The First Good-Byes

We haven't had much time together as a whole family this past few years. First, Brooke flew off to Germany to go to school. She came home for the summers, but she was gone for two and a half years.

That first good-bye nearly killed me. Watching her walk away, suddenly very grown up. I'd like to say that I handled it as the most mature of parents would, bravely armed with the knowledge that she was going on a wonderful adventure. I couldn't bear to watch her walk through the security gates so I turned around and caught Sugar's jaw shaking. When my grandmother's jaw shakes all bets are off.

I spent a good part of the next month crying at the drop of a hat. I tried to muck out her room for her, but I just sat in the middle of her room and cried. Her room sat unpacked until we moved into the home we live in now.

Brooke is a Green Day girl, they aren't just her favorite band they mean the whole world to her. And for that first year I had to avoid Green Day totally. While enjoying a birthday dessert run with a friend of mine I broke down in the middle of Applebee's when I heard "Time of Your Life."

Yes, I did learn to handle it better. I guess we all do, we have no choice. My kids are still teenagers, I thought I had a long time to go before empty nest syndrome reared it's ugly head. A lot of mommas are feeling it right now. As babies head of to school big boys and girls and big boys and girls head off to become women and men.

It was a little bit easier to let go of Justin last year and Mystery this year because their dad is a lot closer now. A six hour drive versus half a world. I get to see them fairly regularly, and we can stay in contact. Justin and I even pass notes while he's in class through one of his projects.

Mystery, she's always been my independent one. I haven't heard a lot from her since she went to live with Daddy, but I didn't expect to. She has always been a very busy girl, only her interests have changed with age. Boys are replacing bunnies and school dances are far more interesting than documentaries with mom.

Brooke is 18, but she will be 19 at the end of October. Justin, my only boy will turn 16 just after that. The baby of the family, Mystery, is 13 until May. I was supposed to have a few more years with them, but things just don't work out the way we'd like sometimes.

They are going to grow up one way or another, and I know I can't stop it. In fact that's kind of what we've been working towards all along. What we didn't know is that my husband's little girl would need us even more than my kids did. And we had no way of knowing the chaos that her extended family would bring to us through her.

My husband was never married to her mother, in fact they were never really together. It doesn't take a lot to bring a child into this world. All of this happened a few years before I met him, and I not only knew that he had a child, I knew her mother. Better than my husband did actually. I went to high school with her, and her first husband was my ex-husbands best friend.

I came with baggage too, I met a confirmed bachelor and within a few months he was coming home to a woman, three kids, two dogs, and a mortgage payment. I had just escaped a rape attempt and was not dealing well with it. I wasn't even divorced from my ex husband when we met.

But as prepared as we thought we were, neither of us ever dreamed that her mother would be as involved in our lives as she is now. When Rose was with her, we really only had to deal with her every other week. We heard a few things that worried us, saw a few things too but once it all broke and Rose had to come live with us we got the daily version.

Rose is a good kid, she is trying to work through the things she's experienced. She's come a very long way with us too. Her grades have not only improved, but her skills testing have gone off the charts. Coming up as much as two grades a year. Her speech problems had improved as well.

But then something happens in her moms life that sends her off of the rails. Even living with us full-time, when her moms life becomes unstable everybody elses has to follow. It affects my step-daughter, it affects my marriage, and it affects my kids. We are always doing damage control for something quite beyond our ability to control. And we can do nothing about it.

I miss my husband. I miss my family. But I can't stand feeling like everything is out of control. I had to step away for awhile and clear my head. Try to figure out how to make some for of workable family among us again. I can live without my kids part time, but we still need each other. We have always worked together as a team and I hope in some capacity we always will.

We will be together again as soon as we figure out how to get things back under-control again. Ed and I talk every night, but when the subject of how to fix all of this comes up the line goes dead. No way to control another person, no way to go back in time and change it, no way to make it go away. We have to deal with it... and we know... but the how keeps stumping us.

Two of my kids are in Colorado Springs, My husband and step-daughter are back home, my oldest is back home with them but she can't live with the chaos either, so she has her own camp trailer to live in. I am 8 hours away in Arizona.

No, this is not the family we worked so hard to build at all. Not at all.

