Even tho he said to throw it away, I sent it. He can bite it, roll it up, take his rectal temp with it, I don't care.
At least I did the right thing even tho he told me I 'no longer matter to him' because I was charitable and supportive and that other thing.
I post it here because there are a number of points I made that could be of use to others.
Maybe someone is having trouble with a teen, or maybe a teen is being treated badly and something in my letter will make em see something differently.
At least then it won't have been TOTALLY useless and a waste of time.
I swear, some days I feel about as useful as tits on a fish.
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Tofu,
I continue to be disturbed by the way events have played out.
I have tried talking to you, but you just get so mad you refuse to listen, and shut off. I feel that this is very very important and HAVE to try to get through to you.
I’m not going to lie, I am laying it all out as I see it, as it has been told to me, and as I have seen personally. I am trying very hard to keep a moderate tone, so try to just read it through all the way.
All I have ever done is to try to get Matilda to respect you, obey you, and cooperate with your requirements.
She never really wanted to go live with you, her heart has been with her mother all along and I have known it. I think you have known it too.
I still believe that the living situation with her mother was completely untenable under the conditions that prevailed at the time, and that her relocation to be with you was the appropriate thing.
She could have been happy with you and HH, and it was completely in your power to win her over, but for some inexplicable reason you dropped the ball.
Matilda was not happy early on with the perceived injustice with which she was treated by the person named Madonkey, and instead of saying to her privately, 'yeah, I understand, and it ISN'T fair, but that's just how things are and we'll make it up to you later', you made her feel that the problem was with HER.
Since then, in conversation with HH, it was stated that HH herself 'felt bad about the way Matilda was treated' so we won't debate that Madonkey was unreasonable, and that you both saw it for what it was, you just failed to take Matilda's feelings seriously and it was the beginning of a trend.
This would have been a golden opportunity to engender a bond between HH and Matilda based on a commonality of understanding, but instead it fostered a feeling of mistrust.
The thing is; I told you this at the time, but you evidently didn't feel my viewpoint was of any use.
The resentment Matilda harbored towards HH only grew, and I identified it as a 'ticking time bomb' to you, advising you that you needed to talk to Matilda about her feeling between just you two, and you stubbornly insisted you needed to bring HH in on it, thus guaranteeing that Matilda would NOT really share how she felt and that the problem would continue to fester.
I called you on this, but you failed to take my warning seriously, to take Matilda seriously. You stated that you "don't keep secrets from" your wife.
Interestingly, you seemed unable to comprehend the difference between 'keeping secrets' and showing discretion. You are not just a husband, you are also supposed to be a father, and being a father is more than just making demands for respect and obedience, it is more than an insistence on perfect rules compliance and anal retentive regimes of enforcement.
A good father is not a bully, or a tyrant, he is a leader and a confidant.
Matilda herself admitted to me that many, if not all of her annoyances at HH were likely over-reactions, and these could have been diffused if you had taken her seriously, respected her privacy, allowed her to actually express how she felt, and worked from there to get to where you wanted her to be.
One has to find their true location on a map to chart a course to a destination, but you have consistently refused to recognize where you really are, rather insisting on trying to bring about by a sheer force of will a reality that does not exist.
So it settled into a prolonged ugliness with a veneer of civility, Matilda being miserable, but unable to actually state what made her miserable out of justifiable mistrust of your ability to relate to her and a fear of reprisal for being honest about her feelings.
Her only means of expressing her displeasure was by not doing chores, or doing them poorly, Childish, I know, but she was a child. This also had the added effect of teaching her really, really poor work habits.
I did what I could to help her just cooperate, try to work with you, but in a truly mind boggling display of pettiness and jealousy you allowed other problems you had with me to discredit my advice and my efforts, making me out to be the 'bad guy'
If you really cared about Matilda or her feelings, you would have stepped above the fray, and earned her respect by taking her seriously, trying to gain her cooperation through compassion and understanding, but instead of understanding her, you tried to gain compliance by removing the one person she looked up to and who consistently tried to get her to cooperate from contact with her.
This was, of course, after cutting off as much contact with her mother as you thought you could get away with.
