Today is Thursday, the 23rd of June. It\’s about 2pm here. There\’s approx. 30 hours left until the weekend begins. I\’m currently teetering on the edge of total freak out, re: the kid watching. I don\’t think I can handle this for another full week, let alone another two months.
I\’m sick to my damn stomach; I just don\’t know what to do about this. Maude says it\’s easy, and to just sit her down with a book and she\’ll be fine. What ends up happening is she falls asleep. So if we\’re not out running around, she\’s sleeping. Then her dad gets home and is pissed that she\’s been sleeping. Somehow it\’s my fault for not laying down the law and making her stay awake and do things around the apartment. The poor kid doesn\’t like being cooped up in the apartment; she has cabin fever, and I don\’t blame her. My teenage years aren\’t all that far behind me. But she\’s too young to be let out into a strange city on her own, and I don\’t have the time or energy to keep her occupied. We can\’t afford outside care. Her mom is going to have a fit when she finds out the kid came all this way to sleep all day.
Bless you, stay at home parents and guardians of the world. I don\’t know how you do it. I guess most people get 12 years of full time practice before being hit with a teenager, but even so — what first time parent of an adolescent has ever truly been prepared?
I don\’t think I can do this, and I\’m teetering on throwing two and a half years of friendship, trust, respect, and love out in favor of getting the fuck out of this situation. Everything else is grand, but I am not cut out to be a full time stay at home parent, especially not right now. I really like the kid, but this is not working. This is not working.
I turn 24 (going on 40) on Monday. She turns 13 next month. But Dr. Maude is a perpetual Peter Pan. It\’s not that he\’s too old, and it\’s not that I\’m too young — anyone who knows us would laugh at the idea of him being old and me being young, it\’s really quite the reverse, which is why it has worked so well for so long. And while the kid part has been trying in the past, in the previous years she was enrolled in camp or her dad was able to take off from work — and I didn\’t have classes to keep up with.
This is so ridiculous. I feel like such a selfish asshole because I feel like I can\’t handle taking care of his kid for him. And then I think of how idiotic that sounds. I\’m trapped in this crazy mind puzzle of disability/feminism/not liking kids/trying to be a student/trying to keep my relationship/trying to not be homeless/issues about my ideologies on how teenagers ought to be treated and raised/etc. and I just… WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO? There is no self-help book for this.
I want to talk about this with Dr. Maude but I can\’t because the walls are literally too thin in here. There\’s no place to send her and we can\’t leave her home alone. And he comes home, we have dinner, and then he\’s basically asleep — exhausted from leaving for work at eight in the morning. There is no time to talk to him.
I don\’t know how parents do it. I don\’t, I don\’t, I don\’t.
