my near death experience

tonight was an event i will never forget & one i hope to look back on & laugh when i remember. fantasia's been struggling the past few days & has been trying to earn back the privilege to go home for a few hours on sunday. don't get me wrong, ben & i would LOVE (colored to emphasize just how much we would love it) to be able to go to church on our own on sunday but we want to make sure that the kids have earned it, that we're not just being selfish.

so anyway, carmella, ernest, fantasia & myself were sitting at the kitchen table. as fantasia was going through some consequences she earned for not following directions she began to get upset & yell at carmella. SHUT UP! SHUT UP! LEAVE ME ALONE! SHUT UP! i was sitting in between the two of them but kept silent (that is usually the best thing to do with this girl or she continues to escalate). but each time she yelled the words SHUT UP at carmella she pushed the chair next to me into my knee. at first there was just a slight pressure, then it became hard. i sat still, not giving her a reaction. when it got to the point that it hurt, i stood up but was pinned between carmella's chair & fantasia's. i tried to stay calm & told her firmly she needed to remove herself & take some time to go & calm down. then she started screaming at me. and so, i will admit it, i yelled. GO TAKE SOME TIME! START ACTING LIKE A MATURE 11-YR OLD GIRL & REMOVE YOURSELF. she then stood up and started shoving the chair at me as hard as she could.

and this...was when...i saw my life flash before my eyes. i could see the fury in her face & i thought for a moment that i could actually see all of the creative ways she wanted to kill me. and my thoughts turned to my training on different type of restraint moves and whether or not i thought i could actually pull it off & take this girl down. (i wasn't too confident in my abilities)

after what felt like a millennium i was able to move around carmella & free myself of the repeated chair shoving. fantasia blurted out a stream of exciting words & put her shoes on. whenever the clients go outside angry, we have to follow them, but keep a good distance. so that's what i did. instead of running away like i had thought, she actually started to climb a tree. and as she was climbing she began to carry on a two-sided conversation. "don't you f***in' tell me how to climb a tree, you b***h. i'm gonna f***in' kill myself, jump out of this f****in' tree. don't you try to talk me out of it, b***h. i don't care what you say." i had been silent the entire time, standing a good 30 feet away from her, acting uninterested in what she was doing. still not quite sure who she was talking to. probably don't want to know.

i went inside after a good 10 minutes & after about 45 more...she came through the front door. cut to one hour later she is sobbing "I'M SO SORRY, PLEASE FORGIVE ME, I LOVE YOU" & bawling on my shoulder. that is the difficult thing about her. she can be so completely rotten one moment & then feel true remorse & apologize the next moment & my heart just breaks open for her. i told her that i had already forgiven her, that she is still a good person, that i still believe in her. and i "glazed" (ben's version of tearing up) just a bit for this 11 year old who started out with a really rough childhood that we are now trying to correct.

that doesn't mean though, that i am not thinking up some ideas for a new t-shirt. the front will read something like this, "i survived a few minutes with an angry, bipolar 11-year old fantasia." and the back will read, "barely."