funeral and kids

[Jena]

hi

so we went upstate last night, got there around 2, got to bed at 4 and got to funeral at 9:30 today. was a long day, yet we held up pretty well, husband managed to drive and not crash

i get in, we picked up food on way in it was late and we didnt' want to cook. easy child walks in door, well needless to say all hell breaks lose. as usual.

she sits on couch and watches tv. didnt' come home to walk dogs so we walk into pee and poop on den floor. didn't make a call to say im sorry to any family or my stepfather.

she begins fighting with-difficult child, i ask her to feed cats she continues to sit there so i pulled plug from tv and said if you dont' listen tv goes now also. than she goes on phone i pull that out also.

meanwhile shes' cursing at difficult child and fighting with-her. difficult child who mouthed off to me before they began. it's insanity. difficult child has picked up all of easy child's phrases.... difficult child has never cursed at me yet she uses same lines minus curses. so now she's punished and going to bed early. easy child has lost easy child (she keeps stealing out of our room; so we now lock our bedroom door; got new knob etc. and key lock).

i walked in room, husband fell asleep he's exhausted. he's like are you ok, what's going on out there? i said the usual complete insanity. literally my heart was pounding out of my chest i had to breath thru it.

difficult child's always been a struggle yet is so much more disrespectful to me since watching easy child in action. easy child than started with-me again and i said listen it's simple tmrws' therapy if you do not adhere to some rules here basic due to fact you are a part of this family in 3 weeks you can move out. she said that's my plan i'm not following any rules and i will continue doing what i want when i want.

i'm beginning to think i have zero backbone with easy child, now difficult child's caught on and following same......... and im a person who loves kids yet these two. sheesh i want to run far away seriously i do.

easy child is so negative majority of time and has this sense of entitlement like i've never seen before it's shocking. she adds such negative energy here and i'm tired of feeling bad saying well maybe this that and the other is my fault she's like this,my parenting mistakes. i mean enough is enough already.......

any tips advice anything? besides get easy child out so i can parent difficult child thru the teen years with-o easy child making her worse? it def. may come to that, me opening door at 18 and putting her on street. she complies with-absolutely nothing. refuses to take medications says their for weak ppl nothing wrong with her.

they have no respect i return from funeral, difficult child's pressing to "do something" a movie, go out etc. i said no way we had a long two days than mouths off and i have easy child doing same. my feelings are non existant in their minds

 

[DDD]

Sorry you are stressed but like I said a few days ago I think difficult child should not have been included in the funeral. It's a dreary environment and the potential for resideual effects is enormous. easy child? Well, she's another story all together. Sorry. DDD

 

[Jena]

there was nowhere to leave her, she had to come. i wasnt' going to miss it due to her. it was quick though hour at funeral home and burial, and 30 min mass. i can't shelter her from everything. she's been to them before, a long time friend passed last year suddenly. that wasn't why she mouthed off, she has been mouthing off as of late. she's catching onto easy child.

so i went in my room and just destressed laid on bed and went on computer. i normally stay in the mix and i handled everyone and than removed myself.

 

[Marguerite]

Why do you still label her a easy child? Seems even more difficult child to me than your younger daughter.

As for saying she will do what she wants for next X weeks - that poop and piddle goes right into her bedsheets. failure to follow through on personal responsibilities brings personal consequences. She has the choice to clean it up and wash her bedding.

Good for you shutting off the TV and phone, too. Keep it up. A place I lived in once had a coin in the slot box on the TV, the landlord kept fiddling with it to make it shut off after a shorter interval. That could be a way of handling the TV - pay as you go, and whoever puts the coin in, gets to choose what to watch.

Marg

 

[svengandhi]

Have you drug tested easy child? There's a kit you can get that tests hair, which you can get from her brush without her knowledge.

It's hard to think of anything else that could be causing the mood swings and behavior, unless she is suddenly beginning to manifest the onset of a mental illness.

It's so sad that they throw their lives away like this.

