(no subject)
Times like this are difficult, and it reminds me that raising a teenager is really damn hard. I know it's hard for everyone; teenagers are challenging and obnoxious and brilliant and push boundaries and are supposed to be the best-and-worst part of raising a child... But raising your teenage sister is hard in an entirely different way. My days are never short of situations that leave me unsure and afraid of my own answers. There's no feedback to tell me I'm on the right path, and I can't depend on the 16 year old I'm parenting to help me feel better about how I'm parenting her.
No matter how hard I try I'll continue to have as many failures as I have successes, and sometimes that really sucks.
It would suck even if she was my teenager and I wasn't engaged in a constant battle with her mother. That bullshit, it just makes this all the more fucking hard. Every poor test result, angsty crisis class or random medical incident is another reason to remind me that I'm the scum of the Earth and don't even deserve the children that are biologically mine.
It isn't Krazy right now, it's me. Or it's everything that surrounds the whole idea of "Krazy and I; how it affects me and probably shouldn't. I don't know.
Marika's doing really well: we've made it through the last crisis of deception and emotional problems relatively unscathed and she isn't challenging me any more than usual. She's smart and capable and I'm actually feeling confident enough to admit that it's partially our guidance that has helped her come so far. She's not a straight-A student, I don't expect her to be, but the very fact that she attends school on a regular basis is such a vast improvement from living with her mom... I'm just happy she's showing up and completing her work. I'm not going to set her unreasonable goals; I want her to know how proud of her I am, and I want to make it easy for her to make me proud after living a life where she was punished for being normal.
That wasn't my point. I keep getting off track. Every time I try to talk about this shit it changes into me reassuring myself and others that we're doing a good job with Marika. We're trying. It's hard. We're doing what we can and trying not to fuck up every step of the way. There are so many voices around me, telling me how to do this the "right" way, and all of them are different. Even the voices in my head don't match: Heather the guardian, Heather the parent, Heather the sister, Heather the friend... A lot of times I don't know which one I should listen to. There's so much pressure not to make any mistakes, and so many strangers telling me how I haven't stopped making mistakes since the moment we rescued her after she climbed out a restaurant window and went missing. What the hell was I supposed to do? She called me in tears and said she couldn't live that way anymore. I'm not going to leave her in the goddamn dirt.
I knew it would cause a rift, I'm not stupid, but I couldn't abandon her when she asked for my help. She was 14 years old, confused, scared, angry and hurt... even if she was the nastiest teenage daughter in the world it's not like she doesn't deserve a safe place to be while she works her shit out.
We've worked so hard to help communication get better between her and her mom. We provide her with boundaries, we provide her with safety nets, we provide her and her mother with opportunities for safe and happy communication, we help Marika learn skills to deal with outbursts and arguments... we listen, support, comfort, love, hold, encourage - all the while hearing what horrible people we are from her mom. We listen to her demands to know why we're "keeping them apart" and "sabotaging" their relationship, we listen to her insults, her screams, her rants, her nasty messages that she sends to us when Marika isn't home. The seething rage that she spits at us when Marika inevitably finds out the things her mother said.
"You make sure she hears!" she accuses; it's our fault Marika is disappointed or upset with her mom's behavior.
The more we try to console her mom, the worse it gets. Eventually we're forced to hang up on her when she calls, not answer, or block communication between us all together before it gets too bad. All that does is prove her right, and give her more fuel for her next assault. There's only so much of it I can take before I have to back off and take a breath. It's not like I want this situation. It's not like I get off on this bullshit. I hate fighting with her, I hate hearing her yell and scream through the phone and watching my kids try to overhear what's going on as I'm choking back tears. I don't want to be the stand-in mom who can't even talk to her real mom... I want us to work together.
It just seems to get worse no matter what we do. I feel so helpless; I can't do anything right, I can never please her, I can never do a goddamn thing that makes her happy or proud of her own fucking daughter because she's not willing to admit she'd made improvements since coming here. Every little accomplishment is either ignored or outright punished, so we end up having to find approval where there is none to convince Marika her mother actually cares more about her than her grudge against me.
And through it all we're still trudging along trying to make it work every fucking day. I'm so tired of this shit. I just want it to end. I told Curtis this would be so much easier if she would just go off somewhere in a cave and go nuts, or if she'd give up...
