Two months on, I can say we’re pretty happy.

For the most part, everyone I’ve met have been wonderful and friendly. Nobody has asked if I’m Australian. Instead, I’m asked if I’m from the UK. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing

Right now, I’m going to be working on a new look for the site and updating all my templates etc. No more vicarious living for this kiwi girl!

“It’s 40 degrees in Vegas, TJ”
“That’s too hot. How am I going to sleep?“
“Well, you probably won’t want to use any blankets, plus we have air-conditioning.“
“What if that’s still too hot?“
“Then we’ll buy you a fan to put beside your bed”
“But what if the fan makes too much noise and I can’t sleep cos of that?!“

Of course, we’re doing things the crazy way. We have a total of one hour and forty-five minutes worth of layovers before we exit New Zealand. We’ll basically be getting off one plane and hot-footing it to the next. It’s what I wanted though. The lengthy layovers we experienced when we traveled to Auckland for our interviews were painful enough with the boys diabolical alternation between love and hate and my not being able to escape. The one time I managed to wander off for five minutes of peace, they both followed within a couple of minutes, sparking an ‘abandoned bag’ scenario ...

J is meeting us at LAX and we’re driving back to Las Vegas. Not only was it the cheaper option, but we thought it’d give the boys a chance to see a little taste of the scale. Like me, they’ve rarely been out of their home town, and if a city of 1 million had them floored, imagine what their first experience in a place like LA will be like?

I’m currently going through my bedroom and one thing is blazingly apparent. I have too much stuff. I have a lot of clothes I haven’t worn in years and yet kept, apparently just because I could. And books. Every surface in my room has piles of them, they’re stacked in little mountains on the floor, in my closet and even in boxes. Also, for a woman that doesn’t have a lot of makeup, I sure as hell have a LOT of makeup. I began to take that as a sign that I really am a girly-girl after all, but the various potions and concoctions I’ve bought over the years and never used kinda threw that theory out the window. Trying to condense it all down in to 2 suitcases ... well, that’s going to be a mission in itself.

On top of all that, the whole experience is making me feel old. Not only am I seeing just how much crap I’ve accumulated over the years (and being reminded of the tiny little thing I was when I first met J, something I most certainly am not any longer), but it’s also my youngest’s 17th birthday today. Yes, it would feel better if you remind me how young I was when I had him.

Each of the boys dealt with it differently. The two of them are chalk and cheese when it comes to their personalities. Jess retreated somewhat, but TJ, who had always had self-esteem issues and was a boy who needed security and attention suffered greatly. He had been diagnosed with ADHD some years before, but coupled with the fallout from his rather abusive relationship with his father and being forced to adjust to living with his mother and step-father, things reared their ugly head in a big way.

It started when we applied for custody and were mucked about a lot by the Family Court. Their father never attended court, nor did he have representation. His line was “I don’t want them, but I don’t want her to have them either”. As the court would’ve preferred there to have existed some relationship, the Counsel for Child (kid’s lawyer) and other people that were brought in to try and mediate often tried to get some sort of reconciliation going. They would ask his father if he wanted some sort of access. He would say yes. They would come back to us and ask TJ if he wanted it too. He would say yes. They’d go back to Dad and try to arrange times and dates, and he would always come up with an excuse ... “Oh, it’s too soon”, “I’m too busy”, “I can’t right now”. And every time, we’d have an episode with TJ.

He blamed us for what happened. He started getting aggressive and threatening.  He would spout off the nasty things his father had always said about me. He wouldn’t listen to us, or do anything we asked him to do. He began self-harming and was absolutely unable to control his anger. And every time we got out of family court, there was a message waiting asking for us to go to the school because of something TJ had done.

We contacted Child, Adolescent and Family Services, the ‘kiddy’ branch of Mental Health Services after a particularly bad outburst. TJ was seen fairly quickly and was re-diagnosed with ADHD as well as Conduct Disorder. At around that same time, we had a meeting between the school, members of the school board, J, myself, and 3 of the people that had become involved with us through CAFS. It was decided that TJ would be stood down (suspended) from school until such time as things settled down, he’d gone through counseling to deal with his anger management issues, and was steady on his medication. He would spend three mornings a week in a classroom at a specialized youth facility and would do correspondence. Eventually, they would begin to reintegrate him back in to the school.

That worked absolutely fantastically for about 6 months. He was having weekly sessions with a psychologist, and had 2 other people who would take him out and about. He was doing really well and the problems had eased dramatically. We all felt he was ready to be reintegrated back in to the mainstream school system and contacted the Deputy Principal. We found out then that the school had discovered that in order for TJ to do correspondence, he wasn’t able to be enrolled with them. So instead of coming back to us and giving us the opportunity to look at different arrangements, they went ahead and expelled him without telling anyone. Within a week of that discovery, he was no longer allowed to attend the specialized youth facility and was left out in the cold.

After informing the Ministry of Education of what had happened, it was agreed that he would remain on correspondence and they hired a tutor for him for the 2 months or so that were remaining in the school year. The following year, he was to attend an Alternative Education course. I wasn’t happy with that plan, particularly not when I discovered I wasn’t able to get him in to the one that I wanted, but I had very little choice. The school had essentially washed their hands of him. As it turned out, I was completely justified in my misgivings.