 

[susiestar]

I think you need to tell easy child she can go now if she won't follow rules. Also let her know that her behavior means she isn't getting much for her birthday besides the door closing behind her. Decide how much rent she needs to pay each month, the deadline to pay it or leave, the basic rules for being a roommate in your home (clean up after yourself, take the dogs out if you are the one home, no drug or alcohol use, no drugs, alcohol or tobacco in your home/on your property, no rides unless she is well mannered and pays for the gas and your time to take her there and get yourself back home (NOT just gas/time to get her there, round trip for each way because it takes you 40 min to give her a ride to a place that is 20 min away), she can have basic food and utilities for what she pays in rent but if something has someone else's name on it and she eats it she has to pay up front for it, treat you in a civilized manner, treat difficult child and husband the same, and violation of ANY of these, or breaking ANY law means she is evicted wtih 24 hr notice.

I know you don't want to evict her, but she has to face the real world. Why doesn't she have a job? There must be somewhere she could ride a bike to or walk to, or someone in the area who needs a babysitter, house cleaner, dog walker, yard person or errand runner. There is NO reason for her to be this close to 18 and still not have a job of any kind. IS she planning to go to college? How does she plan to pay for it and where does she plan to live? These ALL need to be questions she figures out answers to.

As for the dog pee and poo, what Marg suggested is EXACTLY what my mother did to my brother. Only once and he was furious but he KNEW that saying word ONE to my mother about it might result in him not speaking because he couldn't. Mom NEVER really hit us but there were lines that we were pretty sure she might if we crossed them. Even drunk he was super careful to not cross those lines with her.

As for cursing at you, when she next wants something from the store or a ride or whatever, let her know that you cannot hear her because she curses at you. Until she can go for more than 24 hrs with-o cursing at you or calling you names, she gets nothing. At. All.

A big part of me wonders whehter it is the kids who are so different now or the adults. As a kid I KNEW that my parents would NOT tolerate it if I cursed at them. EVER. I was pretty sure that if I cursed at my mother I might not have teeth left. If she didn't knock them out then my father would when he found out. I don't know why our kids think it is okay. I know mine were never given that idea by me. Actually thank you is pretty sure I would beat him to death iif he called me a curse word. I don't think I ever even spanked him more than 1 or 2 times, and those were for doing things that could kill him like trying to stick a fork in a light socket or running into the 4 lane road in front of my parents home. But he actually told another kid that he wouldn't dare to curse around me, much less at me, because I would smack him so hard he might not survive it. He didn't know that I was right there behind him and I didn't let on my surprise that he thought that way. I don't even think he ever saw husband or I hit anyone ever. But I won't fight that perception of his.

Anyway, I hope that things with difficult child settle soon. Don't tell either child this, but another parent who used to be on here was told by cps in NY that she had to provide a home for her child until she was either 20 or 21. DO NOT TELL HER THIS OR GO AND ASK ANYONE. Cause until then you do not know the rule. This parent was told she couldnt force her child to stay but if the child wanted to stay there the parent had to open the door and let her even if the child hadn't been home in days or week. I am NTO sure it would stand up in court, and once she is 18 I would make the rules exactly as strict as I wanted and if she didn't liek it she could leave.

