These past 24 hours have left my stomach in knots. It all started with the call yesterday informing me that I needed to start facilitating additional visits for the girls and has been "downhill" from there.
The call to their mom this morning (see post #2 from this 24 hours) left me frustrated with myself for falling into her manipulative trap (to cut myself a LITTLE bit of slack, I'm sure she has spent many years perfecting it...and I'm an easy target.) I'm still upset that I agreed to let the little one spend an entire 12 hours with her unsupervised considering up until now, they have been getting maybe 9 hours a WEEK supervised. I suppose, in a way, I'm doing as I was told, but I still have an uneasy feeling that it isn't the right thing to do.
I worked myself up to talk to the teenager about her grades. I'm not upset by them because she is working SO hard and WANTS to do well. I know she has been frustrated that her effort isn't really showing up in the grades she is getting. I decided that I would approach it as having her look at them with me and show her that MY observation is that she has trouble with assignments that are written (like papers) and that reading is hard for her. From there, I was planning to suggest she either talk to her teachers about helping with those things or allowing me to read her homework before turning it in.
Well, my best laid plans did not work out so swell. She got defensive and snotty and refused to look at me or talk to me. She knelt by the side of her bed for over 45 minutes doing homework while I stood in the doorway and stared at her because she refused to look at me or talk to me. The only reason our "silent treatment" came to a halt was the three-year-old decided she was done watching Dora and wanted some attention as well. She snuck past me as I said something to the effect of you WILL be talking to me...and her response was that there was nothing to say.
And so, I shut the door to her room leaving a crying three-year-old in the hallway and said we HAD to talk. I let her know that I didn't understand why she was upset because I was NOT in any way, shape, or form upset with her and wanted her to let me know if I did something to make her THINK that I was. At that, she burst into tears, still hiding her face and refusing to look at me or talk to me. I told her how proud I was of her and explained that it appeared to me that reading and writing are tough for her, likely because she has been in many different schools in her life and is now in a private, college-prep high school. She continued to cry and not speak, but agreed that later she WOULD talk to me.
So, I left her be to do her homework/study and came back to my crying 3-year-old who felt "abandoned" even though she had her Dora (I rarely let her watch TV and we got this movie at red box because I thought my friend was coming over to visit and I needed something to occupy her while we talked!) Now she is whining and clinging to me and it upsets me even more that I'm sending her to be with her mom for 12 hours tomorrow.
I am afraid the next 24 hours won't be any easier, so "good vibes" and prayers are definitely appreciated.
Time to put the little one to bed...and hope that the teen is ready to talk.
1030 update: I took a side trip to the pharmacy for migraine medicine for the teen, tylenol and ibuprofen for the toddler with a 102.7 fever. The teen and I are making a song about vitamin B12 but have yet to have "a talk". What a night!
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