House of Zathras

When Buck came home from school on Thursday he called Dad at work to see about going to apply for a job. Dad was in the middle of a conference with his boss, and hurriedly told Buck ‘just do what you need to do’ and had to hang up. Buck took that to mean ‘don’t go’.

Then I come home after a day of work and dealing with the family crisis mentioned in the previous post. So, I wasn’t in the best of moods. I sat at the computer, doing some school work, and then went back to my room to use the bathroom. Only to find the door locked. You see, we have to keep bedroom doors locked because Buck has gone in and taken things ‘because he needed it’. So I trudge back to the other end of the house to get my keys, and decided to grab my purse and school bag and just finish working in the bedroom. I had my purse on one shoulder and my school bag on the other when I passed Buck laying on the couch watching tv. I paused in front of him and said, “You need to understand why we have such a hard time trusting you when your past actions continue to cause the rest of us an inconvenience. When you don’t do anything else to earn trust, it’s a constant reminder, and why we can’t trust you to drive. You need to take ownership of your actions.”

Buck ignored me (and for once, I was talking dispassionately, not yelling), cutting his eyeballs to the right and trying to manipulate the remote (I guess to pause whatever he was watching since I interrupted his viewing pleasure). When he did that, I bent down to snatch up the remote. And in bending down, my purse slid off my shoulder and smacked him in the face. I quickly apologized, but he asserted I did it on purpose. I just sighed and went to my bedroom at that point, and Buck stomped off to his bedroom.

After about an hour of grading papers, I decided to get ready for bed. I have to do a circuit of the house before I go to sleep. I lock the back and front doors and make sure the hot water heater is running. So I did my usual routine and went to bed, working on a last little bit of paperwork.

BR came in about a half-hour after that to tell me about a phone call. Buck’s door is next to ours, and glancing in, he noticed Buck wasn’t there. BR asked me where Buck was, and I didn’t know. He checked the tv room, and Buck wasn’t there. I started to worry, wondering if Buck had decided to haul off in the night. BR headed out of the house to see if he could find Buck.

Come to find out, Buck was outside when I locked the doors. He claimed that I deliberately locked him outside. He said he knocked when he wanted to come back in, but I had left the room and BR had headphones on playing Diablo III. So Buck pouted, instead of going to my bedroom window to knock…and the light would have been on because I was still doing work. No, he would rather ‘suffer’ outside in the dark.

Buck has this serious victim mentality, and only interprets actions that way. I’m working on simply walking away from any confrontations, because nothing else works. I never should have said anything to him when I went to get my keys, because he just doesn’t understand our continuing frustration at having to keep our doors locked. He truly can’t perceive his responsibility, despite years of our setting structure and therapy.

Breathe and go on, and worry about the things I can change.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 26th, 2012 at 9:52 am and is filed under Ummm. I forget.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.