If you recall, I told you that this would come back and bite you in the butt, and that it was going to cause you no end of trouble with her. I warned you that you were going to 'lose her' and you said 'I'm not worried about that'
Left with nobody she felt comfortable talking to, and in a system of rules and enforcement that seemed to concentrate on consequences over compassion and understanding, enforcement and control over love and hope, she deteriorated.
I tried to respect your proscription against speaking with her, but as her condition worsened it became more and more difficult for me to find anything to respect.
There came a point where her emotional state troubled me to the point where I had no choice but to encourage her, and by then it was obvious to me that your proscription was a detriment to her and thus no longer worthy even the small shred of respect I still had for it.
It amazes me that what mattered to you was that your wishes were not being followed rather than that your daughter was in real emotional pain.
When she reached a breaking point, only wanting to be able to see her mother or be told a real reason she would understand or respect that she could not, and only got from you a shallow, nonsense reason that MoS 'wasn’t in compliance' or a refusal to discuss, she did something that amazed us all.
She stood up to you.
She stood up for her rights, and you told her she 'didn't have any'.
Even though we were all totally dumbfounded, amazed, I mean completely floored by what she was saying, you reverted to your true form by refusing to discuss it or denying and running away from it when it got close to things you can't even let YOURSELF admit are true.
She was saying 'I have been wronged, and don't respect you, please just give me a reason I can respect you"
And you were replying, in effect, "Pooh pooh, you really don't feel that way at all."
So she went on strike, and you reacted, then she reacted, ad nauseum.
Interestingly, her mental state has markedly improved under the strike; she is no longer as weak and timid as she once was. She is now being honest with herself AND you about how she feels about things, only you refuse to listen.
She used to cry herself to sleep almost every night, now she doesn’t.
Doesn’t that mean anything to you?
You keep on saying that she is being manipulated, has had ideas put into her head, denying that she really felt the way she feels, the way that she has felt for so long, that she finally broke, you keep on blaming others for a situation that you yourself have created by your stubbornness, denial, and refusal to understand your own daughter
I recall when I would express any disagreement with HH or your treatment of Matilda, you would say SHE was filling MY head with ideas, and manipulating me, yet you maintain that she was happy and just fine until we filled HER head with ideas, which was it, chicken or egg?
You can’t have it both ways, Tofu, the chicken and egg can’t BOTH come first.
You accuse MoS of alienating Matilda from you, when it is YOU who has held all the cards and has consistently misplayed them. You accuse others of 'undermining your relationship' with Matilda, when it is YOU who undermines himself with his every ill-considered and desperate attempt to maintain control of every aspect of her life right up to the last minute.
I think that if you would look up the definition of ‘Parental Alienation Syndrome’ on wikipedia, you will find it refers to a custodial parent who does certain things including, limiting access, hold the other parent to the exact wording of the visitation schedule and considering the ordered visitation the maximum, rather than the minimum as the law and the courts intend.
As a non-custodial parent who has had access shut off more than once, I think it will be very difficult to convince anybody with a central nervous system who has heard the facts that MoS was wrong in providing Matilda with a cel phone.
You say that Matilda is also being manipulative herself, by being on strike when you plainly don’t respect her as a person, claim she ‘has no rights’, invade her privacy, ask her to ‘clean up’ her private thoughts you stole and printed so you can show them to HH, refuse to believe she is capable of objecting to the way she is treated without ‘having her head filled with ideas’; I’d say she is engaging in self defensive behavior against an outrageous abuse of parental authority.
I think her strike is far more healthy than dragging her feet and doing chores badly, it is certainly more honest.
Matilda is a good girl, she is not without her issues and challenges, but she has gotten good grades overall, isn't on drugs or into drinking, doesn't run with a bad crowd or stay out all night until brought home by the police, by all reasonable standards you have it pretty good with her as a daughter.
She even tried to get over her dislike of your wife in spite of your bumbling and dropping the ball. She tried to respect you.
In return she was made to feel as if the focus would always be on where she fell short, where she wasn't good enough and would probably NEVER be good enough; she was given privileges, then had them systematically removed.
She was made promises only to have them modified and toyed with to the point they no longer held any value to her.
She was grounded from 'everything' for a weekend, if you recall, and I have been on the phone with her and heard you pounding on the bathroom door demanding to know if she 'had a book in there' and that she bring to book out, you want the book.
