Finally home, peace extinct
Yesterday we left around 10 am to go to Atlanta. We had a good trip there with our son and settled into the hotel. My wife and I were uneasy about how our daughter would behave on the ride home. We didn't rest all that well and were up at 6 am to get ready to make the 25 minute drive to the facility. After eating a little breakfast, we made our way to the facility.
We arrived at the facility around 8:20 am, although our paperwork said the discharge was scheduled for 9 am. We signed in and waited about 45 minutes in the lobby for her to come out. The staff member who accompanied her provided us with the discharge paperwork, as well as some medication and refill prescriptions. We loaded her belongings into the car and were on the road by 8:20 am.
The ride home went well, she told us about her stay in the facility as if she has just returned from a vacation. She told us about the food she ate, the fights that occurred in the facility and about someone who attempted to escape. We didn't really encounter any hot topics that caused arguing. Upon arriving home, we only stopped at the house briefly to drop my son and our dog. We then went to my mother-in-laws so that my wife could get her niece to trim her hair. My daughter asked if she could get her hair trimmed also because the haircut she received at the facility was not straight. We agreed to let her get it trimmed up and then we went home.
Upon arriving home around 5 pm, our daughter became extremely angry. She was upset that some things from her room were missing. The day she had ran away, we were frantically looking through her room for notes and drawings in an attempt to locate where she may have gone. That and the heavy cleaning we did in her room meant that some things had been damaged and/or thrown away. Some of those items were a few posters. In an attempt to make things right, I reordered the posters which had been thrown away and they were left in their packages on her bed. Upon entering her room, she demanded to have the posters back which had been thrown away. I told her that it wasn't possible to get them back, but that I had ordered the exact posters and they were lying on her bed in the packages so that she could hang them up. That wasn't good enough, she demanded to have the old posters back and said that, although I had ordered the exact posters that she previously had, one of them was the wrong size. She then began screaming at my wife and I and said it was our fault that she ran away because we had removed things from her walls and that the walls were blank. She continued to scream non-stop for 30 minutes or so and then shifted to talking in a normal tone, but with much sarcasm. The entire outburst lasted 58 minutes total.
It is 10:00 pm and our daughter has been screaming and slamming doors for the past hour and a half now. She refuses to go to bed until she finds items that we have told her can not be recovered. She has stormed from one end of the house to another turning on lights and screaming. She just stormed into her brothers room, who was sleeping and turned on his light to question him about a sticker. She is completely out of control! Now she is rearranging her entire room and refuses to go to bed. She just used a line that a therapist at the Pensacola facility used when she said that if we don't give her privileges, she "Has nothing to lose". Our daughter is continuing to yell and be sarcastic and I don't know where we go from here. She has only been home 5 hours and the entire house is in complete chaos!
It is now 10:30 pm and we have made no progress at all. She continues to scream and make sarcastic comments. She is completely disrespectful and belligerent. She just told my wife "I hate you! You are a delusional psychopath". She advised us that she wasn't going to church in the morning. We told her that we go to church every Sunday and that per the Safety Plan, she must go where we go. She continued to rant and be sarcastic until she finally went to bed around 11:05 pm.
Lord, we need your help. This day has turned out to be worse than we anticipated. Lord, give us strength and wisdom in this situation. Lord, help me to keep my anger under control when my child is screaming at and disrespecting my wife. Lord, we need the holy spirit to intervene in our home. We are weary and have only you to turn to. Lord, I put my trust in you alone. In Jesus name, Amen.