I don’t even pretend to fully understand attachment trauma. I don’t even pretend to remember all the jargon surrounding it.

What I do understand? Is that it affects kids in ways other traumas don’t seem to quite touch. And when you combine it with other traumas? With early childhood abuses of various forms, including but not limited to neglect? It creates a near impossible storm.

I wish the caseworkers/social workers/clinicians involved with Spud at this point would listen to me. I wish they could admit to themselves that their degrees are not nearly as useful as my knowledge of my kid who I have parented for nine years.

But no.

They don’t get the sense that he wants to run away.

Guess what he did last night?

He didn’t run far. He stayed around and on the small campus of the craptastic facility in which he is currently housed, but he went farther than he should have and tried to talk to other kids through windows and, apparently, get them to go with him.

Specifically, the girl.

So, let’s back up just a bit. I got a call in the middle of the night Friday/early Saturday, telling me he had been caught the girl’s bedroom. This is a small facility with only four bedrooms, a facility that I thought only housed troubled boys. No. Unbeknownst to me and my husband, they moved in a girl two years Spuds’ junior. Younger and troubled, just the way he likes them best.

Good God.

I knew this was going to become a problem. I’ve been trying to get everyone to figure out their crap, get on the same page, and tell me how I get him home early. We still have custody, after all. That’s never been in question. He’s only where he is as a “cooling off” period to, theoretically, increase my safety when he comes home.

They’ve done nothing to help him cool off. The plan we discuss when he first went in that included zoom calls home which would then turn into personal visits there, which would then turn into a home visit or two hasn’t happened. They’ve done nothing except take him on bike rides (aka reconnaissance missions) and move a girl in.

We have visited him and had a few phone calls on our own because the plan wasn’t happening.

I told them the day he entered that place that I figured he’d keep his nose clean for the first week, maybe even the second, but by the time we hit the third and last week? He’d probably run.

I know my kid. I’ve read a ton about attachment trauma and the trauma brain in general. I know how his brain works and I know his patterns.

Nobody listens. All of these people who should understand trauma better than I do haven’t listened. One of them literally emailed me that she “doesn’t get a sense he will run.”

I’m having a hard time not hating her. She’s the same person that told me she discovered Spud likes EDM music and maybe this is something I should explore with him to help him feel engaged.

I bought Spud an EDM pad for Christmas.
I enrolled Spud in an EDM course before all this shiz went down.
Spud has had his own complete drum set for years, before any of us, Spud included, even knew what EDM was.

She would’ve known this had she asked me if I also knew Spud has an interest in EDM, but she didn’t. She thought she was telling me some big, new discovery.

I’m having a hard time not hating her, especially now that he came very close to running away last night. She is the one who told me I was wrong about him being a flight risk. She is the same one who thinks my minor child, who has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he does not have good decision-making skills thanks to all of his trauma, needs to be included in every meeting and adult conversation so we can get his “buy in.”

His buy in, as he has proven to us a thousand times over, is worthless, but she won’t listen to me.

I am having a hard time not hating her because she is the professional who works with troubled kids day in and day out and, therefore, should know a hell of a lot more than she does, but she doesn’t know, and she doesn’t ask, and she won’t listen.

Most people don’t understand early childhood trauma, especially attachment trauma. I wish at least the mental health professionals did.