Grounded from reading?
When you've got an otherwise decent kid to work with, but you have to resort to blatant police state-tactics to enforce your standard of compliance, you have to wonder what is wrong with your standards.
I know you don't think much of me, neither does HH, DF, or any of your crew, and I get that. But I fail to see what that has to do with the truthfulness of what I have said. I would think that anyone who honestly talked to Matilda and had two brain cells to bang together to spark an idea could see I have simply expressed what I believe to be the truth about how she feels.
I don't have any 'side' in this other than Matilda's, and am not pursuing any agenda of my own. I gain no benefit from my involvement; rather I have the dubious 'privilege' of watching you preside over a train wreck with your own daughter figuratively tied to the tracks.
I didn't ask to be the one she looked up to, the one she was willing to confide in, but thank God she was willing to confide in SOMEBODY. Yet you and HH got all petty, jealous, and brittle. I try to help you see how I gained her respect so you can “man up” and take your rightful place and I am vilified. I defend you, and am accused BY YOU of being 'the problem'
I guess no good deed goes unpunished.
But, I don't think it's too late, even now, for you to do the right thing.
You can go on desperately grasping for every bit of control you can hang on to, and even win the battle, but you will only lose 'the war' by using those tactics. She is slipping away and you can feel it, you want to stop it, but don't know what to do. You are caught between a rock and a hard place, between a spoiled shrew of a wife and a daughter who doesn't respect you and has suddenly and disconcertingly grown a spine and find yourself at a loss.
Well, Matilda's gonna be eighteen soon enough, but if you give an inch, I'm sure HH starts talking about lawyers and divorce, I don't believe you honestly want to lose either, and I would dearly like to see you be able to keep both, but unfortunately you can't please everyone no matter how you try.
If you want to keep Matilda, here is my opinion on what you need to do.
1. Listen to her.
Don't deny she feels the way she does, or try to disagree, she feels the way she feels, and the first step to repairing your broken relationship is to know the truth. She may have to work out the right way to express what she is feeling because words can be hard to arrive at, so let her 'rough draft' and talk ‘til you get to the truth of it.
This can be time consuming, and even uncomfortable, but it is what parenting is all about, effort.
2. Take her seriously.
Give her credit for having thoughts of her own, for trying not to break as long as she did in the face of your complete and utter failure to give her so much as a shred of support. She is a person, a human being, NOT a pawn in your power struggle with MoS, she has her own hopes and dreams, and will be going out into the world prepared or not in a year’s time. You can’t stop the hands of a clock my any effort of will, it’s best not to try, it just makes us old.
You can’t ride a bike sitting still, you can’t guide a child that’s not moving forward, they just topple.
You’ve only got a few more steps before you have to let go of the bike whether you like it or not, this is not the time to stop the bike and have her get off of it, this is the time to aim that bike in a safe direction, and if you are fighting her inevitable and impending freedom, you give up any guidance you might have to offer
You also need to consider that any court will put great weight in what a child of seventeen desires when making a determination.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, you have no idea how bad it would go for you to let this go to court, and I’m not talking about any verbal indiscretions you may have had, I mean things like how you have totally retreated as a viable parent since Matilda went on strike, cutting off school lunches, wanting to withdraw her from YIG, running away whenever she tries to discuss it with you, making her get her own food, then taking some of that, separate dishes, What you have going on there is a hostage situation, and you would be wise to fix it without going to court, you might even be able to regain some of the respect Matilda has lost for you.
3. Keep HH out of it.
The only chance you have for having a relationship with your daughter is to keep HH out of it, and the only relationship Matilda is likely to have with HH in the future, is through you. This is unfortunate, and could have been avoided, but now you have to play the cards you have, not the ones you have already discarded.
If you deal with Matilda without HH being involved, I am sure that an agreement can be reached between you how she will be able to remain civil to HH so that domestic tranquility can return to your home.
Oh, by the way, it is beyond idiotic to suggest that Matilda would leave a disabled person where they fell because she doesn’t want to be an unpaid PCA. If this is the quality of argumentation you intend to present, I would go up and re-read the bit about avoiding court.