Someday I will have to forgive Rose's mother for that, but I do not think that today will be that day. Tomorrow is not looking good either.

Step Parents and Reactive Attachment Disorder

I don’t want to hurt anybody, of that much I am certain. But I did, and this I know. And yes, I hate myself for it. But I didn’t know what else to do. When I figure it out I will let you know.

At this time home is not a happy place. We have a happy marriage. We have a happy family. But our home life has been hijacked by the baby-momma. She is a Dementor.

No matter how hard I try to keep my marriage and my family on keel there is this big dark force just sucking the life right out of us. There are literally times when I am afraid to do or say anything. We just have to try talking some more. Smile and hope it goes away. If we discipline, mommy just makes it all better. Smoothes it over. And makes sure it keeps right on happening.

Or accuses us in court.

A kid gets caught stealing your bras and panties, you should be able to do something. Goes through your private things. Tries to pit one person against another. Lies. Steals. 

My step-daughter has a lot of symptoms of Reactive Attachment Disorder but shes never received treatment for anything specific. She sees a general counselor that she likes, but there is no diagnosis that gives us a sign. All I know is that it is an ongoing battle with many of the symptoms on the list. We’ve caught her holding pets by the throat. She is seductive with boys, including my son.

I can’t keep smiling and saying don’t wipe boogers on the bathroom wall anymore. You are 12. We know better. I can’t keep ignoring the things that go missing. She has pulled chairs out from behind me, smashed my children's toys to pieces, stolen my private notebooks.

And I don’t want to share my most private spaces and things with anybody but my husband. Come on man, my bras, underwear and socks? And it isn’t because she doesn’t have clothes. She has piles of them and her mother sends trash bags of more clothes every few months. It is that they are not hers. So she wants them. And she admits it.

She eats all of my gluten free food too. I have to keep food in the house that she doesn’t like just so I can eat. Whole gallons of ice cream disappear. Boxes of cookies. And sometimes... we find those half full boxes crammed in the trash. Sandwiches with two bites missing. Apples barely touched. And the stuff we find in her room....

And her mother offers nothing. No money. No discipline. No support. Just grief. She  is just there to make sure we can do nothing about anything. We made her miserable by taking her child and she is bound and determined to make us the same.

And maybe she wins... I don’t know.

I don’t want to be to my breaking point. But the joy and life is being sucked out of my home by someone who doesn’t even live there. All of the things we valued as a family are being sucked out of us. My husband is my best friend. My soul mate. But we just flat from one crisis to another and it never stops. Ed is as lost as I am. Nothing we have tried has really worked.
My kids all moved out. They no longer want to live at home. That kills me. It kills me every single day that I can’t provide a home for my kids that they want to live in. They want to be with mommy, they want to be with Ed, they want to be a family again but everyone just got to their breaking point.

My family is falling apart and all I can do is watch it.

I feel really, really alone in this. And so does he.

And we shouldn’t, we have worked hard to build a strong marriage over the last ten years. It should be Dementor proof, but I’m not so sure anymore. We are all just so tired.

She rewards what we try to punish and punishes what we try to reward.

It is his daughter and if he asked me to choose between him and my children he knows which choice I would make. But he loves me and he would never ask. And I love him so much I can’t ask him to make that choice. He has to choose his child.

So I sent one of my children away, and then another, and finally my little Mystery. They were being exposed to things they didn’t need to be exposed to. Thanks to an older sister with no boundaries, such lovely details as what oral sex tastes like and detailed explanations of sexual abuse have been shared with my children.

I worked hard to raise my children without those influence in their lives and someone else's carelessness as a parent is taking it away from me. I had no choice but to let my kids go. I have no way of bringing them back. I have always, always, always tried to do what is best for my kids and I have to admit that what is best for them is not being with me right now. And now I have sent myself away too.

It kills me every single day.

No more rock star fridays. No more dressing up together at Halloween. My reasons for being have gone somewhere else to live better lives and I can’t do anything about it. Because it’s true. And if I had been the one who was putting them in danger it would be one thing. But it was someone else. And she is putting a huge strain on my marriage too.

