I posted right after Easter how things had started looking up in our little piece of the world, trying to spread some optimism. I’m sure plenty of seasoned SMs had a good little snort over that one. Well, after our little roll of good weekends and productive talks with SO about his guilty, permissive Daddying, things did go well for awhile, but then kind of sputtered out. We had a couple neutral weekends after that, not really good or bad, then things reverted to a slightly different version of bad until reaching almost peak velocity while camping with my DD, DS, SS, and SD this past weekend.

Guilty Daddy has significantly backed off the guilty catering to SD’s whims, for instance not playing 7 consecutive hours of board games with her, however he is still is permissive. Worse, the times that he does decide to discipline her, it winds up backfiring on me and my son. For instance, “Don’t climb on Althea’s couch”, “Don’t interrupt- I’m talking to Althea now”, “Quit tearing up Althea’s yard”, “Didn’t you hear Althea tell Son not to do that? Don’t you do it either”, “If Althea’s son is being mean to you, just stay away from him”. So it’s like twisted to make me the bad guy, even though he can turn to me and say, “See, I do discipline her” and it makes it sound like he agrees my son picks on her when really the rest of us can see he hasn’t really done anything and she’s just being a whiny tattle-tale to get attention from her Dad. She does this with her bio-brother as well, and both her Mom and Dad play into it. But if I try to explain this to SO, he sticks up for his daughter.

She already had started acting weird around me- dirty looks, not speaking to me, things SO can’t see, but now she patently refuses to interact with me. It’s not nearly as bad as others have posted here with skids who hit or yell, but it’s frustrating because it’s subtle (and I could almost swear devious) enough that her Dad can’t see it. First, I should mention that I swear I am nice and friendly to her. She will refuse any single thing I offer her- food, treats, pillow, blanket, bug spray, games, you name it- and say her Daddy will get it/do it. Then the rest of the kids will be eating, playing, whatever, and Dad comes in and she whines she’s hungry/cold/bored/getting mosquito bites/whatever, like I haven’t been offering to take care of her. Also, she will disagree with anything my son or I say, just to disagree.

Example- yesterday was a blazing warm day compared to the chilly day before. My son said it was warm. She proceeded to disagree, they argued back and forth a little, and she put on her jacket. Then she went to her Dad, who was doing one of those types of repairs during which he could easily hurt himself for which she has no regard in interrupting, and who was shirtless and visibly sweating due to the warmth of the day, and proceeded to badger him (in her whine voice) about how it wasn’t really that warm outside and my son was trying to say it was warm out and he was picking on her. Even though he was standing there shirtless and sweaty, he started to agree with her, just to placate her. After 4 straight weekends of her pulling these little scenarios, I couldn’t stand it, so I pointed out that he was feeding into their little argument. He snapped back, which he doesn’t normally do and probably had everything to do with the thing he was repairing, something that made it sound like it was my son’s fault and I was siding with him and besides I should ignore their bullshit. So it was like me and my son against him and his daughter. She glared at me and ran off to hide (in MY truck, that I had already told my son he couldn’t play in, but SO let her do it). Glaring at me and running off to hide is her new thing.

There are any number of little scenes like this that sound stupid and minor, but they wear on a person. I guess the question I’m working my way toward, is do you all deal with these petty little jabs? Do you get to the point you can just shrug them off? I mean, I know I’m lucky they are not big, dramatic things…but at least SO could see them if they were huge and blatant. He just doesn’t see what she’s doing. And there are just so darn many of them in a single weekend.

I had mostly disengaged before finding this site, before I had ever even heard of disengaging, but had re-engaged after I thought we were making some progress. Maybe it’s time to disengage again, especially since my own kids will be gone on various trips most of the summer.

Ahhh, vent over. For now.