may or may not tell you before calling CPS.

Jaymes is a different type of kid. Yes, he's 5, but it doesn't mean you can treat him like a 5 year old. He does stupid things like flipping his bed on it's side to reach the window locks, breaking his window screen out and hopping down 10 feet to the side of the house. He kicked his little sister off the couch where she was sleeping as a baby and sent her to the hospital with bleeding in the brain. He rams into things in rages, and gets bruises. He is not a normal child. I watch him, but it doesn't matter. I blink, he's on the counter or in the fridge, or trying to go outside. I go to the bathroom and he's on top of the fridge. I cannot keep up. I love that he is at school most of the day, because I think I'd go insane if he were here 24/7. Come summer we better have respite care or I'll be entirely insane.

So recently I had 5 bute pills up on a high counter, waiting to take them down to Batty for his ouchie hoof. I look away to get Sierra off the potty, get back and they're gone. Gone. Jaymes was with me until the last minute or so of the diapering of Sierra. In the next room. I heard him go sit in the living room. I don't know if he took the pills and ate them, hid them, gave them to the dogs. They're gone without a trace. I am 99% sure he did not eat them, they'd be bitter as hell. He might take that first bite, but he'd stop when the taste hit him. More likely he either fed them to my dogs (hope not, but no one seems sick) or hid them someplace. I have looked all over the house, short of digging through the deeper portions of the trash. I called poison control, they said to watch for vomiting. Jaymes is fine, he chowed down his dinner and is behaving totally normally. Trashing my house, hitting and slapping his sister, biting me. I know that I was stupid to leave the bute out at all, but it was at a height of my HEAD. He would have had to use a chair and climb onto the lower counter, then maybe reach them. How he did that in the minute he was out of my sight.. No clue.

If he showed any signs of illness, you can be sure I'd take him to the ER. But he's totally normal, and I don't think he ate them. What upsets me is that I have to even worry about taking him in. Parents should not be punished for taking their kids for medical care. God forbid he ever breaks a bone. Why is our society so anti-parent? A kid gets hurt, it's abuse. Kid gets into something, neglect. Kid touches himself, must be being sexually abused by the parent (not me, lol, but I've heard it before.)

Stuff happens. Kids get into things. Kids fall out of trees or off horses, they snatch pills or kitchen cleaners. You have to turn away sometimes, you have to take care of the other kids, you have to go to the bathroom. You have to sleep at night. You have to blink.

Jaymes doesn't understand not to jump out the window, not to touch the hot stove, not to wander around in the road. All those things that other people's 5 year olds just KNOW, Jaymes is oblivious to. He has no impulse control, no concern for his own wellbeing, no control whatsoever. He can't feed himself, clothe himself. Nothing. He doesn't get tired and stop, he doesn't sit quietly and watch TV. He screams, head bangs, tries to beat up his sister 24/7. There is no peace time. There is no child free time, or mommy time. 3 times a week I get to ride Batty, and thats only for an hour or 2. The rest of the time I am home listening to him scream, cleaning up the huge messes he makes, trying to make him eat and do basic things that most people's 2 year olds can do.

I'm sick of it. I don't want this anymore. I don't want to have a kid who is 5 and in a diaper, and screams and flails on the floor. I don't want a kid who smears himself and his walls with poop at night. The kid who climbs onto the counter in a rage just to throw himself to the floor.

I love Jaymes.. I really do... I'm just at this point that I can't handle anymore. And I can't talk to anyone about it, because as the CPS woman who came after the window incident told me, saying I'm overwhelmed and need help is admitting to some kind of mental illness or inability to care for my kids. I can't tell anyone how tired I am, how much I want to get away. Jason doesn't get it, because he's not home for it. He can't stand Jaymes 90% of the time anyway.

We still don't have respite services or the personal care aide yet. It's been months. I know his caseworker is trying, she's wonderful. But I can't handle this anymore. Something has got to become easier for me soon. If this goes on, I'm going to have to put him in a residental home. That thought makes me sick to think about... But then I look down as I'm typing, where he's on the floor screaming and beating himself, and I can't even muster up the desire to try and calm him down. Just snuggling Sierra, who he literally dropkicked across the hallway.


End note: I'd love to say I only felt like this once, but I can't. It's on and off, comes and goes. Though I am definitely not seriously considering putting him into a residential facility, we fear greatly for Jaymes' future if we can't make more headway. He has wonderful days where he talks and smiles and hugs and kisses. He's an amazingly intelligent child. We have a long road ahead, and lots of work, and only time will tell what his future holds.

As positive as I and other parents try to be, we cannot help being human. We get tired, depressed, frustrated. It doesn't make us bad parents, it makes us real. Human. We have our ups and our downs, and we push on through it all. And it turns out to be worth every painful step.