Disappointed
This is a very long post, so don’t even start reading unless you have a couple of months’ worth of time.
I’ve talked about deceit and theft before, especially when it pertained to my own kids. Well, yesterday took the cake.
My aunt was taking my daughter out shopping for her belated birthday present. When she came back with a pile of new clothes and some birthday cards, I asked her to try on the clothes for me, and when I saw the cards, asked her if she got any money in the cards. I just wondered if they had also done that for her since they’re overly generous, but she said that there was no money.
A little while later, while she was being skulky in my bedroom, I saw her putting something in her pants, so I looked in the top of her pants and found $25. I asked her where she got it and she said it was a birthday present from my aunt. When I asked why she had lied about that she told me that she thought I’d take it, “like daddy does”. I said that I’m ‘not daddy’ and I don’t take people’s money.
All this didn’t sit well with me. Yesterday or the day before I had taken some money out of the bank machine and when I was putting change back into my wallet I saw that I had no money. I asked my honey where I had spent the money, because I couldn’t remember going through all the money I had taken out of the machine. He couldn’t think of it, and I couldn’t think of it either.
So today after this sneaky ‘money in the pants’ thing, I checked my wallet since I had just taken out $40 from the bank machine because I had no money to get my honey and myself a coffee. I only had $15 in my wallet.
I said to my daughter, “give me my money” and she gave me a $20. I told her to go out and sit in the living room. I asked her where she got the other $5 and she told me my aunt had given it to her for her birthday. I said, “she doesn’t give $5 in a card (because when they give money, they give lots of money) and my daughter told me that, because they’d bought her all the clothes, they just let her keep some $5 change.
I was very mad at the stealing. If you’ll remember, she’s stolen food (sneak-eating a box of something or a container of ice cream or whatever she’s sneaking and then hiding any evidence of it into the furniture constitutes stealing to me). She’s stolen my jewellery and my clothes. Now she’s stolen money out of my purse (and perhaps at other times, I don’t know).
Just two weeks ago when she was here and wrapping my clothes up in her clothes, and hiding them in the hall closet to get them at a time when I wasn’t around, I had a big discussion with her about the stealing, and asked her to ‘have a look at herself’ and write down what was going on and why she was doing these things and how she was going to resolve them. She wrote this:
I take things because daddy won’t buy me nice clothing, he’ll buy cheap crap that’s from Goodwill, or any thrift shop in the area and he won’t care if someone would look like a homeless person if they wore it. Everyone I know has brand-name clothing, shoes, accesories, etc, but I can’t afford that stuff, and I hate looking like the poorest kid in my school because of it.
I try to stop, but if I see something I like, I feel I need to have it.
I don’t like taking things, but I hate it if I don’t have anything nice to wear. I hate the fact that sometimes we shop at Value Village, because it is a thrift store and it makes me feel like I’m poor.
About every kid in my school has Phat Farm/Pharm shoes or some other brand-name stuff, but what can I say? “Oh I bought this shirt at a thrift store?”
I also have maybe 6 shirts (including the ones that don’t fit) at daddy’s house, and about 3 pairs of pants, and I hate wearing the same thing EVERY DAY.
I promise I won’t steal anymore, and I won’t be sneaky with food either and I’ll ask if I want something.
We had another discussion after that, and I trusted her another time. I figured I’d give her the benefit of the doubt and try to believe in what she said this time (until I saw her being sneaky yet again this weekend).
And not only did she take the money, but before that she snuck down half a container of ice cream, ate almost all the breakfast bars, ate chocolate bars (Costco box) in the fridge, on top of all the regular meals we fed her. She hid all the wrappers under and in furniture, and hid the dirty ice cream bowl in her knapsack to take home with her.
I have no idea when she’s sneaking all this food because I was up at 7:00 today and 7:30 yesterday. It’s not as if I’m in bed half the day and she’s got nothing to eat.
I was at a loss. After I told her to sit in the living room, my trust and belief in my own child totally evaded me, and I was angry at myself too, for believing in her. I called my ex and told him that I would be bringing her home then. I called my aunt and asked her if she’d given my daughter any money for her birthday and was told, “no”, at which point I explained what had happened. My aunt told me that my daughter had $5 on her when they went out, so I knew this wasn’t today’s theft and asked again for the rest of my money.
I told her to get her things together. I went into her room to look for things she needed to take home and, while there, I saw the necklace she had been wearing when she came, which she said someone had given her. I told her to take the necklace so she could return it to whomever she had stolen it from.
She then decided to have a conniption fit, saying that someone had given that to her and she was going to leave, she didn’t care about her stuff. I told her that I was going to drive her home and she said that she was going to walk. After the screaming and yelling and name calling, she then took off down the hall stairs.
