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His daughter (15) is against me…
12 May 2007 by Rod Smith in Attraction, Step parenting, Stepmother, Teenagers, Voice / 12 Comments
Reader writes: I am living with a man who has a teenage daughter (15) who is so against me I can hardly stand it. She does everything she can to undermine our relationship and she has a mouth like a sewer. The child was not living with us until she had problems with her mother and they decided she needed to live with her father. This has made my life quite uncomfortable and he will not tell her she should treat me with respect. Please help.
Rod’s Response: I’d suggest you never tolerate or embrace poor manners from anyone and so I’d suggest you move out. It is unlikely you will make much headway if you try to insist the father stand up to his daughter or if you make him choose between the two (or three if you count his ex-wife) women in his sad life. Finding alternative living circumstances on your part will allow the family issues, which precede you by many years, to play themselves out to their inevitable conclusion. This is not giving up, or giving in, it is simply the early realization that you are taking on a battle you will ultimately lose.
About the Author: Rod Smith
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Verbal log-jam
When I was a boy I’d endlessly practice the fluent delivery of my name but it seldom flowed easily from my lips. As if it was new news to me, adults pointed out my stutter. Perhaps they thought I was beginning, at that precise moment, for the first time in my life to spit from the mouth, twist at the neck, jig my head back and forth trying to expel some inane statement log-jammed between my gut and my throat.
Idiots – always adults, children were surprisingly patient, – would make me repeat sentences as if a repeat performance of the humiliating uncoordinated gesticulations, my arms and legs flying in all directions, would make for an easier delivery the second time. That I’d just spent every ounce of energy trying to cough it up was lost on them. That I was already thoroughly humiliated was something to which they were blind.“Practice, practice,” they’d say as if stutterers simply didn’t speak enough. “Think before you speak. Now – try that again,” they would declare slowly and loudly as if I was stupid and deaf. These thoughtless people were ignorant of just how much stutterers do think. Too much – which is central to the issue!
If I’d known at twelve or thirteen that the day would come when I’d make a career of public speaking I might have strolled off a high-rise building.
Now it is quite easy to hide. I am very comfortable with crowds.
It’s asking driving directions or ordering food at a drive through where it gets tricky. Sitting in a cozy circle waiting for my turn to introduce myself sends my blood-pressure through the roof. The ticket attendant on the London underground can render me dumb after I’ve just spent days addressing a room full of graduate level adults about Family Systems Theory. I know. It sounds ridiculous.
I was almost immobilized the first time I saw Thulani put himself “on duty” in the event he needed to be my mouthpiece. He did it. No one asked him or appointed him. He just did it.
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Life in our beloved 122
If the inside of a house (outside, too, I suppose) is a metaphor of the lives of the people who live in it – which is something I once read somewhere – gosh, are we in trouble. Our house is a mess.
I consistently clean it room by room, thinking often of the legend that the Golden Gate Bridge that says there’s some guy constantly painting it. I feel for him. While I am sure the view is wonderful I must believe that the poor guy whose doing it daily from one end to the other must find the wind and the weather quite a challenge.
Our house is the same, but instead of painting from end to end and back again, I am the guy constantly cleaning, – and, it’s hard to tell.
Where I cleaned and swept and dusted and vacuumed and sponged and sterilized yesterday there are scooters and bicycles (boys), mail in piles (me), books (boys and me), newspapers (me), magazines (me), and socks (boys and Max, the Chihuahua).
Turn my back and the boys and Max are at it again – enjoying life as boys (and a dog) while I find being a cleaning lady quite an exhausting challenge.
There is a point of no return, I’ve noticed, or at least a point of the chaos where I feel compelled to let it all go for a while and I throw up my hands and join in the fun of trashing the place.
But when I clean I like to think I’m just like the guy painting the Bridge, which I can only imagine must be a slow and methodical task.
I do it room by room, starting at one end, the front, in the event that I soon lose interest – then, at least, the front room is somewhat in order. I push it (trash, magazines, books, socks, clothes) all back from the living room, through the piano room, then into the TV room until everything lands up in the kitchen.
Once it hits the kitchen I separate out what’s Max’s – he’s has his own set of toys with which he ruins the house – what’s Nate’s, what’s Thulani’s, and what can be recycled, dumped, restacked on bookshelves, placed in drawers, hung on a hanger, or filed in the “important documents” file I keep losing.
We moved into “122” (creatively named for its street number and which has had very few updates since it was built in 1886) when Thulani was about two – and I have been getting it in order ever since. Nate joined us in 2002. Max, in 2009. The house- attachment, at least for the boys and Max, is strong. When I talk of selling Thulani reminds me that Rhino, the husky that was on the run for nine months and returned to die within a few weeks after we reconnected, is buried in an Air France first class cabin blanket just outside of the kitchen door. Nate reminds me of where the fat goldfish is buried and Thulani ends the litany with his inability to think of living in a house without the large tree in the front yard where he has his brother (and Max) have “peed like boys” (and a dog) for the past several years.
