7/28/2009 My Troubled Teen – Part II

New Life, New Problems, Many Revelations

It had been several years since the three of us had lived together without my boyfriend and his children. My older daughter and I had a lot of adjusting to do. The “troubled” daughter was happy as a clam. She was out of there, away from the one man she despised most in this world. It turns out she truly hated him and never had any intention of trying to get along. In a way, she sabotaged the situation, pushing his buttons and making him react poorly. He, in turn, acted as much like a child as she did half the time. They were incompatible, but neither would make the first move toward a workable relationship for the good of the order. I thought our new life would be the perfect answer. Again, what I thought and what it was were two different things.

The younger daughter and I got along on the surface, but little did I know she had entered into a period of major experimentation. I found clues along the way because I often cleaned and combed her room, but didn’t pick up on them collectively as a major problem. When I found cigarettes, she gave me a wild story about a friend who was a smoker and wanted to hide them from her abusive father. I told her I thought she was lying, but took her word for it when she said he wouldn’t have cigarettes in her room anymore. I found a half dozen lighters and bought it when she said she used them to soften her eyeliner pencil. I saw that she changed the spelling of her name and believed her when she said she just wanted to stand out. When I noticed that the two bottles of beer that kept for tenderizing pot roast were gone, I didn’t think much of it when she told me that she threw them away because she thought they went bad. The kicker was when she left her email box open at my mom’s who found a message that included a picture of a naked boy. She explained that it came in her spam email, she had no idea who sent it, and she clicked on delete – end of story. I let that one go, too.

Stupid? I’m a total moron and I sometimes can’t believe how much of one I was. I simply didn’t see what I didn’t want to see. Bad stuff wasn’t supposed to happen in my family. I’m as straight-laced as they come and she didn’t see me doing anything unseemly.