My husband, I don’t know where he is. He wasn’t like this before the Dementor took over either. It has just drained the life out of all of us. I know where he is physically, but emotionally? My husband is the love of my life. But I don’t know what to do anymore.

We can’t send his daughter back, we love her too much for that. We all do. She has already seen and experienced way too much. We all have a responsibility to protect her. To keep her safe. And that responsibility is going to last at least another six years.

I don’t know what to do... I have failed. 

“No mommy... I do it by self.” Parenting is Letting Go

Even before they were born, I knew that there would be things out there that would hurt them, it’s an inevitable part of human existence, but like any parent I still hoped that it was possible to just... you know... protect them from...  

Everything.

Eighteen years in it hasn't gotten any any easier. From birth onward, parenting is a process of letting go.  Give them roots and give them wings, that’s what we were supposed to do, right?

Yeah,  it sucks.Our children have to grow up and we have to let them. They have their own lives to live. The growing up is the easy part... it's the letting them that gets rough.

Even now as my one and only adult child explores her new grown-up world, I am having a very hard time with the letting go part. I am a mother. I want to protect her now, as much as I did the first time I held her. And she just wants to fly.


As one phase of childhood makes way for the next, both parent and child are forced to adjust. From their first skinned knee to their first broken heart, those hurts will come, and most people will survive those hardships relatively intact. Trying to protect them does no good whatsoever, but would we really be parents if we didn’t try?

I constantly question my parenting, well... I constantly question everything but.. I have more help in some ares than most.

I'm not just raising the three children I brought into this world, I am raising my step-daughter Jade full time as well. We keep having to rehash the same old argument about an adults right to happiness versus their responsibility to keep the children involved in their lives safe, but we don't seem to be getting anywhere with the adults. As a result we have a little girl who has seen and experienced far too much for her age. If trying to keep the other kids from growing up too fast is important to us, trying to keep her age appropriate is crucial.She's not having any of it.

With children ranging in age from 12 to 18, we are in the home stretch now. This is that phase that my young parenting self referred to as “the easy part.”

The naive little fool.

While I certainly do have more parental freedom these days, the kids have new freedoms as well... and it is all new and scary for everyone. I can leave the house a lot faster now than I could in the

A few of my old friends from high school are just starting their families. Their Facebook streams are filled with ultrasound images and proud first moments. I love seeing their children grow up, hearing about their joys and triumphs. I love watching the parents try to memorize each moment of their babies lives as if they can freeze it. They can't. Believe me, we have all tried...

We tried to pay attention, to hold on, to save every second of it too. Cooing, rolling over, sitting up. We watched their eyes light up when they learned something new too. Our heart swelled with pride but at the same time our heart broke just a little too. Each step towards adulthood is another step away from us. Away from the safety of our arms and into the world.

Then last week the daughter of one of my oldest friends announced that she got married. For a moment I was once again convinced that she skipped a few birthdays. The little girl who used to draw pictures of angels for me is a wife now. She will be a good wife, but damn if it wasn't supposed to be another twenty years or so before the possibility of growing up even crossed her mind.

Some are just taking their first steps, some are heading off to college, and some are getting married, and all we can do is watch them grow and let them go.We all say the same thing though: "It just happened so fast..."

I’m not ready to boot mine out yet, but I didn’t have to. Two months after Brooke turned eighteen she came home and said, “My friends and I found a house, and I’m moving out.” Our natural instincts are kicking in. We are getting on each others' nerves... she’s already beginning to hate me for meddling, so I guess it really is all on schedule.


I worry that I forgot to teach her something crucial. My late night checklist of “Things That Could Go Wrong” is in overdrive right now. I don’t get a retake here, what’s done is done. How did that experiment work after all?

In the spirit of honesty though, I must now admit that my daughter is technically only a block and a half away. She still comes over a few times a day. She raids our fridge, uses our washing machine, and hangs out to talk. She just sleeps somewhere else now. Just like that. She is still a momma’s girl; we are still close, but she is becoming what she was meant to be all along. An adult.

Jade, is the youngest and at the same time the oldest. She is headed for adulthood at a dead run and where we had to push my kids towards adulthood, with her we are having a hard time putting on the brakes. She's ready for perfume and makeup and curling irons.We want her back into Spongebob instead of Heartthrob.


