Two months of Jeff

Do you know what, it actually might be okay.

Come closer everyone.

Gather round.

I’m going to say something now, very quietly. Barely a whisper.

You may want to lean in.

But do you know what?

I think it actually might be okay.

While things are still, broadly speaking, not fine, we seem to have reached a kind of equilibrium with our horrible son.

Nights are being slept through. The white noise is off. The TV is tentatively being played aloud.

The mirrors are still covered, but you have to pick your battles.

We are, finally, starting to have quite a nice time.

Squeezing meat into Jeff at 7am. Watching him do tiny zoomies round our tiny flat. Smiling at each other as he chases his sieve of peanut butter across the living room floor, leaving a nutty smear in his wake.

We are by no means out of the woods. In fact, I suspect we may now permanently live in the woods. And unless we move out of London and I, God forbid, learn to drive, there remains a very real future in which we come to the sad conclusion that Jeff would be happier with another family, living in the woods literally as well as metaphorically.

But for the first time in two months, there is at last a much needed sense of hope.

Maybe Jeff will continue to relax into his new life.

Maybe he’ll see the park for the first time.

Maybe he’ll make a little friend.

Maybe one day he’ll get on a train and dip his paws in the sea.

Or maybe we’ll just learn to live with the Jeff he is and not the Jeff we wish he could be.

Either way, I love my feral son now, even though he’s objectively horrible.