lohky

After years of caretaker's fatigue from managing my now 11-year-old's behavior issues, I signed myself up for a 3 day per week program at our local crisis center. He has been diagnosed with disruptive mood deregulation disorder and ADHD, but in all reality, he most likely has a personality disorder. In 2023, we had the police out to our house something like 27 times over Memorial Day weekend and he followed that up with 8 back to back acute stays all over our state. He was finally admitted to a residential facility after we forced DCS' hand through a psychiatric lockout.

Well, he was home for about three months before he kicked it up again, this time over boundaries placed on a Nintendo Switch. After a several day meltdown, he jumped out of a second story window onto our driveway and eloped to a stranger's house about a mile down the road. He was taken to the hospital with a pretty bad head injury and after clearing trauma, was admitted to another acute stay. Tonight was supposed to be his discharge and I am again refusing to pick him up. Tomorrow, DCS will charge me with abandonment again and I'll get to spend another year fighting them in court to try to have my son kept somewhere that he can be safe from himself.

This probably sounds uncaring. He doesn't care about me. I don't think he ever has. Or any of his family really. He built and subsequently destroyed a relationship with his 5-year-old brother over the last three months and doesn't care. He has repeatedly tried to get me arrested so he could "roll the dice on another foster placement that won't have rules on his switch". I'm so exhausted. I don't want to do any of this. I just wanted to have a happy family.

I can't even connect with my wife or younger kid anymore. I've been too busy talking to DCS or driving all over the state for visits. They celebrated Easter without me because I was at home watching the 11-year-old kick holes in the walls of our hallway.

I called the police again last weekend and I hate calling the police. I don't want them in my house and they almost never have anything beneficial to say. I needed to have him transported to the crisis center and they refused and just told me to try hitting him. DCS just says to call the police in crisis. The crisis center just ignores us because we've been there so often that our concerns are just dismissed at this point because it's a chronic behavioral issue, not something actually manageable.

So I'm just broken now. Waiting for the inevitable calls that I've abandoned my kid again, how horrible I am, and how I'm going to be punished. For wanting my kid to be safe from himself and the rest of my family to be safe from him. I've been to hundreds of family therapy sessions. I've spent months of my life living in hospitals and crisis centers because he is so entitled. I don't even know how he got this way. Maybe this is just my punishment for raising him wrong. I don't know. I was 23 when I had him and his mom abandoned him with me. I didn't know what I was doing with a kid.

I'm so exhausted. I have another session for therapy tomorrow and I just don't want to go. It's the second one and I just want to sleep, but I can't even do that. I haven't slept in days. Maybe I'll get tboned on the way there and won't have to deal with it.

I've found that AI has done literally nothing to improve my life in any way and has really just caused endless frustrations. From the enshitification of journalism to ruining pretty much all tech support and customer service, what is the point of this shit?

I work on the Salesforce platform and now I have their dumbass account managers harassing my team to buy into their stupid AI customer service agents. Really, the only AI highlight that I have seen is the guy that made the tool to spam job applications to combat worthless AI job recruiters and HR tools.

After what seems like a year of near constant stress, disappointment, and loneliness, I decided to stop sitting at my computer all day and start making better choices for myself. This was a really hard thing to do for me since I work from home about two feet from my entertainment area. I would end up sitting at my desk all day and neglecting things that I wanted to do and I wasn't sure why.

This month I have:

Set up the Ender 3 V2 that was sitting in my closet for two years and printed out a bunch of cool shit with my kid.

Exercised every other day to try to help myself with some vicious joint pain that has developed recently.

Kept the dishes from piling up on my desk.

Made doctor and dentist appointments.

Don't get me wrong, things are still stressful and disappointing, but I feel a lot better than I have in a long time. What have you done to care for yourself lately? Digging yourself out of depression is hard and I want to hear your successes, no matter how small they are.