This blog is my place to vent and share resources with other parents of children of trauma. I try to be open and honest about my feelings in order to help others know they are not alone. Therapeutic parenting of adopted teenagers with RAD and other severe mental illnesses and issues (plus "neurotypical" teens) , is not easy, and there are time when I say what I feel... at the moment. We're all human!

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Normal teen


It's all my fault, I'm keeping her from her friends and that's making her go "ballistic" so that's my fault too.  I want her to be sick.  I want her to go to the hospital and not be able to go to Nebraska.  She's not going to change, because I won't.  She's WANTS to be mad and refuses anyone's help with calming techniques.  "Whatever," she's just given up on trying to do anything I say because I never reward her with the privileges she wants...

She CAN'T do this.  She is NOT capable of being a normal 17yo.  She can do a lot of the things normal teens do, but she doesn't have the capacity to handle things going wrong.  You could leave a 6yo home alone... as long as nothing goes wrong.  They don't know what to do if a scary man rings the doorbell, or they heat their cocoa in a metal cup in the microwave and it starts a fire, or they forget they turned the bathtub on, or they decide to cross the street and misjudge how fast a car is going, or one of the dogs gets bitten by a raccoon, or a sibling says something mean and "deserves" to be punched...  that's why we don't leave small children unsupervised.

I can therapeutically parent the child that she is, BUT she HATES me for not letting her be a normal teen.  She's getting angrier and angrier as everyone is leaving her behind.  She can see that she's being treated differently, but can't accept that it's because she IS different, and not because we hate her.

After being yelled at for hours I'd had enough.  I told her I was going to change.  She could do whatever she wanted for 24 hours, and I was going to do the same.  I took one of my other kids shopping.  She instantly got on the phone, left the house and met a bunch of boys at the park.  Hubby only knew where she was going because he asked her right as she was leaving.  She left the park with a girlfriend and went to her house.  Right at night fall (10 minutes before room time) the girlfriend's father drove her home.  We'd all eaten pizza, but she chose not to eat.  She stayed up another 2 hours, and overslept the next morning (I told Hubby to go ahead and wake her up so she wouldn't miss the bus, only because she had final exams).

Today I gave her a list of chores and wasn't home when she got home from school.  I told both girls if the chores were done I'd take them shopping.  She did a half-assed job at some of her chores.  Her sister begged off because she needed to study for finals so I said I wasn't going to go shopping because I didn't want to.

I confronted her about her bad choices the day before and she was shocked that they counted against her.  She wants to continue to have the privileges of being a teen, but none of the responsibilities.  She wants to be able to scream and threaten me, and then have everyone act as if nothing has happened.  I get that she's not capable of dealing with the consequences, but the reality is that doesn't mean we can live with her as long as she blames us for treating her like she's mentally ill.

I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place with an avalanche coming.  We can't just stick with status quo anymore.  A big part of me wants to just leave her in Nebraska and drive away, or provoke her until she ends up in the hospital or jail so we don't have to live like this anymore.

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