Constant Battles & Self Destructive Behaviors
At school I continued with the pattern of skipping classes, caught smoking and drinking in school and getting after school detentions for my punishment which of course I would skip out of also, which in turn would result in me getting thrown into in-school suspension for days on end. I loved the in-school suspension because I was buddy buddy with all the teachers that came in and out of there throughout the day.
Basically in-school suspension was supposed to be sitting in a room all day with other kids who were in trouble too, stay silent, do the work teachers provided – problem being, most of the time the teachers didn’t send the work to do, or if they did I’d have it done so fast it was no big deal so I’d spend a good portion of the rest of my time there doing what I loved best – Reading Books. If there were only a couple kids in there we would many times spend the time chatting with the teacher on duty for the period and again I enjoyed that time very much. I related to adults far better than kids my own age.
I frequently had conversations with my vice principal about the punishments and how stupid they were. Since punishment is supposed to be a deterrent from doing the bad deeds again and again, but it never worked because they were actually giving me what I wanted and instead of just missing the 1 or 2 classes I would skip, I was “legally according to school rules” absent from every class every day that I was in in-school suspension. I’m not sure why they never gave me out of school suspension, I know many others would receive that kind of punishment for their bad deeds.
The vice principal agreed with me, and asked me what I thought might be effective, but of course I had no answer to that question and they were limited in what they could do for punishments. I still have no idea what an effective punishment for my ‘school crimes’ might have been. Since really nothing they or anyone else did really made a difference to me.
At home, it was a constant battle with my parents, and as a result some of the most hurtful words a parent can ever say to a child were uttered when my Mom yelled during one of these battles that she wished they never adopted me. Did she mean it? No, but regardless it was said in the heat of the moment.
One night I totally flipped out and was out of control, I wanted to go out and they wanted to stop me from leaving and my father pulled off his belt and proceeded to hit me with it repeatedly to get me under control. It left welts on my legs, arms and back that were so prominent, sore and red that the next day at school I had refused to participate in gym class. The vice principal of course wanted to know why, as I was sent to him for insubordination when I refused to change into my gym clothes and participate.
Needless to say Child Protection Services and the Cops were brought in and they were investigated. In the end it was determined that my parents were not abusive parents and not a risk to my safety and that I was a teen out of control and it was recommended to them that they file a P.I.N.S Petition against me. While that never happened, the end result of all of this is that whatever shred of control my parents still had over me, was gone. This whole event humiliated them and embarrassed them to such a degree that from that point forward, I did whatever it was I wanted to do. In hindsight, they probably should have filed the petition that was recommended, because I was a person that was totally out of control and in need of supervision that they couldn’t provide.