I found out yesterday that our daughter is marrying this man she's living with, within the next couple of weeks. Her reasoning? Her probation officer told her she couldn't live there - that the home doesn't meet their requirements for one reason or another (I could name a few - weapons, alcohol & do on). So, I guess if they're married he can't say anything, at least in her mind. I'm thinking they'll still have to get rid of the weapons & alcohol. I know she believes that she's in love with him. She always does, no matter who she's involved with. She claims that she's wanted to be with him for 3 years - funny, she was with one guy she claimed to love then & stepping out with another one that she claimed was her soul-mate & the only man she'd ever love back then. So.. while I'm sure he's buying into it, I lived with her then, I know who she was all about 3 years ago. We aren't going (I wasn't invited, nor was her brother), she did ask my husband if he'd do the ceremony and he didn't tell her he wouldn't. I kind of threw a fit & forbade it, being that it not only puts him in a bad position, but it indicates a tacit approval of the way she's living, so he will be telling her he won't perform it. I know it seems like a shitty thing for me to do, but he didn't want to do it in the first place. He never feels great about marrying couples he feels like are getting married for the wrong reasons, and then to have all of this trauma & drama connected to her, he doesn't need the guilt.
The good? Today is our son's 1 year clean & sober date. A year ago, in the early hours of the morning, I picked him up from the bus stop, in the next city south of us. We spent that 45 minute drive home doing a lot of talking. He did a lot of confessing & there were a lot of tears. We dropped my daughter off at her home & we spent a few hours talking, crying and trying to make sense of the craziness he had lived over the years. We both slept awhile, then started the day with some more of the same. There were months where all it seemed we did was talk & cry, but those times grew less & less and the happy times started to fill their place. There were days of triumph & days of sadness for him, but in the end he is a much stronger, happier - content man & we are very proud of him.
Our daughter tells us AA doesn't work. Our son (and my husband) show us every day that it does, as long as you work the program.
Friday, January 04, 2013
Monday, December 31, 2012
Just Put it on an Endless Loop
Yep. She's in jail again. We were told that she "was doing really well" and so on by one of the people she was living with (I should say that my husband was told that - no one tells me anything about her anymore), but how much credence can you give a person who wasn't, for years, aware of what was going on in his own home, with his own children? How can we believe he knows anything about how well our daughter is doing when she can fool anyone into believing she's sober (and if that doesn't work, she turns on the tears) that doesn't know how manipulative she is?
She was arrested by her PO this time, so we're assuming that he was making a home visit & found her drunk. I don't really know, it's been almost a month since she demanded that I remove myself from her life, and like I said, no one tells me anything about her. I'm not upset by this, not at all. The further I can stay from her drama, the better I am, but I am amused that her "roommates" seem to think we have no idea that she's in jail. Come on. The only time I don't checking the bookings for our county jail on a daily basis is when she's already IN jail. Why? So I know when to expect the postcards begging us to come & visit.. begging us to put money on her book & begging me to write to her. I'm sure those will start in the next few days, and this time, I'll stick with my plan to not cave in to her.
At any rate, it's the end of yet another painful year, one that I don't even have the energy to reminisce about for once. Goodbye 2012 & good riddance!
She was arrested by her PO this time, so we're assuming that he was making a home visit & found her drunk. I don't really know, it's been almost a month since she demanded that I remove myself from her life, and like I said, no one tells me anything about her. I'm not upset by this, not at all. The further I can stay from her drama, the better I am, but I am amused that her "roommates" seem to think we have no idea that she's in jail. Come on. The only time I don't checking the bookings for our county jail on a daily basis is when she's already IN jail. Why? So I know when to expect the postcards begging us to come & visit.. begging us to put money on her book & begging me to write to her. I'm sure those will start in the next few days, and this time, I'll stick with my plan to not cave in to her.
At any rate, it's the end of yet another painful year, one that I don't even have the energy to reminisce about for once. Goodbye 2012 & good riddance!
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
The Update
So. Our daughter spent 3 months in jail, with a good portion of that time being time we either weren't communicating with her at all, or were only writing to her a couple of times a week or so. She had court early in August, and was being sent to a local rehab facility, and begged the judge to let her come home for the night so she could make it to a doctor appointment the next morning. The judge refused & told her he'd let her out the following morning & that she had to be in my presence at all times.
I went & got her, ready to take her to the doctor & it turned out she had been lying to him, and there was no appointment. I'm not sure what she thought she'd get out of getting out for the night or how stupid she thought we'd be to let her out of the house, but whatever. I dropped her off at rehab that afternoon & attended family group therapy as often as they had it & did everything I could do to be a strong, supportive force in her life.