4. Run interference between Matilda and HH. Keep the two apart, under whatever pretense you need for HH's sake. Weekends with her mother, move her room to the basement, away from HH's gaze, Put her computer down there so she has the privacy to write what she wants and recharge her batteries for more effort being civil to somebody she can't stand, even if her feelings might be unjustified at times.
She can’t help how she feels, but can be expected to be civil, but that takes recharge time.
5. Start letting go of some of the control you have tried to keep, and you'll find that it isn't so bad; respect will take its place.
Respect cannot be demanded, it must be earned and it's a two way street. You can demand obedience, but you cannot demand respect, and even obedience eventually gives way to resentment without respect.
She is seventeen, and soon will be able to make her own choices, by acting as you are; you are throwing away your chance to have a continuing influence on her after her next birthday in the interests of having an unhealthy and abusive level of control until then.
I'd hate to see you do that.
Remember, the tighter you close your fist, the less you have to hold.
6. Stop taking things away.
When a punishment loses it effectiveness it means it has been over utilized, how has ‘taking things away from Matilda’ worked lately?
How about gaining her confidence and trust? How about leading?
She knows what you are doing is wrong; she doesn’t have to be told that she lives in what is legally referred to as a ‘destabilized household.’
If you can’t inspire and connect with her soon, you will have lost far more than you can possibly realize.
But first you must gain her trust, and that won’t be done by taking away her clothes she packed for her thanksgiving break.
You are supposed to be the adult, act like it.
7. Make her feel welcome in her own home.
She still lives there, and will until she is legally allowed to move. MoS has let her put things in her room, and I have permitted her storage space in the garage, but she has no bed here, no 'room of her own' under my roof while she is legally obligated to reside with you. I seriously doubt a stack of boxes on a pallet in a garage could seriously be viewed by anyone as a 'change in residence'
But you have to wonder why she would go to so much effort to get things out of what is purportedly her 'home' and why she feels so much more 'at home' someplace she does not live.
Everything you give her either comes with strings attached, or may be taken away at any time. The things you have given her, she doesn't see as a 'token' of your esteem, but 'in place of' and this is precisely because of the facility with which you take them back. Then, you say to me that the 'things you have given to her' are not 'her personal belongings' and Dr. BunnyRabbit says she is 'being manipulative' by 'taking away every bit of leverage' you 'have over her'
Tofu, are you hearing what you sound like?
Its nuts!
Do you realize how it will sound to a court when she says that she is banned from certain rooms, doesn’t own even her own stuff, is left notes warning her that ‘she is being watched’, has had her lunch money stopped and so forth?
Make her feel welcome and safe, and just watch her bring her stuff back. Acknowledge that what is hers IS really hers, and she'll feel safe having it.
I am going to encourage her to come up with some terms under which she will end her strike, it really isn’t fair to strike without terms the other side can at least choose to accept or reject, and without terms, a negotiated peace is impossible.
Isn’t that what we all want?
Peace and respect?
Look Tofu, the ball is in your court, but you cannot drop it this time. We can argue about me, and what I have supposedly done, or MoS, or whatever another time, but for now, I have opened my heart one more time, reached out once again, fully expecting to be vilified for my efforts, but I would have a very hard time sleeping if I didn't at least try.
Now, you have shown in the past an amazing determination to misunderstand what I am trying to say, and take exactly the wrong point, so let me reiterate for you my position.
I am ONLY on Matilda's side, but still tell her when I think she is wrong.
I have no intention of allowing her to reside at my residence apart from visitation with her mother until and unless it becomes legally appropriate.
I have only ever tried to reinforce your relationship with your daughter, often in spite of your best efforts to mess the whole thing up.
I am still your brother, and am always willing to talk with you one-on-one, I still care about you and don't want to intentionally cause you any hurt.
I have not always been a good guy, or done the right thing, and I admit this. I am not perfect, and get a little heated up, but I always try to set things right.
I never give up on anyone who I think is honestly trying.
I know you feel 'perfectly justified' but I feel that this will be of little comfort to you when you are alone, and it doesn't have to be that way.
Remember all those other times I tried to warn you?
Remember ignoring it?
How’d that work out for you?
Just think about it, OK?
Dave
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Boy, just think what I could do if I 'mattered'
RD