Difficult Daughter

Here are yet more words I’ve never allowed to utter out loud.

I have an extremely difficult daughter.

No matter how much I have given her, she lets me know that it is not enough. She finds a way to insult me and it seems that the larger the amount is that I give her, the more insulting she becomes. In light of the fact that I have ¼ of the amount that my mother had, I’ve shared a larger portion of my inheritance than my mother did with me.

And I certainly showed my mother more respect. I never threatened to kill her, ever. I never told her to never speak to me or my children again, ever. I never blocked her from social media, ever. I sent her cards for Christmas, birthdays and mother’s day while I myself have received less than a handful from my own grown daughter.

I’m so sick of being punished for inheriting this money that I considered dividing the assets three ways, between my son, daughter and I. But then, I’m certain it won’t be enough for her. Nothing ever has been .enough for her and it scares me now more than ever, because I can hear the same entitlement that made her threaten our lives, repeatedly, in her teens.

I don’t think her true hate for me has ever ended. She’s always thought I had so much more to spare than I have. I’m not the only person for whom she has unrealistic expectations, but I’m most definitely her primary target.

The first time she threatened to kill my son and I, she was angry that I wouldn’t let her go to a party. She was 13 years old. This was the first time she’d asked to go to a party for teenagers. She gave me no information about it, so I hesitated and said I couldn’t allow her to go unless I knew more about it, who would supervise, etc. She stood at the window, looking out, then suddenly whirled around and demanded, “Where’s my father’s money?” I was shocked and speechless. She then marched into the kitchen, exclaiming, “Where’s a knife. I’m going to kill my family.” She began to rifle through the top kitchen drawer. My son came to stand beside me while I stood there in shock. I couldn’t believe this new behavior. Before I knew what to do, my son had climbed up into my arms and I was holding him, when she turned away from the drawer and charged out of the kitchen toward us. I didn’t see a knife but wasn’t 100% sure and I instinctively reached out and hit her in the face hard enough to keep her back. I honestly don’t recall if it was a slap, or a backhand, but it’s the only time I hit my daughter in the face and I instantly regretted it. I’ve regretted it ever since and never forgotten it.

She went and stayed with my older sister for a while, but chose to come back, complaining that she watched her aunt put on a pair of heels and click down the halls to the counselor’s office at the school, trying to get me in trouble for not having health insurance for my children. It was a weird story, but not a surprise. My big sister has spent a lifetime of energy soliciting others to gang up with her against me. I was out of my mind and at my wit’s end to let my daughter go there. But what’s done is done.

After that episode, I realized her sentiments about the social security money, I decided that I didn’t want to use her father’s social security money, for fear that she would hold it against me in the future. So, after 13 years of receiving no child support, I continued to take care of her with no help, and put the social security money in a savings account for her future.

A few years later, she threatened to kill us once again. The fighting had never stopped and we received counseling from public services. My daughter’s complaints were always about money and freedom to do as she pleased. I complained that I couldn’t please her financially. When I was telling the counselor that she wanted fifty dollar jeans because the other girls were wearing fifty dollar jeans, she yelled out, to our surprise, “That’s not true! If they’re wearing fifty dollar jeans, then I want hundred dollar jeans.” There were many years where she was impossible and I sobbed and begged and threatened to try and end the drama.

She would spray perfume in my face while driving, once while I was driving down I-35. She was letting dangerous criminals into the house. She tried to jump out of the van when a man I’d worked for for almost two decades was kind enough to transport us to Albuquerque for our yearly Christmas visit with ‘the family’ .

At 16, she was angry about something or other, and we sat across the kitchen table from one another. She wasn’t getting what she wanted so she picked up the phone and pretended to call the police. She said to the pretend operator, “Hello police? I’ve just killed my family.” Then she hung up the phone and smirked at me with a wicked smile. She saw my fear and enjoyed it. I sat there frozen, realizing that she was finally physically capable of carrying out her threat.

It was soon after that that I moved to Albuquerque with my children, desperate for support from someone in the family. I went to the home of my mother and step-father. I drove to Albuquerque with my son, and said goodbye to my precious oldest sister for what I did not know would be the last time I would ever see her again.

I asked my father to pick up my daughter and put her on the plane to Albuquerque. I was completely unable to manage her at that point. She was disappearing every night through her bedroom window, dancing on bar tops so she told me. I don’t know how she got in at her young age.

I woke one morning to find a psychopath in my daughter’s bed. He’d come in through the window while she was out, and was waiting in her bed. Fortunately, I saw him in the bed before she came home and called the police. The man had carved a Z into his stomach with a very large knife, in order to impress the girls. When I saw him in my daughter’s bed, my knees gave way in fear and I fell against the wall in fear. It was difficult to walk down the hall to get to a phone and call the police.

While I was at work each day, my daughter’s friends would change my outgoing message to foul and embarrassing messages. Since I cleaned 13 houses a week, I received frequent calls from my clients who heard these bizarre and foul messages.

When we arrived in Albuquerque, I immediately found work, new houses to clean and a temporary typing job.

I was planning to establish myself again in Albuquerque, but my step-father had other ideas.

He had me see an attorney to sign a contract he had conceived, giving him full control of my daughter and taking away all of mine. When I got to the attorney, she informed me that she represented me and not my step-father, despite the fact that he had paid her, I was the client in this case. She said it was her responsibility to tell me that the contract he asked her to write was meaningless and unnecessary and she also thought it was cruel. She said, “You have every right to custody of your daughter, no matter what this contract says.”

But I was beaten and looking for peace for the sake of my 9 year old son, who had already witnessed far too much drama, so I signed.

My son and I lived in a tiny room with two cots, a sink and a toilet. Probably 5×15. It was very narrow and not meant for long term living. It was the room at the end of a six car garage. My daughter lived in the house with them. I didn’t mind the separation.

