Lessons From Vacation

Vacation is not as much fun as when I was a kid. Or before I was a parent. Or before I became an adoptive parent to special needs kids.

In the interests of spending time on the beach and time with my brother, getting to know his preggo wife, I rented a two bedroom condo with a pool and beach view.

It was a lot smaller than the pictures, a lot farther from the beach than the pictures, and very over decorated. Yes, it’s a beach condo. We do not need to be reminded of this fact with a fish or boat motif-ed in every square foot. But I birdwalk.


Here are the things I learned on vacation:

1. Not all technology definitions are equal. Our landlord for the week assured me before I paid him that we’d have Wifi. My brother works from home on-line, so he had to have the internet. I’m taking an on-line class and wanted to blog and stuff. So it was a priority. Our landlord’s definition of Wifi was to use the neighbor’s. The problem was that the neighbor changed the password and wouldn’t return our landlord's call. Brother spent a lot of time in a national-chain overpriced coffee shop. I just turned my school work in late. Lucky for me, I have an online prof who is very understanding.

2. Not everyone has the same level of tolerance for crazy that I have. You have heard from my blog that my children are kind of special. We have lots of things going on, and lots of behaviors that are outside the realm of what others might see as normal. My brother and his wife—Don’t get me wrong, I love them—they don’t live my life, or near my life, so they don’t know what normal is for us. Our normal level of crazy, I think, might have made them twitch. There were several moments when I caught them looking at me like I was either crazy or, well, crazy.

3. Not everyone has the same gag reflex. I think nothing of changing a diaper on the floor in the middle of the living room. And honestly, I don’t care how many people are there. Or what they’re doing. A wet baby is a screaming baby, and ending the screaming humanely, without me going to jail, is way more important to me than the fact that you’re eating squash casserole. Which, I must say, looks remarkably like what was in the diaper. Which is probably why you started gagging and running from the room. I’d apologize, but you’re pregnant, and you needed to learn that lesson before you finish procreating. Baby poo is gross. Accept that fact and life will be much easier for you in five months.

4. Your intoxicated brother can and will tell your kids stories about you that you don’t want them to hear. I really didn’t want my kids to hear about me giving my brother and all his friends condoms when they were in HS (no pregnancies in that graduating class, thank you very much). I didn’t want them to hear about us rescuing my drunken father from the back office of a bar. I didn’t want them to know I smoked, or drank, or dated before my husband. I was a perfect, virginal pure young lady prior to my wedding day. (Yeah right, but you know where I’m going here, right?) My brother, after a few drinks, decided to tell them all about my sordid past of teenage infatuations with bad boys and cheap wine coolers.

5. Whether or not the stories are true is beside the point. See number four. I deny everything. Those pictures are clearly photo-shopped.

6. Your time spent on the beach will decrease inversely proportionately to the number of children in diapers. I spent about $1000 on the condo, about $200 traveling, and about $400 on supplies from food to toilet paper to beach stuff. I spent less than two hours on the beach the entire week, despite the fact that it was less than a football field from our condo, and despite the fact that I was desperate for beach time. Two kids in diapers will do that. So will four teenagers who do not have any appreciation for the deeply brewing insanity inside their mom’s head.

7. If there is a chance for the crazy to come out in your kids, it will. We’d been there for five days. It was inevitable. Danae and Tonya (her “friend”) got into a screaming, yelling, cursing fight in front of the condo. Then it came inside where a table and chair got broken. It went back outside, and Danae and Leigh ended up in an actual physical fight. (I mentioned the place was small, right?)

There was lots of noise and yelling and stomping, as Leigh got more involved. CC just watched the whole thing, wondering what the heck she'd gotten herself into.  Security was called. I explained to the nice man with the patch on his arm that I have crazy teenagers, and they’ve almost got it out of their system. But that if they couldn’t settle down in the next ten minutes I’d be the one calling the police. Security didn’t seem convinced and Patch-man hovered under our balcony for about 45 minutes.

8. If the crazy comes out, and security gets involved, prepare to be embarrassed. Everyone around us looked at us funny for the two days left of our trip. At least back home, our neighbors can’t HEAR the crazy. In public, we usually take great pains to keep our crazy tucked away for later. And I’m sure that the stares had nothing to do with my openly gay daughter walking around holding hands with her sweetie, or Leigh’s friend CC, who is tatted and pierced and has pink hair, or our decidedly dark-skinned babies that none of us could have given birth to. I'm sure it was the ghetto-style brawl.  Right?

9. You will not want to cook as much as you plan to. We planned to eat out only once. My brother and his wife bought groceries for the rest of the week. We ate out four times. And they took the groceries home. Next summer, we just plan to only cook twice. It’s easier that way.

10.  Everything is more expensive the closer you get to the beach.  Brother and Preggo bought two back-pack lawn chairs from a Wings chain store. They spent $85.  Several giant chain stores sell the same things for about $20 each.  Gas was up 30 cents a gallon. And speaking of gallons, milk was outrageous at about $4 a jug. 

11. You will not be invited to rent again if any of the following happen: broken furniture, broken knick-knacks or complaints about your boogey-board and towel placement. I left the landlord a check to cover the damage, and asked him to call me. So far, my phone has not rung, and I am not holding my breath.

Oh well.

As Preggo pointed out, there are lots of places at the beach.

