O just kicked me today, in the stomach. A new parenting low.

I raised a boy who is violent towards girls, and his mother, no less.

And he called me a b*tch again. Jeez, I wonder where he heard that word.

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And then I saw this on in my phone’s photo gallery…

I was really upset, but this got through to me. Made me smile a bit, at his ingenuity in trying to get through to me when I was too upset to listen to me.

I went to his room to ask him how he managed to get the message into my phone. He was reading and didn’t want to talk. I get that. I had explained to him before that when I get really angry, and my “lizard brain” gets activated, I can’t engage because then I just get more and more upset, and I usually cope by watching Netflix. I guess he has adopting listening to country music and reading as a anger management strategy.

I left him be for a bit. But then just went back again to explain that I only seen his photo just now when I went to speak to him earlier. I hadn’t seem it before, which is why I didn’t understand when he said I had “no sympathy” earlier in the evening. I said I loved him, and asked if he loved me. He said he did. And I suggested we both go to bed and sleep on it, and he asked me to switch off the light.

He *did* wake up really early this morning (~4 or 5am UKT), and had a long day travelling back from France after he’d been away on a school residential trip. I had also had less sleep this night. So neither of us were our best salves.

But still… physical and verbal violence to his mother is really not good.