Last week we had a revelation from Kit that seems to have jumped him forward. He stumbled and worked hard, and stumbled again all winter and spring, to come face to face with a tough realization about himself. Rather that shy away, he's accepted, embraced even, who he wants to be. It has been a positive force for him.
Tio is a different story. He's resisting change. Because he is popular, good at sports and academics, I've been giving him more rope than perhaps he deserved. He's full of himself and doesn't believe that he should have to work hard at anything. It's made him disrespectful and arrogant towards authority and even dismissive of having to live within the rules, both at home and at school. For all the work I've done in the past couple of months to help him "learn to learn", he's dismissed that, too. It came to a head this week over several incidents and he was threatened with having his baseball season end early if he didn't shape up.
Tish is more worried about my well being and feels that if Tio doesn't want to cooperate there's no reason for me to spend a lot of energy driving him to games, working on academics, and helping him out. While I'm not quite there, she has a point. We still haven't got it through to him that he's old enough to help out, old enough to think of others before himself, old enough to know the difference between good and bad behavior without having to be constantly reminded.
Since he was at risk of losing playing on the all star baseball team, I spent the past few days trying to suss out how to find a middle ground where he will work with us and I can cooperate with him, knowing that both Tish and Buddy had already decided he shouldn't be on the team. They felt that he needs a serious consequence to take us seriously. I agreed but also wanted him to play baseball.
Yesterday, he and I came to an arrangement where he would work towards goals and still play ball. We shook hands and he went into the living room where I heard him smugly tell Grammo and his dad that he'd talked me into letting him play, acting like he pulled one over on me and things were "back to normal".
So, needless to say, he lost an opportunity to play on a really good team, lost his privileges to stay in town after school, and earned himself some serious summer work. He's clearly not mature enough yet to figure some of this stuff out, much as I wish it were so. It took Kit all winter of having school privileges curtailed, early bedtimes and other limits before he could recognize that working with everyone made his life easier and helped him come to important realizations about himself.
We only hope that Tio doesn't take longer to do the same.