But now?
Krazy has cancer.
We learned about it not that long ago, but were the last to know. She told absolutely everyone in her town, including all of Marika's old friends, before she told her own daughter. Marika feels betrayed, confused, angry, hurt, desperate, and terrified.
"Why didn't you just call and tell me?"
"I don't like to call the house, Heather and Curtis aren't respectful enough to me for me to call and talk to you."
"But you could have just told me! Why didn't you just tell me?"
"I asked you to call me. You never talk to me."
"We talk on Facebook chat every day. Why didn't you just talk to me?"
"If you loved me enough, you would have called and asked."
Marika wants to see her mother; give her support, love her, spend time with her - but her mom hasn't changed. Being sick makes everyone think you've got a second chance, as though the side effect of a scary diagnosis creates is a divine epiphany that suddenly makes you rearrange your priorities.
I watch Marika go into her room with the telephone, keeping her tears and her hopes restrained, so desperate for some progress... then she comes out 15 minutes later in hysterical tears, "Why is she doing this to me? I just want to tell her I love her. Why does she act like such a bitch! I don't want to be mad at her when she's... I don't want to." Being sick doesn't change anyone.
What do you say? What do you do? What the fuck do I do to make this better? I want to protect her and tell her to back away, take a breath, set some boundaries. But I also want this to work. I want her to never give up on this. I don't want to pull her and her mom apart; so I'm left trying to create opportunities for Marika to reach out, and then I'm forced to step in and take the fall when someone has to take the phone away after I find her curled on the floor listening to the sound of her heart breaking.
"Why does she do this? What can I do?"
Do I act like I would if she was my daughter? Do I remind her I'm her sister? Do I tell her two different answers if I have them? Do I try to pretend I'm an unbiased third party? Do I remember what it was like when her mother was abusing me at this age, and I was the one crumpled in a heap begging for her affection and approval? I don't exactly have an answer key for this, I don't know what to do.
Her mom went in for a surgery today. She had her tonsils taken out, and a biopsy done on the lump in her neck. All we know at this point is that it's cancerous... everything else is still up in the air.
Marika is terrified. She wants to see her mom, visit her and support her. I want her to visit her too... but I'm scared to let her go, because of every single time I have it's gone horribly wrong. Not one damn visit has gone right. So we talk about it and talk about it and talk about it, and I let her know that we want her to support her mom in any way she can without being crushed to death by the weight of her own guilt and her mother's aggression. I try to let her know that it isn't her responsibility to care for her mom emotionally or physically.
Today we got a call from her school counsellor at around 11:30am, saying that Marika had a breakdown in class and was sitting in her office talking about how badly she wanted to see her mom. The counselor effectively threatened us: if you don't arrange to have her up there ASAP - as in tomorrow - I'll do it myself.
Curtis took the call. He was dumbfounded by her threat and not-so-subtle accusation. He stuttered and stammered and tried to tell her that it's just not possible for us to drop everything: we have a busy life, jobs, family, small children, one car for 6 people that barely even works (7 now, with Marika's cousin staying with us temporarily), and the drive up there is three hours each way.
When he hung up and told me what had happened, I was furious. He called the counselor back and told her he was deeply uncomfortable with what she'd said. I was sitting in the bedroom, listening, furious: how dare she insinuate that we're keeping her away from her mother? How fucking dare she act like we don't care?
The counselor apologized. Marika was sent home. We talked. She has an appointment she can't miss on Wednesday, so we agreed to do it Friday.. it would also give her a chance to get her homework done.
I wanted her to confirm with all the contacts before she talked to her mom: dad to help drive, her friends for a place to stay overnight so she wasn't with her mom all the time, and finally her mom herself to let her know she's coming to visit.
Dad called later and said that he wanted her to go up on Wednesday night instead. I was so raw from the counselor's attacks on our "parenting" that I burst into tears. I know it wasn't what he meant, he just wants to help Marika, but it feels like everyone is telling us how shitty we're doing. That we're not doing enough, that we don't care enough, that we're making the wrong choices.