FYI, go and check the breakers to find out which one/ones power her room. Then you can turn off the power if she is in there and is p;aying music too loud, watching tv, has taken the computer in there, etc... It can be a very very USEFUL piece of knowledge. Also check out the hot water heater. Usually you can turn it off and end the hot water coming out from the tank. That means you can give her 5 min of hot water for a shower and turn the hot water off. She can rinse the soap out, but it will be cold. My gpa actually gave his kids 3 min of hot water and then it went off. Even for my aunt with waist length hair. It keeps them moving and not wasting hot water or tying up the bathroom if you only have one. In all likelihood her room has a vent that you can go in and close if you want her to not have air conditioning in the room (if you have central air). It is another thing that my father used to do. gfgbro used to go on rants about how wasteful Americans are with our central heat and air and long hot showers. At the time we swear he was choosing his friends by how awful they smelled. Not just unwashed and out working hard in the heat - unwashed for months with clothes that were never washed and some ate certain foods from their home countries that created a smell that came out through their skin that was truly awful (kim chee is a fermented cabbage of some kind that many of his friends loved but it reeks and it makes your body just reek for days after you eat it). So my dad got tired of the rants coming from this boy-man who took 45 min showers and then would come out yelling because the hot water ran out, would run the airconditioner at 65 degrees and then open his window if he got cold (in the OK summer with temps over 100 degrees), or would turn the heat up high so he could be comfortable iwth his window open in the winter. That is how I learned about the breakers, hto water heater, heat and a/c vents. Used to make my bro nuts, but not as nuts as my dad was after his rants, lol.

 

[Marguerite]

If you need to shut power off entirely, use a bush shower for everybody. I lived with one at my parents' place for a few years. We had no running water; there was one tap in the kitchen from the rainwater tank, that was all. The bathroom was being slowly built by my father; for the first few years you could look down through the plug hole and see the ground under the house. no pipes. Any shower water just ran free under the house and down the hill. Mum had planted some hydrangeas on the downhill side of the house, they caught the bathwater and stopped it becoming an erosive flood into the downhill neighbour's place.

The bush shower - it was a large plastic container (like a plastic jerry can) which hung form a hook above our heads. You could lift it down, but trying to lift it back up when it was full was tricky. There was a large hole cut in the top of one side of this so we could put water in; you could only ever fill it half full because of that hole. At the bottom of the container was a telephone shower attachment. There was another hook for the shower head piece so you could hang it up above the water level.

For a short hot shower, we put in one kettle full of boiling water (we did have electricity) and two kettles of cold, from the kitchen tap. With the shower head hanging up, no water would flow until you lifted it down. So - you stand in the bathtub (the whole apparatus was hanging up over the tub) and quickly wet yourself all over. Then hang the shower head back up again. Soap up. Lather your hair if you;re washing your hair. Take down the shower head and rinse off. Focus on your hair if you're washing it, the soap on your body will take care of itself. Hang the shower head back up again quickly, then check to be sure you've removed all the soap and shampoo. For a conditioner run, a leave-in conditioner is probably best. Use any remaining water to rinse hair again.

In a lot of drought-stricken areas, the shower water is collected and used on the garden. In that place, we obviously had no inside toilet. The outside toilet was literally a pit. Going there after dark was a scary experience so we had a bucket for communal night-time use. In the morning the bucket would be carried to the tank stand outside, filled with water then poured onto the vegetable garden. Tomatoes, not lettuces. On the ground, not on the plants. Not on the herbs, although some of it percolated through to the herb roots which was OK.

In warmer weather I used to go for a daily swim and take my shampoo and conditioner with me to the beach. There was a public shower there, cold water only, no cubicle. I stood there for all to see, in my swimsuit, and washed my hair after my swim. It was a bit chilly to do this in the middle of winter, but sometimes I was desperate and I knew my hair needed more than three kettles of water!

It can be done. It also should be legal. And I tell you, non-compliance with the time limit means you HAVE to get out, covered in suds, wrap yourself in a towel and go boil the kettle for a refill.

It was a valuable lesson for me - it was not punishment, it was necessity. I've been contemplating putting in a bush shower outside, for use after a trip to the beach. A black water reservoir container will automatically warm the water. Fill it before we go to the beach and it will be just right on our return. Couldn't leave it full, though - mosquitoes.

You haven't lived, until you've lived with tank water and having to drink your way around the tadpoles and mosquito wrigglers. You learn to leave them stranded on the side of the glass...