So. I’ll go on painting and, before you send me letters about giving the boys chores and responsibilities and assigning daily tasks and getting on top of it before it gets on top of me let me advise that you are barking up the wrong tree (sorry, Max for the dog metaphor) because we do have all that in place and it does work here and there and off and on.
I know, I know. Consistency is the name of the game for parenting and let me tell you, the ONLY thing that is consistent here is the need to keep going room by room with or without the boys (and Max) to get this little bridge painted one stretch at a time so the world can see just how organized and decent our lives are here at our beloved “122.”
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Being a white South African can come with complications
Being a white South African reared under Apartheid is no simple matter. It permeated everything for me. While I do not pretend to have been a political activist, I was always cognizant that my privileges, simply a result of being born white, were unmerited, and most unfair especially when enjoyed at the expense of others who were not. I think this unsettling truth (for I took advantage of my station in life) was somewhat of a companion to me from the age of about six or seven.
I am regularly aware that:- I was discouraged from playing soccer in the “front” yard (in view of the neighbors) with the servant’s children. While this may seem insignificant in the light of other much more severe problems rising from racism, it was huge for me as a child on several fronts. I loved the children and I loved soccer even more. They were excellent soccer players.
- I did attend a segregated school as did almost all white South Africans while there did exist some church schools that were integrated even under Apartheid. I vividly recall my school principal scolding the entire student body (over a thousand white boys) because a domestic worker (a black adult man) was seen walking in the neighborhood wearing a school blazer.
- Although, by no means wealthy, I was waited on hand and foot by a full-time servant.
- In the late 80s I was warned not to pray publicly for Prisoner “Nelson” Mandela from my church pulpit.
- A member of my family did balk at my request that I bring black children to his home-swimming pool to swim.
- Even as late as 1987 I was embarrassed that a young black boy whom I’d “helped” in his squatter camp had shown up at my door unannounced. I recall wondering what the neighbors would think seeing a child arriving at the home for a social visit and not to work in the yard.While I am aware that these are piddly problems in the light of what millions faced under the Apartheid regime, I am also aware that these factors in my immediate environment “shaped” me into believing perverse things (like in my own superiority and in “their” inferiority) about persons of other race groups. More significantly, I am frequently reminded that my children and I could not have shared life as we now do if we were still living in the era of Apartheid.
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Location, location – remembering winter in August
We live very close to our school and church, so close we can hear the school bell from our kitchen and the church bells in my bedroom.
Sometimes we walk to both and we don’t see the car for days.
I like it. I like not having to get in and out of the car. I like not having to negotiate traffic, something as synonymous with life in the USA as Disney, Fast Food, and the Fourth of July.
That’s the upside.
We are a 10-hour-drive to the nearest coast – and, most of the east coast beaches are not worth the drive. The west coast, which has many wonderful beaches comparable to where I was reared, takes three full days of driving to reach.
Being landlocked is one thing but another is the weather. Indiana weather is erratic, neurotic, and downright psychotic.
Days ago I could’ve (but I didn’t) ice-skated across the street. Now, as I write, there’s a small lake in the street next to the sidewalk from last night’s rain. The weather is so brutal and extreme (it is as hot as blazes in the summers) that when we do drive anywhere (there are no grocery stores in walking distance) the streets are often full of potholes making some of America’s finest suburban streets resemble stretches of road you’d find in a rural stretch of South Africa’s Wild Coast. So, I am exaggerating but really not too much. Washington Boulevard is a challenge to drive right now, you have got to dodge potholes and loose pavement or, unless you drive a tank, you stand to severely damage your suspension.
But I do love living here. My neighbors are some of my best friends. My children are free and safe in the neighborhood and everyone knows everyone’s children. Even as I write Joseph (born a week or so before Thulani) from down the street has wondered into the house and it is quite likely he will eat with us, stay the night, and then wander down back down the street to his home sometime in the morning. His mom and I will talk sometime between now and nightfall unless he of course chooses to wonder off home and be gone just as quickly as he showed up.
Potholes and crazy weather won’t send us running, although we will drive to church in the morning – even though it is really close. I’m not sure I want to brave the elements which could be a snow-storm, an ice storm, the threat of a tornado – or a little or a lot of each. What else could you expect during March in Indiana?
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Ready to adopt?
