Got to make the best of a bad situation*

* Glades Knight and the Pips sang it right
Got to make the best of a bad situation, got to keep on keepin on.


I don't bounce back like everyone else in this house. When something like the fight that happened tonight happens, I feel it for a while. Everyone else treated it like a summer thunder storm. It blew in and blew out.

   This has been brewing for several weeks. Elena started the year doing straight threes on her circle sheets. October came in and there was a little slack in her sails, something was brewing. November it got worse. We paid a visit, Teri and I to Dr. Benjamin and one of Elena's teacher and did what boils down to an intervention. It was light hearted, it was straight talk,it was everything you can think of to get her doing the work she was doing in November.
  Then tonight comes.I was getting into the car to go to Costco when she got home. I asked her how the circle sheet was. She said "the usual."
  I told her, "no that wasn't going to do. What did you get?" She confessed to a couple of zeros. I told her to go tell her mother. I left.
  Teri called and said she'd blown her top at Elena and sent her up to her room. She'd gotten two zeros and a couple of ones. I told Teri to make sure she did not have her computer or her phone, because that would be heaven for her.

  I got back to a quite home, Elena doing homework and Teri cooking dinner.
  At the table dinner was going well when Teri goes to the bath room. Elena starts to tell an Anna Lisa story and I tell her don't. She's not supposed to be having any contact with her,it gets her in trouble. She gets angry and pushes Athena away from the table a little too hard. I smack her on the arm and tell her to leave the dog alone. I don't remember what happens next, but I think Teri come down and asks what is happening. And I think I begin to tell her and then I think she goes at Elena for hitting the dog and Elena who is already upset, gets angry and shuts down and is trying hard not to cry. Teri is pushing her and wants her to come closer to her and tell her what is going on inside of her. Something else happens and Elena is telling everyone fuck you. I ball up a fist and some how manage not to hurt her. Teri, the not violent one is going, "Funk me, no fuck you." She has fire in her eyes

and things might be spiraling out of control. I push Teri down into her seat and I talk to Elena in this overly calm voice, you know the one you use when you are trying to be calm and don't really feel it. I talk to her and tell her that this is her own fault and she could of avoided it if she just did what she did in September. I also say I want to hug you and take away all your pain, but I won't. It sounds cruel now, then it sounded like I was telling her she needed to do for herself.
  Somewhere along the line she had started hyper-ventilating.. It went on for a good five minutes.
  Somewhere about this time we, Teri and I start talking to her about how much we lover her and how we fell in love with them as soon as we saw them and how it was God that bought us together, which I truly believe.
  When things started to calm down, I wasn't sure Elena would want me to touch her. I gently touched her hand. When that was accepted I hugged her. Teri went right in from the beginning to hug her, she wasn't going to let her not accept a hug. I felt I had hurt her a little deeper then her mother and I might not be forgiven so easily.
  I did get the first smile out of her by telling her the story about how when I would come up the stairs at night and she would call out to me to fill her water bottle, I didn't want to. I would ask her why I should and she would say "because you love me." in an overly sweet voice, I would say "Oh yeah, I forgot." and I would fill it up.When I went into my bedroom, Teri would go "fool", that got the second smile.
  The night kind of petered out from there.I gave her a big hug in the kitchen and told her because I was a sucker and she had a hard night she didn't have to dry the dishes.
  And yes when I went up to my room after she had gone to be, she asked me to fill her water and I did. I gave her a big hug and a kiss and I don't think she saw the tears in my eyes.