Marg

 

[donna723]

I think both kids and parents are different now. And it's happened fairly recently and it's NOT good. My own children are 30 and 35 now and it wasn't like this when they were kids either! Like someone else said, it started when we began to be obsessed with promoting children's precious self-esteem at all costs. Parents tried to be their childs' "friend" instead of a parent, didn't want to make them play by the rules because then the child might not like them anymore! And you don't ever tell them "No!" and mean it because that might make them feel bad! Praise them lavishly for every last little thing they do until it becomes meaningless and they think the world revolves around them because they are so "special"! They were afraid to ever raise their voice, talk to them sternly or correct them when they did wrong ... because it might damage their self-esteem and make them feel bad about themselves! Pump them up and empower them at all costs! And people with good intentions tried to do things to assure childrens rights and protect them from abuse. But then, as usual, it was carried to ridiculous lengths, they went completely overboard, they bent over backwards so far that now all authority has been taken (or handed over voluntarily) from the parents and the schools and given to the kids! The kids are in charge and they know it! Certainly not all of them, but so many have no respect for authority, no respect for the law, for their parents or teachers, no desire for education, no work ethic at all but have such a sense of entitlement! How has this been allowed to happen?

I tried to raise my own children pretty much the same way that I was raised (with a few modifications). When I was a kid, there was no doubt who was in charge ... and it sure wasn't us! I would have never EVER dared to mouth off at my mother, much less call her names! That was a line you just didn't cross, and we knew darned well that it wouldn't be tolerated. And because we knew this, we were never brave enough to try it! It wouldn't have been tolerated even once! Parents (and teachers) DEMANDED respect and a child who dared to cross that line would soon regret it and probably wouldn't try that again. Even when I was a teenager, if I had ever dared to disrespect my mother (or heaven forbid, call her names!) I KNEW sure as anything, my father would have knocked me right across the room! Right or wrong, that's what he would have done! And he didn't give a rats rear about our "self esteem"! And if I had ever dared to tell him that I was going to ignore the rules and do exactly what I pleased, he would have kicked my butt right out the door! You just didn't disrespect your parents in their own home when they were providing a roof over your head, the food you ate and the clothes you wore! And this wasn't just my parents, this was everybody's parents!

And I never tolerated disrespect from my own children either! They could speak their minds but there was a line that I would not allow them to cross and they knew it. This started when they were very small and there should be no doubt who is in charge. If one of my children had gotten very disrespectful, mouthing off, or had ever dared to call me a name, even once, they would have gotten their butts whipped badly enough that they would have been afraid to ever do it again! I'm not saying you have to be a dictator or be abusive, but you certainly do not tolerate it!

 

[klmno]

I agree with Donna with one exception- I tend to think it's all of society having this attitude (or most, not all) that parents are there to be the checkbook and just delve out to the kids and really aren't allowed to keep their kids in line. At least that was my experience- of course sd and courts people all said they expected me to keep difficult child in line but they sure never backed me up when I tried and they spent a lot more effort trying to fault me and look for a reason to turn difficult child opver to dss. But overall, I have tio agree that parents aren't in the role they used to be.

In any case, it appears to me, Jen, that your oldest is not showing you any respect because you aren't sticking to anything nyou tell her for more than a week or two then you change your position again. I know in your mind you feel that your positio0n is staying the same, but as an outsider looking in by only reading some of your threads (admittedly) it looks like yiou end up giving in on any decision you make about punishment after a couple of weeks. Obviously, your oldest isn't too worried about any punishment from you and there's a reason for that.

 

[AnnieO]

Count me in on the list of people that will not curse at their parents. I even feel weird saying obscenities when quoting something someone else has said. Very uncomfortable. Because it was not tolerated.

To go along with the "self esteem"... Jett complained and complained that people said he smelled bad. Yet, husband and I consistently had to remind him to bathe. Finally - about 4 months ago - I walked into the room where Jett and husband were watching TV together and said... "Jett, this is how things work. You complain that people say you stink, but you don't want to take a shower. From now on, we're not going to remind you to shower. If someone tells you that you smell bad, it's your problem."

...Still not using deodorant on a regular basis, but I haven't reminded him to shower in quite a while... Except for an early one, once or twice, for something special.

