Just Simply Jen

If I could, I'd so be handing in my resignation papers right now. This mothering thing is not going well this week. Someone came in the middle of the night and switched my son for some clone whose soul mission is to drive me completely and utterly insane.
I could give a long list of examples just from yesterday but I will stick to the latest and worst. This evening my son was playing in the backyard. He asked if he could go and play with some other kids that were playing just outside our fence. I said no because he has a nasty cough and doesn't need to be running much less spreading all those germs. He came in a few minutes later and asked if he could go to the park. I said no for the same reason. Not 5 minutes later I realize he is entirely too quiet and call for him like I had been doing since he went outside. No answer. I go to the back door and look out and see the back gate open. He had gone out of the yard. My first instinct was anger. He knows he is not supposed to leave the yard without us. We have had this discussion many times. Anger turned to complete panic when I couldn't find him at the nearest playgrounds. I thought I saw him at one but he disappeared so I assumed i was seeing things. I went to my neighbor whose kids he was wanting to play with to ask what park they play at because he had wanted to go with them. My sister said she saw him at one of the distant parks and took off in the car to go get him. I relaxed slightly until she came home and said she couldn't find him. I freaked. My neighbor grabs her sons and they start looking for him. I walk by my backyard again and yell for him. I hear a running sound in my house so I go in and my son is coming out of it. We had searched the entire house so I know he wasn't in there before. I had to spend 15 minutes after that trying to find my 6 months along pregnant panicking sister who had taken off in the car minus a cell phone. i was trying not to worry about her too much because stress like that is never good for someone that far along.
I tried to calmly talk to him and find out what had happened. It took us 10 minutes to get through the him making up stories for him to tell us he had gone to the park but came home while we were looking for him. We tried to explain to him the danger of going off alone but he refuses to believe that there are bad people that would hurt him. I knew his grasp on reality was lacking that of a normal six year old but the degree of which it does wasn't realized until tonight. It terrifies me.
I took away his legos, cartoons, playing at friends house for two days and sent him to his room to wait for me until it was bath time. My sister tells me I let him off easily because I didn't yell or tear his butt up. She said we would have gotten our butt torn up as kids and she would do the same. You know, we did and it didn't hurt us, but I really don't see where it would have helped. He realized he messed up but not how bad. that will come in to play over the next few days when he realizes all of his favorite things were taken away. I can tell she thinks I was too lenient but without my husband here to help me, I made the best decision I could at the moment. Spanking him is not something I like to do very often because it just isn't all that effective.
When I came up to get him ready for his bath, he was very somber and waiting for me. I hope I did the right thing. His behavior is so out of control right now and I know it's because of him testing boundaries but at this point I'm totally lost. He's being worse because his daddy is gone. I'm going to talk to the school counselor to see if she has any advise.
Here's to yet another day that will never win me mother of the year. I so hope my kid doesn't end up totally screwed up because of me.