According to Huckle, I don't do anything right.

If he asks for grapes, he remembers that he wanted an orange. If I put his bowl down in front of him, he insists that oranges need to be on a plate. If I put his plate down at the kitchen table, he tells me he wants to sit at his playtable. If he asks to watch Dora, by the time I find the requested episode, he tells me that he wants to watch Dora after he watches Wonder Pets.

This goes on all day long. Good times.

About four o'clock, after 8 hours of this nonsense, I'll say to him, "Huck, even if I'd put oranges on a plate at the playtable, you'd tell me it was wrong."

We have a lot of "bless his heart" moments around here.

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Huck is a bit screwed up, as we all expect him to be. Lots of progress around here in the last four months, of course, but I'm not in the mood to write about progress.

Even though I experience the manifestations of his issues every day, it is one sort of feeling to live it, and another feeling altogether for someone else to witness it all. Huck met his new-since-December SW today for the first time, and after hanging out with us for a few hours, Paul the SW pulled me aside and said, "He's really tough on you, isn't he?" I went into the "Yes, but....he's so much better now/he hasn't kicked me in the head in weeks/he's only rejecting me 4 of 5 times/anda anda anda." Then I stopped apologizing for Huck and said, "Yes, and it sucks." And then I cried. I was a big, wet, snotty, sloppy sobmonster. And I felt more hopeless today than I have in weeks. What seems like such huge progress to us, the things we celebrate and giggle over and call relatives to report, still don't add up to a kid that passes for "normal."

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Huck's file is being sent on to an adoption caseworker this week. I called my mom to tell her that, in six weeks or so we should be able to read his redacted file, and that after that it would probably just be a matter of scheduling a court date for an adoption, assuming the paperwork goes through. My mom is Huck's biggest fan. Today she asked, "What if he never gets better?"

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My heart feels a bid threadbare.

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I used to be a holder-on-er. No matter what, no matter how much someone hurt me, I stuck it out, to the point of nearly destroying myself, because that person needed me. It took a lot of time and work to be able to learn to walk away. And, I mean the physical acts of walking away, not taking phonecalls, not going back to places where I knew I'd be able to find those people. Even years later, my mind can't fully disengage -- the only thing I'm strong enough to do is abide by my decision to leave by not putting myself back in that relationship. Once I'd forced myself to walk away, I got good at it. Walking away was safer, guaranteed a new adventure, and hurt just enough to punish myself for having been young and stupid and in love or whatever.

Last month, I told our SW that if a boyfriend treated me the way Huckle treats me, I would have dumped him a long time ago.

So now I'm learning how to hold on, how to let Huckle into my heart even when he's his most awful, when I just want to protect myself from his anger and his hatred.