If you wait until you are ready to adopt a child you never will because you will never be ready. The baby, and only the baby, will make you ready. Reading the right books will be helpful, but “ready” magically comes upon you when a real baby is sleeping in your arms or crying in the middle of the night. If you are not ready to change diapers – and I always am amused at the big deal about this non-issue – being unprepared will last only as long as a clean diaper. Of course you can go baby-stuff-shopping, get a room painted, stencil yellow ducks on the wall – if you know long enough in advance your child is coming. But painting a bedroom with ducks and rainbows and a pot of gold, and getting a truck load of stuff from your local one-stop baby emporium will only fill your home with a lot of weird and wonderful, and mostly unnecessary, equipment.
Children interrupt everything. It is the child who is really ready to teach you, whether you are or not. Once he arrives he will become the hub of all your scheduling. You will be fine with this because the child is not an interruption to your life but rather, from this point on, central to it.
The baby will make you ready and you can’t really prepare for the baby until he is breathing in the crib right next to your bed.
Life inside the Smith household
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12 Comments
tobeme
This is one of those rare times where I disagree. I believe that by moving out you give the 15 year old control and that is what she wants. I believe the there must be a unifed front between the Father and Stepmother and that they take complete control of this situation. This can and will change when this happens. The 15 year old is a guest in this home and should be treated as such.
14 May 2007 02:05 pm
Rod
….. it is NOT a step-mother…….. and in which case I’d be making a similar suggestion as you are making, tobeme…… this daughter, dad and ex-wife have a lot of work to do before the live-in girlfriend will be a priority. Getting in the middle of unresolved family conflicts with no legal contract (marriage) will render the man’s girlfriend a second-class citizen in his home — marry her, and everything changes! The guest at present is the live in lover…. at least the dad and daughter have legal ties.
Peace,
Rod
14 May 2007 06:05 pm
tobeme
Rod,
I appreciate what you are saying, however I respectfully disagree. I do not believe the marriage contract will change the dynamics of this relationship. Married or live in, this can be considered a permanent relationship and therefore to me the same strategy must prevail.
Are you suggesting that if the Dad marries the girfreind that the behavior of the daugher will change for the better. I believe this 15 year old will only escalate her bad behavior and make attempts to drive a wedge deeper between the man and the woman. I still belive that one has to be very careful as to not give this child control over the adults life’s.
We share different viewpoints on this, and that is okay. Hope all works out for this family.
16 May 2007 09:05 am
Liz
I have a very similar problem and hope someone will give me some advice. I have been seeoing a wonderful man for some time now. I’m far younger than him,but love him dearly. He has 2 children, only the 1 one was staying with him when we 1st got together. His son. (Who is 18 years old, does nothing all day, but smoke weed, and get drunk.) He is a very nice biy though, and I have no problem with him. His daughter however, was staying in Dubai and has only recently moved over here. She is 13 and irritates the hell out of me. She is so manipulative. She has her father twisted around her finger and is spoilt to hell. We get along sometimes, but she trats her father like rubbish, and that boils my blood. I’m trying to make this work, and my boyfriend will always side with me when she is in the wrong, but I dont know how much more I can take. I get home from work and have to clean the house after she has been home half the day doing nothing but messing it up. She stresses her father out so much that i’m worried he might have a heart attack. I am refered to as dude, and am totally disrespected. Yet i’m the one doing everything for the kids, and by doing this I feel as thoough i’m double the age I am. How do I deal with this, and do you think this could work at all. I was never like tis as a child, and cannot believe there are actually children like this.
18 May 2007 07:05 am
Grace
Since I’ve actually lived this particular scenario, I hope that some of what I learned can be of help. See, my second marriage did not withstand the issues of blending a family with not one, but 3 children…two of them teens and one a preteen.
First and foremost, I recommend that the families (whether the partners are married or not) get into professional family counselling IMMEDIATELY. I’m not sure what the exact statistics are, but the divorce rate amongst couples with children from previous marriages outpaces the horrendous rate of first time marriages.
My stepson at the time viewed me as the Enemy. I represented the final death blow to that well-known fantasy that almost all children have – that somehow, their parents will reconcile. Children very often feel as if the divorce was their fault – as irrational as that may be, it’s their FEELINGS. It’s important that we understand that the child is projecting all of the rage, all of the fear, all of the heartbreak OUTWARD towards their new scapegoat.
Many parents feel very guilty about their divorces, and so have unhealthy and inappropriate boundaries with their children. They overcompensate by allowing too much, or not expecting enough. This creates fuel for a fire that is going to rage anyway….anyone who has raised teenagers understands that this may be one of THE most challenging times in the family life – even if the nuclear family is still in tact.
As difficult as it may be to hear, blending families rarely works. If one has the option (meaning, they are NOT already married to their partner), I would suggest seperate living arrangements. It doesn’t mean that the relationship can’t continue, but I would remove myself from the dynamics of the parent/child/exspouse and regain a sense of self and peace.
