Saturday, November 20, 2010

Dram-a-Rama

Kismet started school this week in our school district, at a regular school. She made it through 2 days before having problems again. She got upset during class on Thursday and Friday and had to leave early. I had taken those days off work to just try to unwind, because my job is pretty high stress, but it was impossible with her getting all stressed out at school and coming home.

She was given some consequences and was left in the charge of Moon Unit. Brad took off to work and I took off to get out of the house for a bit. I came back a while later to find that Kismet refused to do anything she was asked to do. I sent her off to do the things she was asked to do. Moon Unit called her a brat and I told her that it was unnecessary to name call. Moon Unit then decided to inform me that I'd been really rude to everyone lately.

Let me explain what rude means to Moon Unit. I have been asking her for 3 years (she is almost 20 years old) to get a job. She dropped out of high school her junior year and has been essentially a useless slug since then. She has always been resistant to being helpful in any way, like it's a serious infringement on her valuable time. And we have battled and battled for years because she is mouthy, snarly, and refuses to be helpful most of the time.

She's been off her father's insurance since April of this year so I said that once I had open-enrollment, I would put her on my insurance but that I was going to expect her to get a job and help reimburse the cost. I've been pushing that more and more lately. So now, I'm rude because she supposedly never asked to be put on my insurance (which, while technically true, was pretty implicitly implied she wanted to be on it) and I'm expecting her to pay for that and because we were asking her to help out with Kismet, which she doesn't really want to do.

So... I snapped. I told her if she didn't like it, she could leave. And she said okay, packed a few things in her backpack and grabbed her laptop and left. Mind you, this is ON TOP of Kismet's tantrumy day. I was pretty stressed out by this episode and honestly, not sure what I was feeling about her taking off like that. Part stressed, part relieved, part sad that it happened that way. I didn't expect her to be gone long but I also didn't expect her to return 3 hours later, blasting through our front door, storming down the hall to her bedroom, and slamming the door behind her. She's stayed there since yesterday evening.

Today we were out with Kismet at Walmart. We bumped into one of her grandmothers, who happens to work at the Walmart. We don't live in a big town and we knew she had some family members living in the area, but this was unexpected. The woman was very respectful and polite and even hugged us because we were taking care of Kismet. But it was horribly uncomfortable and it stressed out Kismet. Then, only 2 hours later, she's at McDonald's with a friend for a birthday party and calls Brad to inform him that she bumped into her bio-hazard-mom's friend at McDonald's. Lovely. Just lovely. We got her back to the house, hopefully safely and without anyone knowing where we live but now we are worried in case bio-hazard finds out who we are and where we live. We didn't give Grandma our names and Kismet had the presence of mind not to tell the friend where she lives but this does not bode well for us. So far, Kismet is handling it all fairly well, although it did stress her out for a bit and she was worrying. I think it's more us than her that's worrying.

And this is ALL on top of some serious financial troubles we are facing, between tax problems and Brad not getting in enough work hours due to Kismet's school melt-downs.

I'm just sure there's a throbbing vein in my brain that's just gonna pop one of these days.

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