Marika isn't the only one freaking out. I can't hate Krazy, as much as I try to. This is hard for me, too. I'm scared, I'm terrified. I want to go up and sit with her, give her a card, hug her, tell her that I care about her... and the worst part is that I know if I so much as tried she'd be screaming before I even got in the door. If not her, then she'd sic her friends on me and my family.
She hates me so much... and I just can't hate her back. I can hate her words, her actions, her opinions, but I can't hate her.
I try so fucking hard to do the right thing. I spend every fucking day trying to make this work, trying to make sure Marika still knows her mother loves her, getting her into counseling, taking her emotional problems on, walking her through, learning, loving, holding her while she cries, bursting at the seams with stress and sadness and guilt and knowing that the only person who gives a fuck about what we're doing is dad.
Meanwhile I'm getting emails and Facebook messages from strangers telling me karma will get me for what I've done, I'm going to hell, my children would be better off if I died, I'm selfish, I'm a monster, I'm manipulative, I brainwashed Marika, that everyone in her home city loves Krazy and rallies against my evil...
There's only so much of it I can let roll off my back. This isn't the internet; these aren't anonymous trolls screwing around, this is real fucking life. These are real people: grown women and men, sometimes even their children, whom they are also sending out to do this to me. Children!
I can't even try to reason with them. The one time I emailed one back and told her that I thought she was mistaken, that I was happy Krazy had friends to support her but that she had only half the story and I'd be more than happy to sit down and talk with her to help her get through any fears she had about the home life Marika has... she called me names in a reply. I blocked her. I found out later, through her child, that she'd talked about this communication to dozens of people, twisting my words and telling everyone that I was a manipulative psycho trying to do my worst to screw up Krazy's life and torment her until she withers away and dies.
I don't even know these people. I've never met them before in my life. They say such horrific things about me, about my family, my children and my life... and they don't even know who I am. Pressing charges for harassment would only make the situation worse: not only does it prove their point, but it creates a larger rift between Krazy and Marika, as well as Krazy and I - as fucked up as it is I want to do as little as possible to make it worse. I've put a filter on my inbox that puts any messages from these people in the trash before I see them. That helps a little. It doesn't do anything for Marika's side... she's started getting them to: except they don't insult her, they insult me through her, try to convince her she needs "rescuing" by saying horrific things about us. She comes out in tears asking why they hate me so much and I have no answer for her. I make jokes, laugh it off, let her know it's ridiculous while validating her pain... and when she's gone I sit and cry and wonder when it will ever get better.
I hate this.
No matter how hard I try I'll continue to have as many failures as I have successes, and sometimes that really sucks.
It would suck even if she was my teenager and I wasn't engaged in a constant battle with her mother. That bullshit, it just makes this all the more fucking hard. Every poor test result, angsty crisis class or random medical incident is another reason to remind me that I'm the scum of the Earth and don't even deserve the children that are biologically mine.
It isn't Krazy right now, it's me. Or it's everything that surrounds the whole idea of "Krazy and I; how it affects me and probably shouldn't. I don't know.
Marika's doing really well: we've made it through the last crisis of deception and emotional problems relatively unscathed and she isn't challenging me any more than usual. She's smart and capable and I'm actually feeling confident enough to admit that it's partially our guidance that has helped her come so far. She's not a straight-A student, I don't expect her to be, but the very fact that she attends school on a regular basis is such a vast improvement from living with her mom... I'm just happy she's showing up and completing her work. I'm not going to set her unreasonable goals; I want her to know how proud of her I am, and I want to make it easy for her to make me proud after living a life where she was punished for being normal.
That wasn't my point. I keep getting off track. Every time I try to talk about this shit it changes into me reassuring myself and others that we're doing a good job with Marika. We're trying. It's hard. We're doing what we can and trying not to fuck up every step of the way. There are so many voices around me, telling me how to do this the "right" way, and all of them are different. Even the voices in my head don't match: Heather the guardian, Heather the parent, Heather the sister, Heather the friend... A lot of times I don't know which one I should listen to. There's so much pressure not to make any mistakes, and so many strangers telling me how I haven't stopped making mistakes since the moment we rescued her after she climbed out a restaurant window and went missing. What the hell was I supposed to do? She called me in tears and said she couldn't live that way anymore. I'm not going to leave her in the goddamn dirt.
