Well, today is now yesterday’s tomorrow. Train Wombat is still in bed, showing no signs of going to school. The only thing he will say to me is “Get out”, when I go in to speak to him. Oh, apart from threatening to put a bolt back on the door. Resilience – schmilience.
How do you help someone who won’t talk to you? Who won’t even try to tell you what the problem might be? Not even a tiny bit of it? Because he has a mindset that people who need help are weak, and therefore his own need of help is challenging his sense of who he is. Who won’t even acknowledge how he’s feeling, when his body language is shouting out “I feel like overboiled broccoli – tasteless, lifeless, useless.”
I have something on this morning. I hate leaving the house when he’s like this. This is why I started blogging in the first place – I could do it at home! I hate going, knowing he’s feeling so awful he just wants to shut out the world. Hide under his doona and sleep it all away. Anxiety? Certainly. Depression? Maybe. We’ve considered it many times before, when the world has been calling and Train Wombat hasn’t wanted to answer. We’ll need to look at it again.
There might be some people reading this who have dealt with serious, sad, scary issues with their kids. You will know that gut-sickening feeling of wondering whether your teenager will be safe if you leave the house. Wondering how you can possibly make the house safe for them to be left alone in. Wondering how long you need to put things on hold while they are on hold. But it’s like holding the line to Centrelink – you can hold and hold and hold then suddenly, the line goes dead. And you have to start all over again.
And so you do. Because you have to. And the wombatting is not always happy. It’s hard. And you feel helpless. But you have to resist the push to feel hopeless. Because again, there is always tomorrow.
Until later, Hopeful Wombatting.