04 Jun 2007 09:06 am
Lisa
I had the same situation with Liz. My boyfriend is a lot older than me but we love each other dearly. He has 3 daughters almost as the same age as me. My observation is ..You can never compete with blood…especially for us gals without children married someone with children…You will always be the second class citizen but he is your whole world…so unfair!!! I am just trying gathering enough courage to leave him.
11 Oct 2007 08:10 pm
Samantha
Hi. I’d appreciate any advice. I’ve been married 5 yrs to a man 16 yrs older than me who has a daughter 12 yrs younger than me. She is 22 now. She told her dad last night how she doesn’t feel part of this family, and that she gets hurt every time she sees me. I’m at a loss. I feel like I’m very kind to her. She often takes shots at me and I have historically made the mistake of not calling her on it and shrugging it off. My husband said that I act cold and distant. I can see how I might retreat when I feel that she’s taking her shots. I don’t do confrontation. Not well, anyway. I have a daughter who’s 3, and my step daughter is not very involved w/her, though she says she loves her so much. I’ve tried to encourage her to come on over, she’s always welcome. Whenever I see her, I feel and act warm and friendly (until she takes a shot than I get quiet). I guess I’m hurt and confused that she’s always finding fault with me. I’m confused how to treat this person so close in age. I feel like I have to bite my tongue around her-which I can see isn’t working. She’s coming over tonight, so I am going to put on a parenting hat and offer to listen to how she feels. Argh. My heart feels very heavy. I really want to blow up at her for all the yrs (10 or 11 now) of her walking on me. It’s my fault for not setting boundaries. I guess my big question is- how do I do this relationship? She’s a bright, immature, narrisitic, beautiful, funny, emotional 22 year old. I love her, and am unsure of my role and how to do myself with her. I don’t want to hurt her or be hurt by her.
Thanks for reading this very long rambling explanation.
26 Sep 2008 04:09 pm
Rod E. Smith, MSMFT
Dear Samantha:
This young woman appears to have too much power over you. Remove and discard your “parenting hat.” She’s a fellow adult who is not behaving very well while a guest in your home. Until you challenge her, and until she learns to stand up to you (as opposed to manipulating you) neither of you will realize the full joy and potential of being in each other’s lives.
Write again, please.
Rod
27 Sep 2008 09:09 pm
Di
Its such a relief to hear that I am not the only one to experience rejection from steps. I have been through it all!!! Its been 4 years now since my husbands 3 teens invaded our home. They were very traumatised by the divorce. They started out living with Mom. Both Mom and kids went off the rails completely and the children came to live with us. I was more than happy to have them with us…until their intensions were revealed…to cause as much disruption as possible for myself and my 2 younger children with the intention of driving us apart, and my husband to return to his ex. His 16 year old daughter was particularly manipulative and there was nothing private. She went through everything of mine, even my accounts and relayed everything back to her mother. Her mother poisoned them against me at every opportunity. To cut a long story short, we have survived. It backfired on the ex and we have ended up a happy family. My advice, you have to be VERY sure this is what you want and that you love your man, or your life and that of your children can be hell. It takes time and understanding. Good Luck!
09 Oct 2008 11:10 am
Jamie
I have been dating a great guy for almost 2 years now. I have three children of my own of which one only lives with us. He has three children and one grandson in which one, 17 year old girl, lives with us with her son, one, 12 year old boy, lives with us mostly and the other one, 18 year old girl, lives with her mom. I was the free babysitter for the grandson and the 17 year old takes advantage of me. If I tell her no for any reason she goes crazy. This last time was the last straw. I told her I didn’t want to watch her son to take him down to the babysitter. She then jumped on me and started choking the heck out of me and beating on me. I tried to push her off and then her dad pulled her off of me. She jumped on me twice before the police were called. I am tired of her trying to make her dad choose between her and me. He loves me to death and we are about to get married and I would never try to make him pick me over any of his kids. I love him and all of our children. HELP!!!! I don’t want to loose him. Me and this child can not live together anymore.
01 Feb 2009 05:02 pm
Jamie
continued…. He let me stop working to go back to school to go for my dream of becoming a nurse. I draw unemployment and that pays my child support and phone bill. He pays all the bills at the house. Me and him have both tried to tell his daughter that he would be paying all that even if I wasn’t living here. I watched her child for free. I love that baby as if he was my own grandson. I am so scared of what will happen if she moves back in. HELP!!!!
01 Feb 2009 06:02 pm
Jane
I’m 17 and my father remarried when I was 14 and it’s been downhill from there. My stepmother has kicked me out twice in less than 2 years and she’s forcing my father to support me outside their relationship, which is hard for him. The woman likes to control everything.
30 Jun 2009 09:06 pm
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