My daughter told my wife that going to the ballet was "the worse thing that ever happened to her." She came home crying and screaming. If I try to get involved Maggie tells me not to. My daughter has been driving Maggie into a state of depression over the last week, and I can't do anything about it. She's so *mean* to Maggie. I mean, she says things I can't even believe.
I took her upstairs and tried to talk to her. She wouldn't listen at all. It was fucking useless. So now, Maggie is mad at me for trying to talk sense into our daughter, my daughter is mad at me for the same, but frankly, my take is: if you're going to act like that, you should just be sent to bed. Period. I feel like we just let her get AWAY with things. I'm sure Maggie would disagree, and she may be right, but...
Shit.
10 comments:
Sounds like a disaster. I hope all of you can figure out what to do, and come up with a compromise. Good luck. :)
Yeah that's intense. There can be only one queen of the house, and they need to figure it out between themselves.
Boys/man are so much simpler creatures.
There's also one king in the house. Assert your authority.
I don't get it, Rich. Why is she so angry at your wife for taking her to the ballet? I can't say whether I'd be on your side or Maggie's, because I think it depends on what the issue is between the two of them.
Of course, you could just forget to pick her up from her gym class for an hour or so, and then she'll start to be more grateful for the little things. Not that I'd know, of course...
Doesn't parenting just blow sometimes?
She's just angry at my wife because she's her mom. I think it's probably just relatively normal girl vs. mom water-testing... but it sucks.
Or... maybe it is because your wife is married to a commie pig...
Commie?
Oh my goodness. I'm pretty much the poster boy for entrepreneurial capitalism.
What made you think that?
I don't tolerate hatefullness in my home. Take a breather and discuss it. But deliberately hurting each other's feelings is hateful.
Go sit on the porch until you've thought it through.
MsAmber
Hatefulness?
Jeez. Even with all this craziness, I would never classify it as hatefulness.
I don't know if this will help, but as a former pre-teen/teenaged girl myself, I thought I might offer some insight on this sort of behavior.
I used to say some pretty absurd and awful things to my mom, too, that really hurt her feelings. It wasn't that I didn't love her, or that I didn't like her, or even so much that I resented her authority-- it was because I felt very insecure at that age, and didn't like myself very much at all. I was so stressed out all the time about how I looked and how many friends I had or didn't have and what other people thought of me that I tended to lash out really disproportionately about all sorts of little things my parents "did to me," because I was looking for something to focus all my stress and fear and anger on. And my mother was the easiest target, because I knew she wasn't allowed to stop loving me.
Maybe this sort of behavior would improve if you found some activities for your daughter to help boost her sense of self-worth (subtly, of course, because if she knows that's what you're trying to do, she's only going to get angrier *sigh* little girls! can't live with or without them ;) ). If she finds something she's good at that also helps her feel better about herself and find new friends, she might snap out of the funk. For me it was long-distance running, which I discovered at the age of 14.
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