Even my baby Mystery is slipping through my fingers. She will turn 13 this year. Officially a teenager. Ouch. Every time I look at her I see the signs of a little girl slipping away and that strange woman sneaking in and taking her place. Her hero isn't Scarlett O'Hara anymore, it's Elphaba Thropp. She doesn't want to be a vet anymore either, now she wants to be an attorney because they still help others but they make better money.

Justin's voice on the phone is not his voice anymore. He’s not a man yet, but... he is. I feel so far away from him and his life. From all of their lives. I am going from being the mom who knew all of their friends and their friends parents to not knowing where they are or what they are doing. Justin is still going to school with his Dad and I miss him. I still can't watch Toy Story without crying, but that's okay... we always have Star Wars.

That shadow above his lip isn't just a shadow anymore. He is taller than me now, and the distance between the tops of our heads keeps growing every time I see him. I knew there would be a day when he would look down upon me, but I didn't really think it would happen, not really. The other day on the phone he lectured me about his big sister. He informed me that she was growing up, and I might not like all of the decisions she is making right now but I couldn't protect her from everything.

He also reminded me that I did a good job, I gave her roots and I gave her wings. I did my job, she made it... she's an adult now.

My oldest moved out...Breathe momma, breathe...

I tell myself that she will flop and flail here and there and I will want to rescue her but she'll come to me when she needs me. If she really needs my help I will be here but now is the time to trust her. To trust all of them.

I have worked so hard to teach them how to make good decisions for a reason. I never wanted them to make the decisions that were right for me, or for their father, or even their future partner, I wanted them to make the decisions that would take them where ever they were meant to be.

I know, deep down they will all be fine. The toddler years just keep coming around again in new forms.

“No mommy... I do it by self.”

What does parenting have to do with politics?

It has been a really negative year for everyone politically, you can't even turn on the news without seeing more negativity. Fighting and name calling are becoming par for the course. Our own government is acting more like a class of preschoolers than a leadership body made up of mature adults. Not just one party, but both are playing the "I don't like you, so you can't come to my birthday party" game.
  

I used to joke that maturity was overrated, but a little bit of maturity wouldn't hurt any of us right now. If you have a truth to speak then by all means speak it, but the minute we resort to including personal attacks and name calling we can no longer consider ourselves responsible adults.

One of my favorite parenting experts is a woman named Susan Stiffelman. She calls her parenting approach Passionate Parenting. She has taught me the futility of power struggles. The more you seek to control another person, the more they resist that control, and the faster you lose the control you seek. 

 

Perhaps she should expand her book to explain that this applies to every situation, not just our own children. We can all share our views as loudly and even as aggressively as possible, but when we shut them out before they even get a chance to hear it, what is the point of saying it at all?

It has been a year since I made the commitment to remain positive no matter what the situation. I picked a bad year to do it, and as hard as I have tried I still have a very long way to go. Along the way I have had to cut out a lot of activities, going to my much loved locals-only site is just one of those things. Not because anyone there has been unkind to me or attacked me in any way, but because the negativity is not only a physical but an emotional drain.

Those who teach positive living say that it takes five positives to counteract a single negative. If so, then the cloud of negativity hanging over this country is going to take centuries to conquer. Those same experts also teach that we should not focus on what we don't have, but what we do have. Instead of focusing on what is going wrong, we are supposed to focus on what is right. I'm not saying that it is a bad thing to speak your mind or to disagree with what is going on in the government right now. I'm just saying before you complain, see if you can find a way to turn that complaint into positive action.

One thing I have always stressed to my children is that bitching has never solved a single problem. Instead of focusing on the problem, focus first on the lessons we can learn from it and then focus on finding the solution. My children understand this concept, but so few adults seem to these days. Even my children know that smart people use their brains, and the rest resort to calling names. 

 

What are we teaching our children right now? That is is better to hate than to love? That it is better to complain that to take action? That it is okay to call other people names as long as you don't like them? That anyone who does not agree with you is the enemy?

Children do learn these lessons whether we mean to teach them or not, and it might seem okay to teach them to attack that which they do not like but... there will be times in every child's life when they do not like us. When those lessons come back to us, they sometimes hurt.