She was there for about 3 more months & then convinced her counselor that she was too distracted with homesickness to make any progress, and so, they put her into intensive outpatient treatment, we made an agreement with her, she signed a contract & came home.
The agreement we made included telling her when she was engaging in her old behaviors, acting depressed, lying and so on.. if she refused to go to her counselor and seek help then we agreed to kick her out. We also bought a breathalyzer. As a part of IOP, she was to attend 3 group sessions a week, go to two AA meetings a week and submit to urine testing whenever her color came up.
She did what she was supposed to. Kind of. She cleaned house a little. Slept a lot. Spent a lot of time chatting with men on the computer. Bugged me about a phone (which we did get for her) and went to her sessions & tested and breathed and all of that. The first day there were problems, she woke me up very early, saying she had a relapse dream. I talked to her for awhile, she went back out into the living room & a bit later she was on the phone with her sponsor, then we both went back to sleep. I let her leave the house later & she went to my best friend's daughter's home When I picked her up, I asked to smell her breath, because she smelled strange. As soon as I mentioned that, she said she drank a bottle of hairspray. After we dropped Morgan & her boyfriend off again, she admitted that she had also drank a bottle of body spray (she had lied a few minutes earlier about it & said she dumped it out) after she talked to me that morning.
As a family, we did what we thought we needed to, our son even came home early to be there for her & help talk her through all of this. We restarted and hoped for the best.
After her phone got here, things started getting bad. She was going on Craigslist & talking to old contacts, promising sex for drugs and who knows what else. I didn't know about some of it early on, although I did catch her exchanging pictures with a stranger and called her on it. Of course, she lied about it, she always does. She started bitching about not having a room, her computer, any privacy and no freedom about this time. I settled that by telling her she hadn't earned most of those things yet (and a room of her own was going to be tight anyway, we live in a very small 2 bedroom).
We had been allowing her ex-room mate to come by & visit her, and then one day, she asked if she could go over there. I didn't feel right about it, but my son told me to let her go, but to make sure she knew I'd be breath testing her when she got home, so we did that. She had, up to that point, been making life pretty miserable around here. She'd start fights with people, not do what she was supposed to be doing & pretty much just make us all wish we were living somewhere without her.
So, we enjoyed the time without her She came in later, with her friend in tow & happily submitted to the breath test. She blew a 0.07 & insisted she hadn't drank anything. He insisted she hadn't drank anything. I changed the batteries, tested her again. 0.06. Tested her many times, always with a positive reading. I tested Troy. I tested our son. I tested me. We all came back 0.00. Her friend left, and she texted me to tell me she had eaten 6 alcohol prep pads at about 5:30. Her excuse for lying was that she didn't want her friend to know. I pointed out that we had a zero-tolerance for lying, reminded everyone of our promise to kick her out if she lied & then I removed myself from the conversation & drama. In the end, she was allowed by Troy to stay, because she manipulated him into feeling guilty and all of that. I was ready to move out over it, because I was tired of having our lives in chaos because she wasn't ready to be sober.
The next morning, I got up & she tried acting like everything was amazing. I had already told her I didn't want to spend time with her & that I wasn't happy that she had been allowed to stay, so she was fully aware of my feelings. Before too long, she told me she was moving in with Morgan & asked me if I could drive her & her things over there. I agreed & took her over. Troy got mad at me for not taking her phone & so I told him to tell her he wanted it back & that I'd pick it up. She manipulated him into letting her keep it & I lost it. I told her that I would be there in 30 minutes to get it, that I couldn't afford to pay for it if I was getting nothing in return & there would be no arguments. I picked it up & found proof that other things had been going on, which just made me angrier.
I ended up letting Dawn have the phone & she took over the bill on it.
Fast forward to last week. Dawn & her son had been over at Morgan's house, and then came over here. Right after Dawn left to go to a training session for work, Morgan texted me & said that Rhi had just been to the ER & found out she had H1N1 & Salmonella and asked if I would take her & the baby to the doctor to take preventative measures so they didn't get sick. I did a quick search & found the only outbreaks of H1N1 in the world (one in India, the other in South America somewhere) and told Morgan that H1N1 didn't caus vomiting, that there were no outbreaks in the USA and that if she had Salmonella, then anyone who ate the same foods that she did would also be sick. You see, I learned a long time ago, that food poisoning = drunk with my daughter. She used that excuse, along with the flu, an ulcer and anything else she could think of for months before we caught on.
Of course the phone got handed over to my daughter & she started yelling at me, until I told her I'd be happy to bring the breathalyzer over so she could test & then we'd take the baby to the hospital & see what could be done to make sure she didn't get sick. Her answer as, "No. There's no point."
