Mister was aggravated this morning when I got up while he was getting dressed to leave home. Today was Donuts with Dad, at Kiddo’s school, but it was scheduled for an hour before school started, which I’d never heard of and always thought it was during school hours. But it’s not like my own biological father ever did anything like that with me, or my children’s’ Dad ever did it with them, so I didn’t know for certain. My children’s’ paternal grandmother did go to their school for whatever they call the day with grandparents, and I know for sure that that was during normal school hours.
He was also disgruntled because after whenever he made it to work (late) after that, he was leaving again shortly after he arrived, to come get YD and take her to work at the job she recently started working 3 or 4 hours/day a few days/week and then he go back to work. His job is almost 30 minutes from where we live. That makes no sense to me, for several reasons.
Monday (my regular day off work) her BF brought her home that morning, just in time for her to take a shower and get dressed, for her cousin or somebody to come get her and take her to work. When she left with him the night before, I heard Mister ask her where they were going. I didn’t hear her response, but I heard him say next, don’t lie to me. So she obviously did not say that she was going somewhere to spend the night with him.
So after that and Monday morning, I thought that if her BF is really supposed to be a BF and she can spend nights with him, it is not unreasonable to think that since he has a car, he can help her get to and from work at least sometimes. I refrained from speaking on that Monday evening, because I feel like I need to be careful what I say about the teens, and if I have time to figure out how to try to say something without being overly offensive, I should.
But Mister spoke on it himself, and said the same thing I was thinking, and also said her Mom had the same thoughts and said she was gonna have to talk to YD. So it’s out there, without me being the one to bring it up.
When Mister talks about leaving work to get YD here or there, on days that I am or will be at home, I’m not sure whether is he is doing what my daughter learned to do as a teenager, telling me about a problem and knowing that I will jump in to offer help, even if it’s not asked for. But when DD and I were in a counseling session when she was a teenager, something happened that made the counselor stop me and made me aware of the pattern. It was like a (gentle and kind) smack upside my head, because it was true, even though I’d never realized it, and I have been trying to “unlearn” that behavior and stop doing that ever since.
So even though I have taken YD to school some mornings so she didn’t have to stand at the bus stop for the school bus when it was raining or really cold, and picked her up from school when she has asked me to, I am not volunteering to take her anywhere at this point, after everything that has happened. So I just listen to Mister, and am not inclined at all to volunteer to help him solve those problems, even when it would clearly be more convenient for me to do it. And most importantly, I do not feel bad about it, at all.
Because honestly, even if he or she got over themselves enough to directly ask me, I would still say no. She has said such ugly things about me, and been so rude to me and still is, that even though I still am not rude to her or interested in mistreating her in any way, I’m not going out of my way to do anything for her. I am still stuck on my belief that some conversations need to be had before I go back to being willing to do whatever I can to help. Because she is not a minor child anymore, and how I try to handle minor children is not quite the same as how I handle young adults that want to insist on what they can do as an adult, but at the same time time don’t want the responsibilities of being an adult, and try to insist on having the same privileges and treatment that they had as a minor child when that works in their favor. In my mind, you can’t have it both ways. If you want to assert your rights to the freedom of an adult that can do whatever you want, you have to deal with the flip side of that same coin, when it comes to adult responsibilities. Do something productive like going to school full time or working the equivalent, if you want people to keep helping you and if you can figure out have to get people to drive you wherever to have fun, put that same energy into getting to where you need to be on a regular basis without involving your Dad.
And I do understand that Mister leaving work almost 20 miles away, and coming to run back and forth to get her to and from places that are less than a mile from our house, is on him for doing it, even more than it is on YD for expecting him to do it.
So that is one more thing that I am just a curious bystander on. I am getting to a whole new level of minding my own business, even when people are around me are doing crazy shit that I either can’t fix if I wanted to, or it’s something that I’m learning to not even think about considering trying to fix.