I knew it would cause a rift, I'm not stupid, but I couldn't abandon her when she asked for my help. She was 14 years old, confused, scared, angry and hurt... even if she was the nastiest teenage daughter in the world it's not like she doesn't deserve a safe place to be while she works her shit out.
We've worked so hard to help communication get better between her and her mom. We provide her with boundaries, we provide her with safety nets, we provide her and her mother with opportunities for safe and happy communication, we help Marika learn skills to deal with outbursts and arguments... we listen, support, comfort, love, hold, encourage - all the while hearing what horrible people we are from her mom. We listen to her demands to know why we're "keeping them apart" and "sabotaging" their relationship, we listen to her insults, her screams, her rants, her nasty messages that she sends to us when Marika isn't home. The seething rage that she spits at us when Marika inevitably finds out the things her mother said.
"You make sure she hears!" she accuses; it's our fault Marika is disappointed or upset with her mom's behavior.
The more we try to console her mom, the worse it gets. Eventually we're forced to hang up on her when she calls, not answer, or block communication between us all together before it gets too bad. All that does is prove her right, and give her more fuel for her next assault. There's only so much of it I can take before I have to back off and take a breath. It's not like I want this situation. It's not like I get off on this bullshit. I hate fighting with her, I hate hearing her yell and scream through the phone and watching my kids try to overhear what's going on as I'm choking back tears. I don't want to be the stand-in mom who can't even talk to her real mom... I want us to work together.
It just seems to get worse no matter what we do. I feel so helpless; I can't do anything right, I can never please her, I can never do a goddamn thing that makes her happy or proud of her own fucking daughter because she's not willing to admit she'd made improvements since coming here. Every little accomplishment is either ignored or outright punished, so we end up having to find approval where there is none to convince Marika her mother actually cares more about her than her grudge against me.
And through it all we're still trudging along trying to make it work every fucking day. I'm so tired of this shit. I just want it to end. I told Curtis this would be so much easier if she would just go off somewhere in a cave and go nuts, or if she'd give up...
But now?
Krazy has cancer.
We learned about it not that long ago, but were the last to know. She told absolutely everyone in her town, including all of Marika's old friends, before she told her own daughter. Marika feels betrayed, confused, angry, hurt, desperate, and terrified.
"Why didn't you just call and tell me?"
"I don't like to call the house, Heather and Curtis aren't respectful enough to me for me to call and talk to you."
"But you could have just told me! Why didn't you just tell me?"
"I asked you to call me. You never talk to me."
"We talk on Facebook chat every day. Why didn't you just talk to me?"
"If you loved me enough, you would have called and asked."
Marika wants to see her mother; give her support, love her, spend time with her - but her mom hasn't changed. Being sick makes everyone think you've got a second chance, as though the side effect of a scary diagnosis creates is a divine epiphany that suddenly makes you rearrange your priorities.
I watch Marika go into her room with the telephone, keeping her tears and her hopes restrained, so desperate for some progress... then she comes out 15 minutes later in hysterical tears, "Why is she doing this to me? I just want to tell her I love her. Why does she act like such a bitch! I don't want to be mad at her when she's... I don't want to." Being sick doesn't change anyone.
What do you say? What do you do? What the fuck do I do to make this better? I want to protect her and tell her to back away, take a breath, set some boundaries. But I also want this to work. I want her to never give up on this. I don't want to pull her and her mom apart; so I'm left trying to create opportunities for Marika to reach out, and then I'm forced to step in and take the fall when someone has to take the phone away after I find her curled on the floor listening to the sound of her heart breaking.
"Why does she do this? What can I do?"
Do I act like I would if she was my daughter? Do I remind her I'm her sister? Do I tell her two different answers if I have them? Do I try to pretend I'm an unbiased third party? Do I remember what it was like when her mother was abusing me at this age, and I was the one crumpled in a heap begging for her affection and approval? I don't exactly have an answer key for this, I don't know what to do.
Her mom went in for a surgery today. She had her tonsils taken out, and a biopsy done on the lump in her neck. All we know at this point is that it's cancerous... everything else is still up in the air.
Marika is terrified. She wants to see her mom, visit her and support her. I want her to visit her too... but I'm scared to let her go, because of every single time I have it's gone horribly wrong. Not one damn visit has gone right. So we talk about it and talk about it and talk about it, and I let her know that we want her to support her mom in any way she can without being crushed to death by the weight of her own guilt and her mother's aggression. I try to let her know that it isn't her responsibility to care for her mom emotionally or physically.
