No junior high boy should have to be an emotional roller coaster, but one of my clients has been on a deluxe roller coaster ride the last several weeks.  First his placement with a relative disrupted and he returned to a group home, then his birth mother told his two younger siblings they are coming home to live with her in two weeks. He got angry because his mom rejected him.  To top it off, his caseworker tried to clear up the situation by having another conversation with him.  His caseworker told him he is not going to live with his mother or another relative because he will grow up in a group home.  No junior high kid should have this kind of information dumped on him in just a few weeks.  I don’t know many adults who could process similar conversations without losing emotional control.  My kiddo did go ballistic for a short time immediately after the conversation with his caseworker, but actually held it together remarkably well . . . even at school . . . sort of.

When I went to school to see my client this week, he was wearing a pair of jeans with a huge hole just above the knee.  When my client walked into the office to meet with me, the principal immediately noticed the holey jeans and told him that holey jeans violated the dress code and he needed to wear more appropriate jeans to school.  My client has had some discipline issues at school since returning from living with his aunt.  I asked the principal if there had been any other issues, she reported that my client had skipped class last week and been having difficulty remember to bring his school supplies to classes.

The principal told me that my client was sabotaging himself at school.  The day he cut his reading class, he actually walked by the class room, so his teacher could see him.  He was trying to get caught.  Same thing with the jeans.  The jeans were obviously too short for him and belonged to someone else in his cottage. My client and I had a brief conversation with the principal and he shared with the principal what had been happening in his life outside of school.

The principal’s response demonstrated an amazing amount of grace.  She told my client that she didn’t know how he was able to handle his experiences and spent several minutes assuring him that he had people who cared about him at school.  Then she went on to tell him that she would not accept his attempts to get in trouble and to sabotage his success.  She told him that he was living in a group home because of choices his parents made, not choices he made.  She made it very clear to him that he had an opportunity to make better choices than his parents and it was her job to make sure he made those good choices.

I don’t know what will happen with my client in the immediate future, but I feel sure that he has a lot of people supporting him. I suspect he will occasionally try to get in trouble and get punished because he thinks he deserves to be punished (even if the rest of us know he is a great kid who does not need to be punished).

I do know that I saw a little bit of God’s grace in a principal’s eyes this week.  Like God, she was willing to love my client, but like God she expects him to make good choices.

Funny how a holey pair of jeans lead to a conversation filled with amazing grace.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Blog. 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.