I know most people have their blogs on auto-pilot today, while they are off doing other things...
Sadly, I have no other things, so, I'm blogging.
Today is very strange, not just because of the short-week weirdness, but, also because of some things that happened here yesterday, which I will try to explain.
The issues with my stepson, while somewhat similar to what we went through with the stepdaughter, are worse in a lot of respects, and, got damned ugly yesterday. I won't go into a lot of detail, but I will say that when I (grudgingly) confronted him on some behaviors, he became so angry and confrontational that I would not have been surprised if he had punched me--he did raise his fist, but didn't follow it up. Instead, he stomped off with a "
F*ck you, you f*cking bitch!" and slammed the door behind him, then told everyone in his path (my children) to F*ck Off as well.
Frankly, I was relieved when he stomped off. The kid scares me. The reason I don't like to confront him on anything is because this is how he reacts--he becomes angry, and he teeters on the edge of doing something violent. He goes immediately into the abusive intimidation act in order to get his way, and it usually works, because, well, he's scary. Later on, he denies ever having done it, claiming that we misinterpreted his actions, or that
he is the victim of our misunderstanding, and we should be more understanding.
In other words, classic abuser behavior.
As bad as it was living with his sister, at least with her, I never thought my safety or my children's safety was an issue. With him, the longer we live in the same house, the more I think about it.
After he got in my face and was shaking his fist at me, I couldn't think of anything else. So, when I stopped shaking, I called my husband and said, "I'm done."
And I feel very bad about this.
Throughout the entire time we have been married, my husband has told me, many times, that it is his dream to have his kids living with him. Their mother denied him a relationship with both of his children, and frankly, she completely ruined them because she raised them without any kind of system of checks and balances. After she forced my husband out, there was no "rational" person in the household to temper her insanity. When the schools tried to intervene, her response was to pull them out of school--get off the grid, so to speak, so NOBODY could see what kind of daily abuse she was inflicting upon them.
She threatened them, to never speak of the things that she did. Secrets...hallmark of an abuser. After all, if what you're doing can't be shared, its probably wrong.
All along, my husband and I have felt a great sense of duty to get those kids the hell away from her, and there were several occasions in which we took her to court to try to get them out. Since their mother is a professional liar, she's better at manipulating the system and painting herself the victim than we are, so, we did not win custody of the children. Eventually, though, she tired of them, and forced them out--Stepdaughter ran away to our house one day after a particularly violent episode, and never went back. The mother just got sick of the Stepson and dropped him off at a homeless shelter at the age of 16.
By the time she got through with them, both had serious personality issues of their own.
And now they were ours.
Let me be perfectly clear about one thing: I don't blame these children for being what they are. They were
created. Created by an evil, awful woman, who thought so little of them that she took those two perfectly wonderful human beings and made them into little monsters. Narcissists, like her.
Just in the past few months, I have had to deal with a variety of issues that I never thought I would ever have to deal with, most of which involve Stepson's victimizing of women. I'm talking about pure sleaze, here, basically--no other way to describe it. Like this: He is 16, and started having secret, late night phone conversations with one of the Diva's friends, who just turned 13, and...the conversations consisted in part of him trying to get her to do sexual things over the phone.
That is just one example, and there are many others, so you can see how I formulated the opinion that my stepson is icky sex offender material.
And we live in the same house with this person.
I'm a woman, and I have two barely-teenaged daughters. The only thing that pops into my head in regards to dealing with someone like this is cutting his junk off and hanging it in a prominent place on the wall to remind him to be ashamed.
When asked, by my husband, what I think should be an appropriate punishment for these things, I tend to say things like, "Step on his head. Then jump up and down a few times."
He usually opts for less extreme methods, like taking the phone away for a week or two, which the boy protests as unfair and stupid, and does not think of as a motivation to stop carrying on his dirty little secret life--just a temporary delay in his icky gratification. In fact, he'll sneak around and use the phone anyway, or just carry on his sick shit IMing on the computer instead.
So nothing changes. He doesn't get it.
There is no "send him back to his mother" option, and even if there were, it should never happen--to do this would be to do the child a dis-service. He needs, well, someone to step on his head and jump up and down a few times. Figuratively speaking, of course.
But my sense of duty to help him be a better person has been eclipsed by my duty to protect my children from people like him.
We spent several hours talking last night, the stepson, husband and me. I got to speak my peace, and say everything I needed to say to both of them. My husband just wants to figure out a way for this to all work out. I think he is being naive.
Needless to say, I'd love to trade long weekends with any of you.
Labels: Inappropriately Self Involved, Some Great Lament
