Aftermath

So the running away incident (see last post) happened on Monday, and now it's already Friday.


That's how my life goes. It's Monday, and then it's Monday again, with an occasional Friday thrown in.


Anyway. Life has been extraordinarily stable and fine (fun, even) since the incident. P has been fine. He has mentioned of his own volition how sorry he is numerous times. Enough so that yesterday evening I actually uttered the words "consider it forgotten." (Was I serious?!) He offered to do a lot of grunt work around the house to try to "make things right," so he's been doing an extra chore a day -- scrubbing kitchen cabinet doors, dusting baseboards, tonight it will be cleaning the basement bathroom -- and without any RAD delay, sabotage it, try to get us to hover over you nonsense. Also, last evening I was attempting to fix my bike, and he came over and assisted and even admitted that he was surprised at how much damage his collision had done. There is no imminent-RAD-onslaught energy surging through the air in our family life right now. P is not even chattery. Moreover, we really don't feel as traumatized at this post-incident interval as we did at this same stage back in December.

But there is still an edge to my feelings. As I write this post, I feel an undercurrent in myself that thinks we should not let down our guard.


What to do? If we allow P some freedom and he is not ready for it, we will feel so foolish. But I always hate restricting him if he's ready to handle things. Maybe we'll try to figure out some baby steps for over the weekend.


We hadn't told P, but we had been planning to try letting him walk home from school once a week this year instead of having to go to the daycare centre. M writes at home much of the time, and it is only 7 gentle pleasant residential blocks between our house and school, and we are positive that coming home and unwinding on his own terms would be so much more relaxing to P than going to the hubbub and structure of daycare. I just know that if we told him he could do this once a week, he would jump at the chance. Before the running incident we had been planning to give this a try on the first day of school -- Wednesday next week. He's had an incredible summer of progressing in his self-control and management of his difficult feelings and has been showing us all sorts of more mature choices, with just little things popping up like still attempting to exert control sometimes. We haven't had a single behaviour report from the daycare, and he's been a pleasure to be around all summer. Until the ups and downs of Sunday and the running away of Monday. Before this latest round of regression, I had been feeling pretty confident about the walking-home plan. But now I want to feel confident about it because I have this strong gut feeling that it would mean so much to him, but instead I feel uneasy. Maybe it's too big a pleasure for him to allow himself to partake. Maybe he'd pull some stunt. If we hadn't had the Sunday and Monday we had, I wouldn't have these doubts.

I think my gut is actually telling me that P should go to daycare after school as usual next week. See how he handles the transition back to school and think about walking home on his own for the next week. ? What do you guys think? Am I crazy for even considering giving him a new, unexplored, and probably highly prized privilege right now? It's just that the thought of keeping sending him to daycare after school, when I know it taxes him energy-wise more than being at home would, kills me. I had so loved our plan to let him try coming home -- and our confidence about it.