The Boy is Back

Well...it's happened. Our kid has come back. Some backstory: Hubby and I took in his young cousins about 8 years ago when they were in need of a really safe place for them to go to school. Without too much elaboration, where they were living was stressful for their caregiver and the boys were pretty much running amuck. Cut to a visit by hubby to see his relative and the need to help out became apparent. We offered. The boys moved in. Raising children from birth is a challange in and of itself. Raising them from 10 and 12 is worse. One attitudinal, one withdrawn, we had unique challanges. Hubby is an educator, so we thought we had a leg up on the challange. What we discovered was our mother's prayers were answered through these children.

2 years later, the oldest boy is going back to live with his father because he's just willful and not improving in school or his attitude. So, from that point on, we took care of his younger brother and all was going to be sunshine and roses. Oh how wrong we were...

Michael is a good kid. He was pretty quiet and had it pretty rough before he got to us. I get that, but things started changing about junior year of high school. His friends introduced him to smoking, sex, then pot and God knows what else. Our quiet shy kid, soon became our moody, secretive kid who was pretty stupid and thought we were class A idiots, to boot. Eventually, things came to a head and we threatened to have him leave. Repentance, improvement, then backsliding and new bad behaviors began (stealing from us, lying, etc.). One more come to Jesus meeting, and the law is set...you shape up or get out. Three rules: clean your room, get a job or pay rent, make restitution for stealing our shit. Easy peasy. On New Year's Eve 2007, he went upstairs, began cleaning his room, changed his mind and packed a garbage bag and left. No warning, no real goodbye, just "I can't follow your rules and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna screw up again, so I should go."

Fast forward to now: He calls a couple of days ago to tell us he's been evicted from the apartment he and a friend had rented. The "friend" stole his stuff, lied to him, blahblahblah and now he needed a place to drop his clothes off. We agreed to take his things, but put them in the garage instead of up in his old room. This morning, he arrives on the doorstep before dawn to say he hadn't slept in 2 days and just wanted to sleep, so hubby let him in and put him up in his old room to crash. He slept from 8am off and on until we woke him at 9pm to go to work. Before he left he asked if he could move back in.

Why do people really want to raise children again?

Dilemma...do we let him back in? Give him access to the house, our food, our stuff again after he's lied to us, exposed our house to people who have stolen from him and he's stolen things from us to give to them? Do we let him go back out in the cold world and say "Suck it up. You made your bed now get comfy." How mch do we trust this person we hardly know anymore and looks every bit the addict? (And we KNOW addicts, so that is not an overstatement.)