Crazy Lying and Epiphanies, II

Today, she wants her phone back. Now. Period. It's hers and she wants it.  End of story. Woke me up from a nap (which also ended up waking up NaNa). Got in my face and very VERY L.O.U.D. 

Lots of cursing and yelling ensued after I told her no. 

Here are the highlights:

1.  She did ride the bus home, she just didn't ride it all the way, and the fact that she was late was not her fault. (Do I need to point out the logical stupidity in that, or are we all smart enough to figure it out on our own?)

2.  I'm trippin' because I have no reason to be mad, and reminded me that I said I'd think about giving it back to her. ("I did think about it, Danae, and decided not to.")

3. She's smart enough to know that she learned her lesson (I'm pretty sure that doesn't make sense to anyone...)

4.  We only buy stuff to hold it over their heads.  (This from the same child who tried to argue yesterday that because she bought the phone we couldn't relieve her of it.)

5. We never punish Leigh, and never punished Dawn.  (For the record, our punishment actually put Dawn in jail, and Leigh has no friends, ergo no life, so breathing in and out is pretty much a punishment for her.)

6.  She'd stick it out until she was 17 and then she was leaving because we were the reason no teenager ever wants to get adopted. (My two replies:  She did want to get adopted.  It wouldn't have happened had she not have wanted it.  And, we don't need to wait til you're 17.  If you want to go back to your group home, call them up and make the arrangements.)

7.  You don't know what you're talking about. (Duh.  Since you've been lying about your whereabouts we might as well be talking about how Windex and lotion do the same thing for as much sense as that makes.)

8. At the top of her lungs, and at this point two neighbors have come out of their houses to see what's going on, "I DIDN'T FUCKING DO ANYTHING WRONG TO BEGIN WITH!"

Really?  I must have dreamed all that.  To quote Bina....  What-EVer.

Can I make a "you'll get your phone back when you're nicer" rule?  Can I make a "it's okay to punch her teeth in when she acts like this" law?

Crazy Lying and Epiphanies

Tonight was a verbal slugfest, a bout of epic proportions, between 16 year-old Danae and The Mom, AKA me. 

The topic(s): 

1. Why, dear, dear, Danae, have you been lying about staying for tutorial? 
2. And where oh where have you been going after school? 
3. And with whom and for what purpose........ for the past two weeks?
4. And for GodAllahBuddha's sake, why would you do that to us knowing that we have to drag the babies out and across town to pick you up? 
5. And, why would you NOT take the bus home today, after clearly being told to, and then lie about how you got home? 

Now, I know she did not take the bus home because I waited for it to arrive, saw that she was not on it, and proceeded to take her sisters shopping and out to dinner. 

To the casual reader, dinner and shopping might seem like a callous response to a possible runaway-missing persons type situation involving one's own child.  However, I have some experience in these matters and realize that getting all wound up does nothing but give me a headache and turn my face red.  Plus, I have two other adopted kids who have run away for a combined total of six times, and, as a Homo Sapiens Sapiens, I can be taught. Eventually.

So Danae finally called my cell from the house phone at 6:28 and tried to convince me that she had indeed ridden the bus home.  Her bus arrives in our neighborhood between 4:55 and 5:10.  I told her to reconsider her story and go with the truth, as she would be in less trouble in the long run. (Sidebar, your honor:  I never believed that argument from my mom when I was a teen, so I'm not sure why I keep trying to convince my kids of its veracity, but that's a whole other blog I guess, sometime when I have no fodder... Things We Do Because Our Parents Did Them.  Remind me to write that....)

Anyway, birdwalk. Back to subject. 

It comes to this:  I have irrefutable truth and proof on my side.  She has "That's my story and I'm sticking to it."

But then she realized (because she is much smarter than the average teenager) that I must have something on her, because then she said, "I did ride the bus home. I just got off at an earlier stop, called Amanda to pick me and bring me the rest of the way because I didn't want to get home so late.  But then, Amanda couldn't come right away, so I was late."

Not once in this fiasco did she call me to let me know she was okay. I had other sources tell me they knew she was alive, but that they didn't know where.  But she did call and text Amy, and only Amy--definitely not me. I'm pretty sure that's because she knew she was going to get in trouble, so she might as well avoid hearing it on the phone.

Now, ask me if I believe that story. 

Seriously. Do I look THAT stupid?  Of course I don't believe her. I think she didn't want to ride the bus, DID want to hang out with friends, so she did what she wanted.  And as I thought,  the epiphany hit... 

It's something that I should have known or at least figured out WAY sooner.  Kids with attachment disorders, also known as Reactive Attachment Disorder, don't trust.  They don't believe in parental benevolence in any form, and don't for a second think that you have their best interests at heart.  And trying to convince any of them to trust is almost like asking Boppo the Chimp to reproduce Mona Lisa.  Messy and impossible.  And while not a total waste of time, but definitely not the best way to spend an afternoon, or year or a decade.

So why would I ask that of a young lady who is at the point in her life where she is trying to prove her independence and pull away from her family?  Duh.  Now who's got issues? 

I'm asking her to bond and pull closer when biology and society are telling her to pull away.  Or she could just have doubled up on her daily dose of Pain in the Ass Pills and decided to see if she could pull off another lie. 

No wonder we argue so much.

In the meantime, she wants to know if she can go spend the night with a friend and have her phone back. 

Attachment disorder or not, I'm thinking no.