Well, boys and girls, I’d just about lost it by then. I came out of the bedroom after her and I smashed that fucking hallway door open, prepared to grab a 13-year-old and drag her back up the stairs so that she could get driven home instead of off by herself, making her way.
When I opened that door it smashed into the big plant we have outside, knocking the plant and dirt to the landing below. She stopped at the landing (perhaps she thought the plant would fall on her) and I told her to get back upstairs and get her things together.
I told her to find her glasses (the new FCUK ones that I just paid $150 for) and she said she didn’t care if she found them. Oh, after I just spent $150, she didn’t care. She found them, got her new clothes together with her backpack (minus one ice cream dish that I had removed) and went down to the car.
She had been yelling and screaming at me about how she hadn’t stolen the necklace. To which I responded with the, “you’re going to have a tantrum now about the necklace? You stole money from me and you’re trying to make things seem as if you’re hard done by because I don’t know whether the necklace was stolen?” stuff.
I dropped her off at my ex’s place and looked through her room to make sure that none of my stuff was there. She looked and found the box that the necklace came in and my ex told me that the necklace was a gift. Well who gives a fuck? I just didn’t know whether the necklace was yet another theft, but the issue certainly had nothing to do with the necklace.
I talked to the ex upon leaving and told him that I didn’t want to see my daughter again (interruption: “I don’t want to see you again either!”) until she could behave like a normal human being and stop the fucking stealing.
So, I’m sorry for the length, but that was my day – other than all the ubercleaning my honey and I did while she was out (hence finding hidden wrappers/containers throughout the furniture).
I’ve about had it with children who lie and sneak and steal from me. Oh, it must be me. My children seem to have a sense of entitlement. It doesn’t seem to matter to them that they’re taking things from me that aren’t theirs, since apparently other parents do more for their kids than I do for mine.
It doesn’t seem to matter how much I’ve given whenever it was possible to give. Instead of a thank you and appreciation for the fact that I don’t have much to give, I must be a bastard for not giving whatever ‘somebody has given somebody else’.
I’m sick of it all and I wonder WTF I ever had kids. What did I expect? Normalcy? Leave it to Beaver? No, I think I just expected to love my kids, give them what I could give, and get back some love in return. This is not my definition of love.
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Comments
My step-daughter is 11 now – and I have a tough enough time dealing with the cigarette stealing that goes around here.
I think you did the right thing. You gave her chances – as many as a mother should, and you didn’t give an unreasonable ultimatum at all – “don’t come back until the stealing stops”
Well done.
Its hard being a half kid eh?, whats a half kid?, got half of two relationships.
The problem is you never see what “Daddy” does and says, and vice versa.
This produces some really strange signals in the kids head, things like stealing are symptoms, symptoms of distrust, that your kid feels is her lot. That she is distrusted by both of you and , since you can’t live together, and she has two half lives they must be seperate in her mind or she will be really confused, and I’m sorry to say, affected for life.
I know its hard on your part too, knowing how to relate to this behaviour, if you have never encountered teens with these problems before. I have see it about twenty times or more, and it seems in general the girls steal or shoplift where the boys destroy things or injure themselves, or both. Sometimes the younger boys steal too but you would be hard pressed to catch them by the time they are teens they are so good at it.
I’m not going to give you any advise either, because you didn’t ask for any, but I offer this thought.
“This too shall pass”, teens grow up into young adults soon enough. And if they haven’t killed anyone, and have all their limbs you have done well as a parent.
Now get back to that cleaning, I can see a dust ball under the table….
*ducks*
I can see why you’re upset.
BFG’s got a point, though. Even though you’re bringing her up right, who knows what signals she’s getting from Dad? Or from her school chums if you go by that letter (which was a good idea on your part I believe).
I always sleep on these things before reacting, ’cause I usually regret it, being me!
Thanks for all your support, guys. I have a whole bunch of thinking I need to do to see if we can handle this in any way.
But I appreciate your comments and your time in reading (even half) of this tome.
idiotonastick
Minna
Dave Barker
I used Moneris for over two years. I recently terminated due to a merchant compliance requiremen t – Moneris began...
Maria
just another
Female, taken, fire, Sagittarius, Monkey, Toronto, two kids, one grandson, IT.
55
is the new 30. I want the world to close their mouths when they’re eating or chewing gum. If they don’t, I want to elbow them in the face.
I am so sorry to hear that this all happened to you on a weekend. You know, raising kids is not easy – we had our ups and downs with banging doors and what have you. Sometimes I was so frustrated, but we made it through. We actully have a very open relationship with our son. We did not have problems with stealing though – so I can’t give you any advice – I can give you just an ear to ‘listen’.
I hope that your daughter will come to her sences. But then again, peer-pressure is hard on kids…