One area of our life affects every other. If we insist we are teaching our children respect but can't offer respect to our neighbor or even our president, then we aren't teaching them respect at all. We are teaching them to hate, and we really have no right to be surprised when that hate comes back home. Teach them love and compassion. Teach them to speak their truth respectfully. Teach them to create, not to destroy.

We Need to Teach Our Daughters... (And Our Sons)

"We need to teach our daughters to distinguish between a man who flatters her-and a man who compliments her. A man who spends money on her-and a man who invests in her. A man who views her as property-and a man who views her properly. A man who lusts after her-and a man who loves her. A man who believes he is God's gift to women-and a man who remembers a woman was God's gift to man. And then teach our boys to be that kind of a man."

On dating sex offenders and other such stupidity...

This is a public service announcement from the snark side.

One should not have to explain to a full grown adult that it is wrong to date sexual predators, but I’ve seen plenty of women defend their right to date who they choose. After all, when he explained the story it wasn’t as bad as everyone made it sound.

Forgive me for being blunt here. but do you really think someone is going to say, “So, I was having sex with this kid a few year ago...” Of course they are going to have a cover story, who the hell is going to admit that they are a danger to a child? Yes, some accusations are false it does happen. These are those red flag things that people sometimes talk about.

You know, those things people ignore until it is too late. We can’t always see them, some pedophiles are pros they come off as loving, caring, nurturing. We all want to believe that they are all creepy perverts in trench coats, when it is an upstanding member of our community, someone from our social groups, or god forbid a family member... we deny it. When it is a hot young female teacher, we don’t even consider it molestation.

Our natural tendency is to defend what we know, if they are like us then they can’t possibly be BAD. If you never understand anything else about sexual predators please understand this. They are very good at what they do. If they walked up to children drooling with a hunchback what child would trust them? They play on a child trust, and to do that they have to look just like everybody else... or maybe just a bit better. You can bet they will have a way of making themselves attractive to children, and often to adults as well.

If there are even rumors of a past abuse of history, pay attention to it. You don’t have to put it front and center. You don’t have to picket the guy (or girls) house. But be aware, watch how much time they spend with children and how much of that time is monitored. Without proof, all you can do is be wary... but once that proof has been obtained. The moment you know that person is a danger to your child your job as an adult is to keep them the hell away from your child.

If you can’t do your job, them somebody else needs to.

I know I am a strange mother, that most women, when finding themselves on a date with a prince of a man so not look them in the eye and say... “I was abused as a child, if anyone ever layed a hand on my children I would kill them, and the cops could have what was left.” I still checked his criminal record before he was allowed to meet my children.

Oddly enough, he married me.

It is my job as a mother to do all I can to keep my children safe. I will fail sometimes, we all will. It happens. But when we know that someone or something is a potential threat to our children and we choose to ignore it because it would make our life uncomfortable. We are no longer parenting. We are acting like the child.

When we repeatedly put our child into dangerous situations, we no longer have the right to call ourselves mother or father. They are not titles given freely, they did not automatically come as a birthright. To call yourself a parent you must actually parent.

Just because a new friend or romantic interest is nice to your children, does not mean they are safe with them. Just because you have known them your whole life doesn’t mean they are safe with your children. It is your job to watch for red flags and act appropriately. Supervision is your strongest defense against sexual predators. You have to be alert to the adults cues and your child’s cues.

Check your local sex offender registry. Keep up to date on it. If there are predators in the neighborhood warn your children and your childrens friends that they are not to talk to the person in that house and any contact with them should be reported to an adult. Keep it age appropriate. And keep an eye on the house and the children. Make sure they aren’t allowed to get close to any other kids.

I wish this were only one situation, but I’ve seen it over and over. Women that have dated multiple sex offenders. Women who still hang out with her molesters, and spend the night with their children. Women who have discovered that their partners were having sex with their teens and kicked the child out of the house. They have no idea that the honor of being a mother comes with the responsibility of protecting that child to the best of your ability.

If this is the best they have, it sucks. They need to be honest with themselves.

If you can’t do your job, be honest with yourself and find someone else who can.