We had been gone, out of state, the weekend before & Troy kept getting hang up calls on his phone, from several different area codes. On Monday morning, he started getting texts from people he didn't know, alluding to "trolling on Craigslist" and so on, so I sent her a message & asked if she was using her dad's number on Craigslist & if so to remove the ads because he was tired of the texts from strangers. Well my text went to Troy's phone, so we knew then that she was still using his number for Google Voice. When she got up & saw my messages, she got instantly furious at me & started cursing at me & disrespecting me. It all ended with two texts from her, "You don't even care about me anyway. I'm not perfect (our son's name) so just leave me the FUCK alone I'm begging you." and "I don't like being abused I don't like controlling manipulative people. I don't need or want you in my life. You only hurt me. Goodbye." I pretty much just ended the conversation at that point & when it came up later on Facebook with her, I told her she needed to stop bothering me & for the most part she did.
Friday afternoon, we were at Belegarth & she showed up and immediately started talking to me like it was nothing and going out of her way to try to engage me in conversation. Even going so far as to say, "I know you're mad at me.." with me telling her what was up, and reminding her that she was the one who wanted me out of her life. Her only response was that she wants me in it now. I got very upset & grouchy & took it out on Troy & our son when we got home. I know it's because I was feeling overwhelmed & lost and would have been fine if she'd have just left me alone. I did explain that to them, because I felt terrible about it & just hoped the next day would be better.
Of course she showed up on Saturday, she was even there before we got there. She came up to me & handed me a Christmas card, and gave cards to Troy & our son, as well. I would still have been fine, if only she had stopped trying to talk to me and if I had been actually able to play & wasn't having to take a test so that I could run for office during the next reign. I was frustrated, emotional & pretty upset, so I made Troy take me home so I could finish my test & calm down awhile. Dawn followed me up here, because she was worried about me. I was actually fine as soon as I got here & away from my daughter.
So. She's out of control again, drinking and spewing hate & I'm done again. I can't keep living this way, it's too hard on me in too many ways. She can do as she pleases, but it's going to be without me in her life.
I went & got her, ready to take her to the doctor & it turned out she had been lying to him, and there was no appointment. I'm not sure what she thought she'd get out of getting out for the night or how stupid she thought we'd be to let her out of the house, but whatever. I dropped her off at rehab that afternoon & attended family group therapy as often as they had it & did everything I could do to be a strong, supportive force in her life.
She was there for about 3 more months & then convinced her counselor that she was too distracted with homesickness to make any progress, and so, they put her into intensive outpatient treatment, we made an agreement with her, she signed a contract & came home.
The agreement we made included telling her when she was engaging in her old behaviors, acting depressed, lying and so on.. if she refused to go to her counselor and seek help then we agreed to kick her out. We also bought a breathalyzer. As a part of IOP, she was to attend 3 group sessions a week, go to two AA meetings a week and submit to urine testing whenever her color came up.
She did what she was supposed to. Kind of. She cleaned house a little. Slept a lot. Spent a lot of time chatting with men on the computer. Bugged me about a phone (which we did get for her) and went to her sessions & tested and breathed and all of that. The first day there were problems, she woke me up very early, saying she had a relapse dream. I talked to her for awhile, she went back out into the living room & a bit later she was on the phone with her sponsor, then we both went back to sleep. I let her leave the house later & she went to my best friend's daughter's home When I picked her up, I asked to smell her breath, because she smelled strange. As soon as I mentioned that, she said she drank a bottle of hairspray. After we dropped Morgan & her boyfriend off again, she admitted that she had also drank a bottle of body spray (she had lied a few minutes earlier about it & said she dumped it out) after she talked to me that morning.
As a family, we did what we thought we needed to, our son even came home early to be there for her & help talk her through all of this. We restarted and hoped for the best.
After her phone got here, things started getting bad. She was going on Craigslist & talking to old contacts, promising sex for drugs and who knows what else. I didn't know about some of it early on, although I did catch her exchanging pictures with a stranger and called her on it. Of course, she lied about it, she always does. She started bitching about not having a room, her computer, any privacy and no freedom about this time. I settled that by telling her she hadn't earned most of those things yet (and a room of her own was going to be tight anyway, we live in a very small 2 bedroom).
We had been allowing her ex-room mate to come by & visit her, and then one day, she asked if she could go over there. I didn't feel right about it, but my son told me to let her go, but to make sure she knew I'd be breath testing her when she got home, so we did that. She had, up to that point, been making life pretty miserable around here. She'd start fights with people, not do what she was supposed to be doing & pretty much just make us all wish we were living somewhere without her.
