It’s been a craptastic week for me… in parts. I am feeling very confident in how I shifted my mindset as it relates to managing my thoughts and feelings around them. I still struggle here and there but overall, the way I think, feel and act is significantly different than it was this time last year. (I started working on much of this about August of last year). So here I am just rockin along and BOOM… new circumstance that has thrown me for a loop with my thought management. I have an 11 year old 5th grader, whose friends decided to disown him this week and have been ganging up on him and calling him fat, telling him that no one likes him, etc… I have tried many times to help him understand that the power of how he feels belongs to him. He hears me talk about it. He knows it but is insistent that it doesn’t apply to his life (though he has thrown it back in my face before when I tell him he is making me mad. …”Mom… you know that no one can make you feel anything. That is your choice!.” Argh). Anyways…the level of 5th grade drama that has entered the house this past week has been significant. Unfortunately, I wasn’t home this week as I was traveling for work but I was face-timing every night. Each day the situation progressed a little more but I didn’t want to intervene in hopes that the boys would work it out. On Thursday, one of the boys, who has been one of his best friends for the last three years, punched him and my son hit him back and the both ended up in “in school suspension.” Prior to the fight that day, my husband sent a group text to the three other families. He didn’t copy me, nor did he tell me about it. I eventually learned from one of the other Mom’s. My husband, struggles significantly with managing his emotions, particularly when he gets angry. He doesn’t know how (or maybe chooses not) to keep his anger from escalating and he becomes irrational and illogical. He clearly was in that state when he sent the text. I share this because now there is drama involved with these other families, who naturally feel defensive and like their boy is innocent and that the disowning of my son from the group was caused by something he did (one said he plays too rough). I share with you so you have some context but ultimately, the details here really aren’t important. I have a couple of aspects where this is particularly challenging for me.

1. I work very hard to keep drama away from me and suddenly I have a big pile of it sitting in my lap. I say this because my husband is no longer being logical or mature on this subject and I can’t trust him to interact with the other families or the relationships may be permanently damaged. I really want us to set the example for our son of how to be emotionally mature I am in this one alone. My husband has turned my son’s pain into his own and it is not helping the situation. Yes, I know I need to let my husband be himself but what do you do when you see it negatively impacting your child (by feeding into the situation)? We literally can’t talk about the situation in front of my husband or he will just lose it.
2. The even harder situation is that my son is hurting and I am sure you know that when your child hurts, it simply sucks and I don’t know how to deal with it. I can process my own pain, my own feelings but seeing him in this place is heart breaking. With this situation, I can break out almost any fact and work my way through it pretty well. Where I struggle is with the fact that my child is in pain…Ok… now that I am writing it I see that pain is my word. Let’s try again… My child is coming home crying each day because his friends call him names and tell him they don’t want to be friends anymore. From there… I just feel numb and it almost paralyzes me but I don’t really know the thought other than I don’t want to see my child in this condition.