Well, this rarely happens... when Junior is napping and Mr. Squire is at basketball, and I am awake enough to not want a nap, and... I finally have the physical and mental space to reflect. Feels nice. :)
One of the things that we're challenged with is the single mom living with us (without her child). Yesterday she put us on notice that her aunt in another state (who is caring for the child) told her that she doesn't need to rush in reuniting with the child; she should take the time she needs to restore her own life.
This puts a bit of a wrench in our plans... our plans had been to give her a home to stay in, for free, for 4 months so that she could get her life in order enough (e.g. find a place to live, move in, get things ready) to reunite with her child. She has a job--a decent-paying one--and no substance-abuse issues, and she's clearly intelligent, so we figured 4 months should be sufficient. Looks like she'll be with us longer than that.
But we can't have her live with us forever; that's not good for her or for us. So it leaves us in a bit of quandary as to what to do next. We never expected to essentially be parenting a teenager at our age (it's as if we had had a kid at 16!). We (Mr. Squire and I) talked about it at length last night, though, and I think we have a go-forward plan... I just hope/pray that it works out and doesn't blow up in our face somehow.
Starting next month, we're going to set monthly progressive goals for her that will build on one another (the ones we have in mind are: wash dishes twice a week, and prepare a meal for the whole family once a week; set a budget for the future; attend a support group; wash dishes twice a week and prepare a meal for the whole family twice a week--and "look for housing options" will be on each month's goal list), and starting in Month 5, we will start charging actual rent that she will not get back (instead, we will subtract out what it costs for her to live with us, then forward the balance to a battered women's shelter or something like that).
The thing is, if she's not going to reunited with her child, then...I guess the only thing we can really work toward is helping her gain her independence, since she claims that her ex emotionally abused her to the point where she couldn't make any of her own decisions. So my hope is that by setting these monthly goals for her--and making her continued stay with us contingent on her meeting those goals--we can give her structure and incentive to do the things she needs to do. I've never really dealt with someone who claimed to have PTSD as a result of emotional abuse, and I told her at the outset that we were here to encourage and support her and give her a safe place to heal and grow, but that we weren't here to be her counselors.
I feel like our role is to give her a bit of tough love and guidance, to teach her and not enable her. I feel like so many voices in her life are just giving her license to wallow in her misery without a real step forward. And there is a definite place for grieving and processing and working through that mess (and that's what counseling and support groups are for), but there's also an entire life that needs to be moved on with...and a child who is waiting for her mommy's return.
It's hard to know what is the right thing to do. It's challenging to balance our sense of "come on, get with it" against our recognition that she needs compassion and mercy. I'm not quite certain what the point of this exercise is, and we did kind of jump into it headlong without a lot of time to fully weigh the way it might play out. But I'm sure God will help us figure it out...
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