"If you don't like my orphanage," I say, "don't live in it."

Two weeks ago, Garbanzo went to sleep-away camp.  He came back in what we call orphanage mode.  In orphanage mode, adults are obstacles to be worked around or resources to be manipulated.  Maintaining relationships is a silly waste of time as is establishing and preserving trust.  In orphanage-mode, a child presents surface compliance and sneaks and steals and disobeys as soon as the adult is not looking.  And why not?  The orphanage adults are paid staff members -- their real lives happen when they are off shift; how would it benefit a child to be genuine with these transitory care-providers?  It doesn't matter if a child tricks them or sneaks things from their private areas or says 'yes I will' and then promptly doesn't.  It doesn't matter because the child's food will keep arriving at the same time, their activity routines will be unaltered (because keeping a child from a group activity means supplying a staff member to supervise them -- easier to just let it go).  Sure, they'll get a scolding, but that is a temporary annoyance.

(As an aside, people -- especially my Dad -- remark on how well my children handle scoldings.  This is not a good thing.  They endure it as they would a cloud of gnats: annoying, but only on the surface -- and forgotten once the gnats leave.)

Okay, so Garbanzo is in orphanage mode.  His behavior is defiant and willful and demanding and bossy and contradictory and deceitful and tricksy and mean and dismissive and pretty much dreadful to be around.  He is in a mode where he will do what he wants and does not care if we say "no" or if we have asked him to do something else.  He is treating us as disposable relationships.  He can't manipulate us into doing as he wishes, so he has dismissed us.  We exist to feed him and drive him around.

Not!

We keep trying to impose the family model on him and he will have nothing to do with it.  He smirks and gives lip service and then goes right back to his yucky ways.

So, for today, he wins.  For today, this is Suzanne's Orphanage. The staff member is grouchy as she doesn't like/didn't want this job.  The food is so-so as the cook is in a bad mood.  The activities are all chores as the activity director is also grouchy.  There is a lot of sitting-on-the-stairs-waiting-for-a-supervisor time.  It's a very boring drab life in this orphanage.

He complains.  He doesn't like this orphanage.  He liked the last one better.  Yeah, well, orphanages vary.  He doesn't like the food (unsweetened hot oatmeal).  He doesn't like the activities (stacking wood).  He doesn't like the matter-of-fact interactions with me, the staff member.  He doesn't like it here.

"If you don't like my orphanage," I say, "don't live in it."


-----------

And before you all post asking me if he knows what his options are, yes, he does. We made a long list of how orphanage relationships are different from family relationships and he could recognize which one he has been living and we talked about how I've been trying for the last two weeks to live in the Family Way and he is rejecting it and that I can't MAKE him make a better choice but that I can choose what I do, and what I choose is to stop wrestling with him over it.