Today we got a call from her school counsellor at around 11:30am, saying that Marika had a breakdown in class and was sitting in her office talking about how badly she wanted to see her mom. The counselor effectively threatened us: if you don't arrange to have her up there ASAP - as in tomorrow - I'll do it myself.
Curtis took the call. He was dumbfounded by her threat and not-so-subtle accusation. He stuttered and stammered and tried to tell her that it's just not possible for us to drop everything: we have a busy life, jobs, family, small children, one car for 6 people that barely even works (7 now, with Marika's cousin staying with us temporarily), and the drive up there is three hours each way.
When he hung up and told me what had happened, I was furious. He called the counselor back and told her he was deeply uncomfortable with what she'd said. I was sitting in the bedroom, listening, furious: how dare she insinuate that we're keeping her away from her mother? How fucking dare she act like we don't care?
The counselor apologized. Marika was sent home. We talked. She has an appointment she can't miss on Wednesday, so we agreed to do it Friday.. it would also give her a chance to get her homework done.
I wanted her to confirm with all the contacts before she talked to her mom: dad to help drive, her friends for a place to stay overnight so she wasn't with her mom all the time, and finally her mom herself to let her know she's coming to visit.
Dad called later and said that he wanted her to go up on Wednesday night instead. I was so raw from the counselor's attacks on our "parenting" that I burst into tears. I know it wasn't what he meant, he just wants to help Marika, but it feels like everyone is telling us how shitty we're doing. That we're not doing enough, that we don't care enough, that we're making the wrong choices.
Marika isn't the only one freaking out. I can't hate Krazy, as much as I try to. This is hard for me, too. I'm scared, I'm terrified. I want to go up and sit with her, give her a card, hug her, tell her that I care about her... and the worst part is that I know if I so much as tried she'd be screaming before I even got in the door. If not her, then she'd sic her friends on me and my family.
She hates me so much... and I just can't hate her back. I can hate her words, her actions, her opinions, but I can't hate her.
I try so fucking hard to do the right thing. I spend every fucking day trying to make this work, trying to make sure Marika still knows her mother loves her, getting her into counseling, taking her emotional problems on, walking her through, learning, loving, holding her while she cries, bursting at the seams with stress and sadness and guilt and knowing that the only person who gives a fuck about what we're doing is dad.
Meanwhile I'm getting emails and Facebook messages from strangers telling me karma will get me for what I've done, I'm going to hell, my children would be better off if I died, I'm selfish, I'm a monster, I'm manipulative, I brainwashed Marika, that everyone in her home city loves Krazy and rallies against my evil...
There's only so much of it I can let roll off my back. This isn't the internet; these aren't anonymous trolls screwing around, this is real fucking life. These are real people: grown women and men, sometimes even their children, whom they are also sending out to do this to me. Children!
I can't even try to reason with them. The one time I emailed one back and told her that I thought she was mistaken, that I was happy Krazy had friends to support her but that she had only half the story and I'd be more than happy to sit down and talk with her to help her get through any fears she had about the home life Marika has... she called me names in a reply. I blocked her. I found out later, through her child, that she'd talked about this communication to dozens of people, twisting my words and telling everyone that I was a manipulative psycho trying to do my worst to screw up Krazy's life and torment her until she withers away and dies.
I don't even know these people. I've never met them before in my life. They say such horrific things about me, about my family, my children and my life... and they don't even know who I am. Pressing charges for harassment would only make the situation worse: not only does it prove their point, but it creates a larger rift between Krazy and Marika, as well as Krazy and I - as fucked up as it is I want to do as little as possible to make it worse. I've put a filter on my inbox that puts any messages from these people in the trash before I see them. That helps a little. It doesn't do anything for Marika's side... she's started getting them to: except they don't insult her, they insult me through her, try to convince her she needs "rescuing" by saying horrific things about us. She comes out in tears asking why they hate me so much and I have no answer for her. I make jokes, laugh it off, let her know it's ridiculous while validating her pain... and when she's gone I sit and cry and wonder when it will ever get better.
I hate this.