Meds

I ended up keeping myself home all day yesterday listening to some very old Tammy Wynette, Merle Haggard, and George Jones songs while I caught up on laundry. A blast from my past, but then I just slightly updated myself with Jackson Browne, got up to the 1970s era at least. Spurred me on to clean out half the kitchen cupboards as well while screeching, "You never even call me by my name, Dar-ling," along with ole Merle, as I stood on a kitchen chair, dancing, hooting and hollering; amusing the tar outta the kids.

My brother, Jimbo, is coming today from Tallahassee, and tomorrow we're having a 'see Daniel off to Basic Training dinner' thingy. Notice I don't use the words good-bye. I had a tough enough time letting him go get an apartment last year, if I'd have known this was coming, I would simply have had a cow. If I'd known much of what last year had in store for me I'd have probably called a doc for meds.

An email question yesterday asked me if my kids were on meds? Nope. Yes, my life would be easier if I could zone the kids on some mood altering pills, but I have found too many complications with that method over the years.

A good many of my children come to me on medications, and with the help of different doctors, I've weaned them. I don't mean to pull a Tom Cruise here, but I'm kinda against meds also, in that it just seems too easy, and I don't really believe people should depend on pills if they don't have to do so. There are, of course, times when it is necessary, but kids adopted from the foster care system appear to be way too over-medicated for convenience sake.

I want to know my real kids, not the masked-by-meds behaviors, even Joey was once on 18 pills a day. That ain't natural nor normal. After slowly, very slowly weaning him, we discovered his behaviors were similar on drugs and off drugs, the kids have a huge resistance ability to the meds as time wears on, their tolerance for the meds grows in response, let's change the behaviors, not the medications.

But I also know, that's not always an option.