just keep swimming...

Crazy weekend.  Not sure how much detail I should go into, but I guess I'll just start and see how it goes.  Glade and I had scheduled a weekend away with several of our friends at the cabin.  We left Thursday afternoon and got there about 8 pm.  I called home to check on something and mom let me know that Nick needed to talk to Glade.  Weird.  After watching Glade silently listen for quite some time, which is extremely weird, I finally learn that Nick had a plane ticket to West Virginia and was leaving the next day.

I won't bore anyone with the ramblings of how ridiculous this is, or how hurtful to plan it all out while your parents are out of town.  His plan was to go live with a girl he had been talking to on FB that he knew a couple of years ago, but she had moved.  To West Virginia.  According to him, her parents were cool with him living there and he was already registered for HS.  He's quit his job and had an interview lined up out there.  He'd figured it all out.  My poor mother was left here to deal with all the absurdity.  She took him to buy a suitcase (wasn't taking mine) and helped him pack.  He didn't tell any of the other kids he was leaving so when his ride arrived, he just headed out the front door and left.  A couple hours later, he returned saying there was a little problem.  Apparently the girl hadn't quite cleared it with her parents and they weren't really prepared for him to come.  Maybe during spring break they said.  So mom helped him cancel his ticket and off he went to his friends house. There  he worked on plans for his friend to drive him to Illinois where he could try to look up his birth parents.

Needless to say, we weren't happy about anything that went on.  Upon our arrival home Saturday night, we found him in his jammies watching TV on the couch.  We told him to to go pack pack and come back down.  We talked with him for 30 min or so and decided at that point it was really just best he go.  He feels trapped, unhappy and unfulfilled here.  He doesn't know what he's looking for but he knows he won't find it here.  As the mother, I worry, but at the same time know that until he scratches this itch, we are just going to have problem after problem.  He doesn't want the same things we do.  We truly wished him well and encouraged him to keep in contact with us, let us know how things are going.  As well as made sure it was clear that when and if he ever decided life here wasn't so bad, and was willing to actually be part of the family, he was welcome back.  We gave him a few minutes to make some calls and offered a taxi if he couldn't reach anyone.

He called our Bishop (leader of our church) and asked him to come get him so they could talk. They were gone an hour or so then the 4 of us talked till midnight.  Of course, faced with a dark street and no where to go, our home wasn't looking so bad after all.  He was now sorry and saw the error of his ways.  I call bull crap.  He was scared.  He had no where to go and no one to help him. Now, sometimes fear can change people.  And there's always hope for change.  But I'm just not feeling it.  After talking for so long and hearing all the truths from us, our Bishop was fully supportive of us not letting him stay.  He has a property with just a garage on it where another man is living right now because no one will have him.  He poops in a bucket and bathes in cold water in a kiddie pool.  He was willing to take Nick there for the night if that's what we wanted.

Of course that thought is chilling, but at the same time, we just don't know what's best at this point.  We let him stay... for now.  No final decision has been made.  We had a very similar situation at Christmas and he didn't even last 2 months.  Why would I think this time will be any different.  We are just his comfortable place to be until he can figure out something else.  I wish this incident would have been a lesson in how truly not ready he is to be on his own, but he just doesn't see it.  I honestly don't know what the future holds, but for now we are just plugging along trying to figure it all out.