The biggest problem with Public Health services in New Zealand is that it’s difficult to retain specialized staff, and we lost TJ’s psychologist. That upset him enough, but for the rest of the time he was with CAFS and attending monthly appointments, I don’t think he saw the same doctor more than twice. Three times if we were very lucky. TJ began to get quite nasty with them, feeling that there was no need to strike up any friendships.

Then he started the Alternative Education course and most of the other kids had been kicked out of school for things much more serious than TJ. They were all troubled, some were in the care of CYFS (the NZ equivalent of Social Services), some had associations with gangs and almost all had gone, or were going through, the youth court system.

Needless to say, it wasn’t long before TJ fell in with these miscreants. Within a month of starting, he began to miss course and stay out all night, coming home drunk and (most likely) stoned at 5-6am. Then he’d get up late afternoon and walk out the door again. We did everything in our power to stop him, including bolting his window shut, but If we tried to stop him, he’d get aggressive and things would escalate extremely quickly. On the very few days we did manage to stop him leaving, the police were called by either J or myself, as we had been told to do by CAFS when his aggressiveness got out of hand. The days we were unsuccessful, J and I spent hours driving the streets searching for him. Every time the phone rang or there was a knock at the door, I was terrified. Two weeks later, he was brought home by the police having been involved in a burglary. Other things later emerged - during that little spree they’d broken in to a car and in to his father’s house. He’d also stolen money from us, as well as our X-Box.

At that point, he was officially in the system, and before long we were attending a Family Group Conference with a representative from the Family Court, his case worker from CAFS, police and family members, as well as another woman who was in charge of a course at the YMCA designed for first time youth offenders. At the FGC, a plan was put in place for Tyler to make amends. He was to attend Specialist Youth Services Corps at the YMCA, pay reparation, write letters of apology and do community service. Because he was a first time offender, that plan would’ve been good enough (so long as it was carried out by TJ) and he wouldn’t have had to attend court, however J and I wanted him to learn a very hard lesson. We not only continued with our complaint regarding the X-Box he’d stolen, but we insisted he front up to the judge.

Once there, the judge reiterated the plan that was put in place and at our request, put TJ on a curfew with non-contact orders relating to the boys he’d gotten in to trouble with as well as a couple of known gang members who had been harassing him (TJ and the other boy both stated that the first 2 incidents in their spree had been orchestrated by gang members and that they’d been threatened with violence if they didn’t comply).

TJ mucked around with it for the first couple of months and regularly breached his curfew. As the SYSC program worked closely with both the police and the family, so we were all in constant communication, so there were no secrets. He’d been lectured by the police regarding his breaches and when that didn’t work, they picked him up at course and dragged him back in front of the judge where he was put on his final warning. At the same time, one of his partners-in-crime was sent to a youth detention facility and CAFS deemed that his problems were beyond their abilities and had to do more with substance abuse (mostly alcohol) and while he continued with the monthly appointments, the other bi-weekly help he received in the way of social workers who would take him out for some one-on-one work was taken away.

Losing what he’d relied on, his friend being locked up and the final warning from the judge was obviously enough, and that was the turning point for him. He cut himself off from those kids, stopped going anywhere but to course and his grandparents and began knuckling down. He became a model student at SYSC (coming second in the class and making his mother cry at his graduation), he did his community service and earned the money himself to pay the reparation. He wrote his letters of apology, and when he attended his final court appearance 9 months after he first got in trouble, the judge noted a complete change in his attitude and commended him not only for his hard work to put things right, but on the fact that he’d turned his life around. He was discharged without conviction.

At the time, we knew we were going to be emigrating to the US and the question was asked of the judge how to deal with any questions regarding Tyler’s criminal history. The judge informed us that because he was discharged, there were no convictions and the slate was wiped clean. It was as if the charges had never happened. He recommended that we say nothing. Coming from where it did, we thought it was sound advice.

Since then, TJ has been in no more trouble. He’s also drug-free. We still argue and things still get heated, but what parent and child can say that they don’t? He’s by no means perfect - he’s a month off his 17th birthday and in true teenage style, he thinks he knows it all. But he’s a normal kid. He’s no longer under CAFS care, and at the time he was discharged from their services, they deemed him to have nothing more than ‘usual teenage problems’.

Do I regret insisting that we go through the court system? In some ways. No mother ever wants her child to go through that and there’s always the possibility that our hard line when he was 14 years old will affect his future - even though it absolutely should not. In every other way, I don’t. If we hadn’t have been so tough on him, he wouldn’t be the personable, friendly young man he is today.

He informed me that I was only angry at him because I was PMSing. His calendar said so.

First of all, is it scary that even though I haven’t seen him in 15 months, he still knows my menstrual cycle better than I do?

Second of all, what makes him so damn sure that it’s PMS and that he’s not just an ass? I have plenty enough on my plate with fixing up this house and dealing with the kids, while he sits there constantly offering his bright ideas and criticisms. I have every right to be mad at him, PMS not withstanding!

So tonight, I threatened to send him the kids the second their passports arrived back from the Consulate. He told me he thought that was a good idea.

Apparently, he’s in crawl mode.