So, we enjoyed the time without her She came in later, with her friend in tow & happily submitted to the breath test. She blew a 0.07 & insisted she hadn't drank anything. He insisted she hadn't drank anything. I changed the batteries, tested her again. 0.06. Tested her many times, always with a positive reading. I tested Troy. I tested our son. I tested me. We all came back 0.00. Her friend left, and she texted me to tell me she had eaten 6 alcohol prep pads at about 5:30. Her excuse for lying was that she didn't want her friend to know. I pointed out that we had a zero-tolerance for lying, reminded everyone of our promise to kick her out if she lied & then I removed myself from the conversation & drama. In the end, she was allowed by Troy to stay, because she manipulated him into feeling guilty and all of that. I was ready to move out over it, because I was tired of having our lives in chaos because she wasn't ready to be sober.
The next morning, I got up & she tried acting like everything was amazing. I had already told her I didn't want to spend time with her & that I wasn't happy that she had been allowed to stay, so she was fully aware of my feelings. Before too long, she told me she was moving in with Morgan & asked me if I could drive her & her things over there. I agreed & took her over. Troy got mad at me for not taking her phone & so I told him to tell her he wanted it back & that I'd pick it up. She manipulated him into letting her keep it & I lost it. I told her that I would be there in 30 minutes to get it, that I couldn't afford to pay for it if I was getting nothing in return & there would be no arguments. I picked it up & found proof that other things had been going on, which just made me angrier.
I ended up letting Dawn have the phone & she took over the bill on it.
Fast forward to last week. Dawn & her son had been over at Morgan's house, and then came over here. Right after Dawn left to go to a training session for work, Morgan texted me & said that Rhi had just been to the ER & found out she had H1N1 & Salmonella and asked if I would take her & the baby to the doctor to take preventative measures so they didn't get sick. I did a quick search & found the only outbreaks of H1N1 in the world (one in India, the other in South America somewhere) and told Morgan that H1N1 didn't caus vomiting, that there were no outbreaks in the USA and that if she had Salmonella, then anyone who ate the same foods that she did would also be sick. You see, I learned a long time ago, that food poisoning = drunk with my daughter. She used that excuse, along with the flu, an ulcer and anything else she could think of for months before we caught on.
Of course the phone got handed over to my daughter & she started yelling at me, until I told her I'd be happy to bring the breathalyzer over so she could test & then we'd take the baby to the hospital & see what could be done to make sure she didn't get sick. Her answer as, "No. There's no point."
We had been gone, out of state, the weekend before & Troy kept getting hang up calls on his phone, from several different area codes. On Monday morning, he started getting texts from people he didn't know, alluding to "trolling on Craigslist" and so on, so I sent her a message & asked if she was using her dad's number on Craigslist & if so to remove the ads because he was tired of the texts from strangers. Well my text went to Troy's phone, so we knew then that she was still using his number for Google Voice. When she got up & saw my messages, she got instantly furious at me & started cursing at me & disrespecting me. It all ended with two texts from her, "You don't even care about me anyway. I'm not perfect (our son's name) so just leave me the FUCK alone I'm begging you." and "I don't like being abused I don't like controlling manipulative people. I don't need or want you in my life. You only hurt me. Goodbye." I pretty much just ended the conversation at that point & when it came up later on Facebook with her, I told her she needed to stop bothering me & for the most part she did.
Friday afternoon, we were at Belegarth & she showed up and immediately started talking to me like it was nothing and going out of her way to try to engage me in conversation. Even going so far as to say, "I know you're mad at me.." with me telling her what was up, and reminding her that she was the one who wanted me out of her life. Her only response was that she wants me in it now. I got very upset & grouchy & took it out on Troy & our son when we got home. I know it's because I was feeling overwhelmed & lost and would have been fine if she'd have just left me alone. I did explain that to them, because I felt terrible about it & just hoped the next day would be better.
Of course she showed up on Saturday, she was even there before we got there. She came up to me & handed me a Christmas card, and gave cards to Troy & our son, as well. I would still have been fine, if only she had stopped trying to talk to me and if I had been actually able to play & wasn't having to take a test so that I could run for office during the next reign. I was frustrated, emotional & pretty upset, so I made Troy take me home so I could finish my test & calm down awhile. Dawn followed me up here, because she was worried about me. I was actually fine as soon as I got here & away from my daughter.
So. She's out of control again, drinking and spewing hate & I'm done again. I can't keep living this way, it's too hard on me in too many ways. She can do as she pleases, but it's going to be without me in her life.
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