If just one person...

I have been struggling with what is appropriate behavior for MAC and what is normal behavior for a teenager. I was having a great lunch with a friend today when it hit me, she really is a teen. She will be turning 13 in April and in just a week she will be starting 7th grade. She has started the monthly fun of womanhood and has even got a forehead full of acne.

I have been very proud of her this summer. She has come out of the Intensive Outpatient Program with compliments from the instructors. She has learned to control her temper in a group. She has begun to write how her day went in her calendar. She has earned an allowance every week since we started the button reward system.

Sometimes she acts so grownup, than there are the other times like this evening when I find that she has eaten everything her heart desired today: 3 single bags of chips, 1/2 bag of Haribo cola bottles, a pack of pop tarts, lots of cocoa crispy cereal, and 6 (count them...6) fruit roll ups. What made me maddest was the fact that when I came home she had left all of her wrappers on the floor. Oh...that and the three days worth of dishes she had shoved under the couch so she didn't have to put them in the dish washer.

Right before I left work today a song from the Musical "Snoopy" came on my iTunes it is called Just One Person and goes like this: If just one person believes in you, deep enough and strong enough believes in you, hard enough and long enough, before you knew it someone else will think if he can do it than I can do it, making it two. Two whole people believe in you. And if two whole people believe in you, deep enough and strong enough believe in you, hard enough and long enough there's bound to be some other person who believes in making it a threesome. Making it three, people you can say "believe in me". And if three whole people why not more, and if four whole people why not more, and more, and more. And when all those people believe in you, deep enough and strong enough believe in you, hard enough and long enough it stands to reason, you yourself will start to see what everybody sees in you. Then maybe even you, can believe in you too.

I have to remind myself that due to the issues she doesn't believe in herself. I have to be the "one person" and hopefully one day she will believe in herself like I do.