:-(
Many posts on this board about dd.
She went to stay with my mum and sister for 6 weeks at the start of the academic year after some violent outbursts which ended in us getting the police involved.
Things had been a bit better since she got back, but the last few weeks she has started to become more and more difficult with me again, and started getting into trouble again at school.
The long and short of it is that she is verbally abusive to me pretty much every day at the moment and it's destroying me emotionally to the point where I'm starting to feel ill and unable to function as a parent to my other 2 younger dc's.
This morning she asked me to buy her a McDonalds for breakfast. I said no - there was bacon and eggs, bread, yogurt, porridge, flour for pancakes. I told her to make her own breakfast. This precipitated an hour of verbal abuse - I am tight fisted, poor, pathetic, a loser, friendless, lazy, my work is worthless, nobody likes me, I'm useless to everyone.
I try to detach and ignore, but she will follow me around insulting me.
She bullies me and shouts me down, refuses to comply with any requests, constantly reminds me that she can do what she likes when she like, and there is NOTHING dh and I can do about it. She often tells me to 'shut up', makes obscene comments (in the car on Wednesday she spent 10 minutes telling me how she had sucked 5 men's cocks and fucked 15 boys one after another - all rubbish but just said to disgust and distress me. I am pretty sure she is not having sex with 1 boy, let alone dozens), shoves past me in the hallway of the house.
She shouts at me and abuses me if her uniform isn't ready in the morning (if I haven't remembered to hang it out to dry after it has been through the washer), tells me my cooking is disgusting and that the house is disgusting because I'm lazy and useless. She berates me for not having a full-time job or much money, laughs at me, tries to play DH off against me. Says he could do much better than me and that I should just leave.
The abuse is pretty frequent and almost always starts in response to me saying 'no' to her - no you can't have a sleepover on a school night, no you can't have money for the kebab shop, or if I ask her to do something she doesn't feel like doing eg get up in the morning, do some homework, whatever.
She is aggressive, nasty and disrespectful to some of her teachers at school as well, and is currently facing a possible permanent exclusion for disrespectful and disruptive behaviour.
She has a rationale for it all: apparently I am abusive to her because I let her sleep on a new mattress on the floor for several months (was trying to sort all the children's beds out - new bunk beds for the little ones, and she didn't like her old bed frame as it is old fashioned, so I dismantled it ready for storage). She also until recently had no door on her bedroom - it had come of its hinges after she tried to slam it in DH's face a few months ago and he pushed it. Her room is at the end of a long hallway with no other rooms going off it so she still had some privacy. Plus her window is cracked after his cousin kicked a ball into it - not so that there are holes in it, but the glass is crazed in one of the 4 squares. Also took her curtains down to wash and haven't put them back up (no privacy issues, her room overlooks a private garden) and sometimes condensation goes a bit mouldy on her window frame. None of these things are great but the rest of the upstairs of the house is worse. It's a biggish Edwardian terrace and quite scruffy - there is so much to do that we feel overwhelmed by it. Never the less - her room is decent by the standards of the other bedrooms. We put new laminate flooring in about 2 years ago, all the (sadly single glazed) windows were refurbished 3 years ago
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Teenagers
In despair - can't go on
minifingers · 14/12/2013 14:24
Can't believe there are posts here suggesting it's the OP's fault for not redecorating the room!
If that was my dd, there would be serious repercussions - no money/phone/treats etc. I agree that she is doing this a) because she's angry - who knows why, but living in a depressing environment for years, having younger sibling with asd who gets attention she would like, feeling unloved because she was sent to your mums, etc may be contributory factors if not the whole reason. b) because she sees you as weak so thinks she can get away with doing this - and maybe also make herself feel better by making herself feel in control in some way?
So possible solutions - she clearly needs help - anger management, getting to the roots of her 'issues'. I do think how we behave is to some degree a matter of habit - if she has got used to acting as the 'bad' child then she needs help - maybe a different environment where she isn't labelled and doesn't see herself as labelled - to break out of that. So therapy or foster care not such bad ides if uou see them as giving her chance for a clean slate and fresh chance not as abandonment.
Secondly, she needs limits and high but clear expectations. Written rules, discussed between all of you as a family eg no hitting/hurting, no shouting, no deliberate damaging of the house etc. You don't say how old she is, but she needs to understand that your house = your rules and if she doesn't like it, tough; she can move out as soon as she's old enough or go into foster care now.
Thirdly, you need lots of tlc NOW. Go out, leave dh in charge, go see friends/your mum/sister etc. Watch a relaxing film, have a nice meal, a warm bath, whatever. Treat yourself. Your own health and mental wellbeing need to come first, or how can you be there for any of your kids?? Plus you deserve it for YOU - you are not the family's skivvy.
treat yourself. Hope you resolve it a little bit. Ultimately, as others have said, it really is her problem not yours, but you are obviously a very caring mum who wants to be there for your dd too. Good luck.
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