Buying happiness

I never thought i would buy my kid the overly expensive, name brand things.

My mom didn't. She couldn't afford to. And although we can technically afford to, philosophically I am not on board with designer kids stuff for many reasons. Mostly, you don't need a bunch of name brand, expensive things to be liked. I used to judge parents in malls buying their kids such things.

That was until I got a kid, and I wanted that kid to be liked, and all my attempts at buying less expensive "cool" shoes have back fired. Proving that a 34-year-old has no real sense of what is cool to 11-year-olds.

So behold Rose in shoes more expensive than any I owned until I was 27. Will they automatically make her popular? Nope. Did they make her so happy that she's been up since seven today wearing them around the house? Yep.

So that is probably worth the cost, my loss of personal conviction, and the people who were walking by the shoe store judging me.

Organized Chaos?

I have had a pretty big struggle the past few weeks. Note I didn't say Rose had a struggle. I said me.

My struggles have been in realizing how much Rose has been lying and defying us. That alone doesn't bug me. Kids will push boundaries. I want her to. It's her response to being caught that kills me. Kills me.

She will admit to whatever it is sometimes but then argue about why she was  right to break whatever rule has been offended. It feels like there's no getting through to her. More over, my worry amps up thinking about the dangers she'll encounter as she gets older.

I want her to be able admit to those mistakes to us. I want her to know that if she ends up in trouble as a teen, we can help. And  I want to be able to help without me shaking in anger after listening to Rose explain why she decided staying out until 2 a.m. was ok. Or whatever.

Last night, I was awake almost all night mulling this over. I was also mulling over my smashed-up Mustang, our kitchen currently being repaired and painted, and surprisingly those worries pushed all thoughts of work out of my mind. Woot.

Here's my poor first ever brand new, my dream car after rear ending a Dodge Durango.

Around four a.m. this morning I reset my alarm as I decided to skip boot camp at 5 a.m. I did just finish a half marathon Saturday and felt a little entitled. My muscles are still a bit sore, and after no more than 2 hours of solid sleep enduring another hour of vigorous exercise hardly seemed wise.

This morning, Rose was defiant, bordering on emotional abusive, as always lately. I weathered the storm pretty well. Then I dropped her off, I noticed the brake light in my sister's truck was blinking. It's a 26-year-old truck she can't use right dow due to herniated discs in her neck. So I have no confidence the light is just an old truck bein quirky or if it's real. I'm lucky she can lend it to me while my car is repaired. But I'm not willing to risk my life getting to work in it.

Rather than hitting the free way, I decided to come home because my sis wasn't answering her phone and couldn't confirm that my commute to the office wouldn't end in a fiery crash. I had to take care of insurance paperwork anyway, and I took a personal day. After dealing with my insurance stuff, I began to think about Rose again.

That's when I realized half of the lies she was trying to cover up revolved around the total and utter mess her room was in. It's easy to hide things in a room that's a pig sty. I decided to spend about two hours of my personal day deep cleaning her room. I figured the act might make her happy because she might be overwhelmed by the chaos. Or, she might be angry about how much stuff I purged. I was willing to take the risk

When she walked in and saw the work I'd done she was thrilled. Yay. She's hugged me, twice. As I figured, most of the stuff I threw she didn't even remember shoving into drawers. I left a pile of stuff on her table for her to organize. I explained how I'd emptied and sorted her bins--assigning clear tasks for each.

I wonder if maybe part of Rose's sass the past week was resulting from the utter chaos her room was in. I know I feel off kilter when my car, office, or bedroom is messy but I am a little "type a" that way. Then I realize maybe part of my heightened frustration toward Rose's behaviors lately revolve around the chaos in my own life (the kitchen in disrepair, the intense training, the broken car). Who knows.

Here are some after pics of Rose's room. Yes, it's still pink.

(Wish I had realized the chaos of my life and her room would lend themselves to a blog post so I'd thought to take a pre pic.)

Another Family First

Neighborhood Show

It was mom who melted down today. This morning Rose wasn't happy. Who is? It's Monday, right?

I managed to deal with her grumpyness. Then she really started to up the sass. When she does that, she flips into a dialect that, as she confirmed, "is just how sassy black women talk." It's not the dialect as much as the total disrespect that comes along with it. Yet, I weathered that, too, until we were running late, which is a big deal because it means she misses the bus to summer school.

So I urged her to hurry up and was met with a, "you ain't the boss of me, who you think you are?" So I yanked the shoes out of her hand opened the door and threw them down to the street. All the while she was still going on about her birth mom. How I'm not her mom. More red.

I took her back pack and hurled that down the front steps. She kept going to so the peanut butter and jelly crumpets I had made for her I crushed in my hand and flung it into the blushes saying, "go ahead and steal the free breakfast from the poor kids." (Mom isn't politically correct when she's mad.)

She was still sassing, and I was like the hulk: totally unable snap out of my anger. In a last bit of flourish I threw my bagel with cream cheese, and it landed on my windshield, leaving a creamy white streak. Rose wasn't phased in the least. Calmly looking me she said, "I'm not taking my back pack." It lay on the steps, a bit of peanut butter smeared on it.

So I pushed her (not hard) to her back pack, made her pick it up and pushed her (again, not hard) to the car. She got in, and she continued to taunt me. She thought she had the upper hand, but I reminded her that family time was out of the question the longer she didn't behave respectfully. "I don't care." That is code she does.

The drop off at school wasn't a terrible success either, but the extreme drama wasn't there. She pushed it, but I didn't care. She hadn't missed her bus, so I was able to get to work after sobbing my way to my car, and all the way down the free way. I'm not proud of any of this. Pretty embarrassed, actually--especially about the pushing. So I figure I'll include this here to keep myself honest; to remind myself I have a lot of work to do.

Things get more real

I've been fairly silent lately. Mostly silenced by happiness. Rose's white noise from the last year has all but disappeared. The tension in the house is all but gone. Thinking of her as a three year old, not eleven, increased my patience.  She's learning how to be a kid in some instances. She's letting us be parents, some times.

On the flip side, we're able to start seeing the real beauty and sad truthful longer term damage. These are my takeaways:

First, the beauty.
1) She is truly empathetic.
2) She is very, very stubborn. (A coworker today aptly said she had a daughter who she knew would make a cool adult, if she didn't kill her daughter before she reached adulthood.)
3) She is really passionate. She hasn't found her passion, yet. When she does, watch out.
4) She wants to be loved.

Then the sad.
1) No matter what we do, we can't convince her we know how to keep her safe. This results in lots of defiance--some acts more risky than others. 
2) Realizing how much she doesn't trust in anyone's ability besides her own makes me especially all too aware of the hard road she'll head down.
3) She makes friends with abusive children. She is hurt by them. She goes back to them and gets hurt again. She takes comfort in pain, heightening my fear of a more dangerous path this could lead as she grows up.

Then the pathetic.
As a grown up, a perfectionist first born, people pleasing grown up, I'm realizing I can't control this. I realize no matter what we do, we can create positive change, but we can't deter Rose. In essence, "success" as a parent isn't truly definable. In training, one haggard, tired adoptive mom said she learned parenting meant attending the court cases for her son and writing him in court. I bristled, thinking I'd never have that fate. I'm too smart for that.

While I hope i don't my know-it-all big sister sensibilities prove right. I hope my optimism that I can flip any situation around, the reality we've seen lately makes me feel a lot more glass half full. This makes it really hard to bond. I have to somehow create a way to not take Rose's stumbles personally so I can overcome this hinderance. I'm just not sure how.