 

[donna723]

klmno, I agree with you that society plays a BIG part in this too. Somewhere in the last couple of decades we have managed to take all authority away from the parents and empowered the children to the point that NOBODY has any authority over them. And yes, the court system has played a big part in this too. The parents are held responsible for the childs actions but then are made powerless to do anything about it.

When I was a kid, you accepted that your parents, the school, and law enforcement agencies had authority over you until you were old enough and mature enough and responsible enough to go out on your own. You might not have liked it but you had to accept it because those people had the power to HURT you if you didn't! But now that authority has been taken away from them and the children are worse off for it. Our parents and teachers were strict and held us accountable for our actions and this was NOT a bad thing. We learned respect and responsibility and most of us were not coddled and showered with material things - if you wanted these things you were expected to work for them.

Do any of you remember the writer, Lewis Grizzard? Sadly, he died several years ago. He was the wonderfully funny Atlanta-based newspaper columnist whose daily essays painted a perfect picture of what life was like for kids of my generation. He was the same age as I was, raised very much the same way I was, went to similar schools, etc. There were several books published that are compilations of his daily newspaper columns and the titles were as good as the articles. My all time-favorite was called, "Who does my butt belong to now?" In this one, he talks about how he was always accountable to someone all of his life. First he was under the complete authority of his parents and was expected to respect and obey them. They were the parents and he was the kid. Then, when he started school, his mother turned over a portion of that authority to the teachers in his school, who also demanded respect and held him accountable. You could disagree if you wanted to but you did not disrespect these people because they could and would make you regret it! After he got out of school, he went to college - same thing. Then he joined the Army - no question there! Then he got a job, then he got married ... but he managed to make all of this funny! I don't remember now which of his books this column appeared in, but if you can ever find it, it's very enlightening and shows just how much things have changed in the last few generations, and not for the better either!

 

[TerryJ2]

Ohh, Marg, I LIKE the way you think!

that poop and piddle goes right into her bedsheets. failure to follow through on personal responsibilities brings personal consequences.

Jena, in regard to the kids having no knowledge or respect for your feelings, I think you need to give up on that thought. Don't lower your expectations--ERASE them. I have to walk around like a robot with-my difficult child, and then when he does something off-the-wall, like text me from the bus on his way home and write, "How are you feeling?" I am bowled over. But the rest of the time, I don't even bother to think that he can take my feelings into consideration. It is like banging my head against the wall.

 

[Jena]

hi

thanks for all the tips, responses thoughts. susie i think your right. if she can't follow rules she'll have to go. i'll have to be medicated to handle it and that'll be the way it goes down.

she's running all over me. i've tried my best to keep up with any punishment we've given. klmno where do you see i dropped it? i asked husband last night where i am lacking tell me please i'm good wtih that. he said your running strong and solid, giving therapy love while continuing to try to punish her, repeatedly calling cops that does absolutely nothing, lockign door when she doesnt' meet curfew, only gave her money in exchange for chores, and also kept labtop yet she keeps stealing it back. so it's really hard. whenever i leave she goes thru my room, now climbs thru my window.

so really i'm open tell me where i've dropped it. i tried to play it two ways help her as a parent should court issue, therapy etc. and at the same time be really rough with what she wants and not giving it.

i'm at a loss. i'm tired of blaming myself and feeling bad well she's like this because she doesn't know her dad, etc. enough already. she's been supplied therapy, she's been given all the tools to hanlde this if tha'Tourette's Syndrome what it even is. she's chosing not to. we give her love, stability, at the same time rules a sense of family. granted our bubble here's been rocking for a while with difficult child and hospitals. yet you know what life happens and you have to roll with it to some extent.

she's using everyone else as her scape goat why she's totally out of control.

 

[AnnieO]

Donna... "Elvis is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself" Lewis Grizzard? Yeah, he had a way with words.

Jena, hon... You will always love her. That never means you have to LIKE her.