My daughter finally got her first job, something she’d wanted for years and I was bursting with hope for her. She looked nice in a starched white shirt when she went off to work at a department store. One morning of the balloon festival, my mother wanted us all to wake at 5 in the morning to see the balloons. My son and I were groggy and tired when we walked into the house and my mother and daughter were standing at either end of the living room, yelling at each other. My daughter was in tears because she was supposed to work that day, so I spoke up and took her side. My step-father snapped and began to scream at me in a shocking rage. “You can’t even get your son to put his shoes away!” he raged.

My mother won. We all went to the festival that early morning. It was cold and damp and dismal. I was crushed. There was no place in the house for my son’s shoes. He would kick them off when he got home from school and we’d hang out in the living room a few hours. But he always took them with him when we returned to the garage. To hear my step-father rage at my innocent son like that, in the tender hours of the morning, was really more than I could take, so I made the decision to move back to Texas and I left my daughter there.

I continue to try and understand at which point my daughter came to hate me so very much.

Her last message to me is that she’s worked for years with counseling in order to make sure that my opinion “means nothing” to her. The curious thing is that I’ve kept my mouth shut and reserved my opinion for most of her life.

When I shared the story with my grown grandson, about a guitar he’d been given, that once belonged to me, he was excited and surprised to learn this news. I had told my daughter that story a number of times, and shared pictures that are a part of the history. By my grandson’s reaction, it was clear that she refused to ever share that story with him. I could tell she didn’t want me to be a part of the history of that guitar, so she simply erased me.

She not only doesn’t want me to exist, she wants to erase my very history that occurred before she was ever conceived.

Where did this hatred begin?

When she was nine, she was about to enter her father’s rental car, when she turned and said to me, “My Daddy lets me ride without a seat belt and he goes 100 miles and hour.” With that statement, she turned her back to me, got in the car and slammed the door. I stood there in shock, not quite believing what I’d just heard when they drove away. I kept asking myself if she said what I thought I had heard. I didn’t even know she resented wearing a seat belt. I was confused.

When she returned from her visit with her father, she hid behind him has he entered our door. “She’s coming to live with me.” he announced. I could tell by his demeanor that there would be an argument if I objected, so I did not argue.

It broke my heart to see my daughter hiding from me, afraid to speak a word to me. If she didn’t want to live with me I certainly wasn’t going to force her, so they gathered up a few of her things and headed back to the airport.

A few minutes after they left, the 3^rd wife of my ex suddenly called. This was decades before cell phones existed. It was her only way to reach her husband. I tried to act friendly over the phone, choking down the incredible sense of abandonment and loss, when I told her that they had just left for the airport.

“THEY?” she demanded. “What are you talking about?”

I explained to her what had just happened and, this being the second time the woman had ever spoken to me, she began to yell at me. She screamed at me that my daughter was not welcome in her home and demanded that I explain how could I have let her go like that?

She herself had given up her own young daughter’s life by refusing to give her the prescribed chemotherapy and was prosecuted in court after her daughter’s death. She wasn’t my first choice as a second parent. I’d never said a word to her asking her how she could have denied her daughter’s health care, and here this strange woman was yelling at me. But it was just the excuse I needed. Of course, I didn’t want my daughter to leave.

Learning that my daughter was not welcome was all I needed so I interrupted her screaming long enough to tell her I was going to get my daughter since she did not want her. I grabbed my two year old son, jumped in the car and sped to the airport as quick as I could with a large thunderstorm approaching. I arrived at the airport just in time to watch as the plane that carried the two of them disappeared into the darkening clouds, complete with lightning. I was too late. My daughter was gone.

The day after this episode happened to be Good Friday. I went to Unity church for the noon time meeting, inbetween the two houses that I cleaned every Friday, and as Sally Taylor preacher her usual good sermon, I sat toward the back and sobbed like a baby with snot running down my face with full force. I prayed to God to give me the strength to let go and trust. It was the deepest sense of surrender that I had ever felt. I was fighting so hard not to lose my mind.

I gathered up all of my daughter’s belongings, upon her father’s insistence, including her bike. I packed it all up in a very large box and, carrying my two year old on my hip, we took it down to UPS and shipped it all to her. I wanted her to have everything so that she wouldn’t miss home.

And then, like a miracle, the next year and a half turned out to be the most rewarding and pleasant time of parenting in my life. To my surprise, she finally asked to return.

She cried to me that her uncle Jim and cousin Micah had been very cruel to her and had picked on her without mercy. Her little brother was only four when she returned but she transferred her anger against her older cousin to her little brother, viewing him now as her competitor and her enemy. I tried to convince her it wasn’t the case but her jealousy was fit to be tied.

When she was 13 she threatened to kill the both of us.

She was standing at the window, staring out, very distressed because I would not give her permission to go to an unsupervised party that night. This was the first time she’d requested such a thing and of course I could not allow it.

She stood at the window a while, stewing in anger, until she suddenly whirled around and demanded, “Where’s my father’s money!” Her father had just passed away and the first social security had not arrived, but she let me know, right then and there, that it was the first thing on her mind.

I was shocked and did not understand the connection between the money and her freedom to party, but she sure did. I contemplated her demand and did not respond, when she rushed toward the kitchen, demanding, “Where’s a knife? I’m going to kill my family!”

She yanked open the utensil drawer and began to rifle around in it, while I stood at the entrance of the kitchen, still frozen in shock. My six year old son came down the stairway and stood beside me. I grabbed him up as my daughter turned and ran toward us. I took my hand and held it back and then landed it across her face as hard as I could when she was almost upon us. It’s the most physical I’d ever been with her, the only physical thing I’d done other than spankings. I was shocked at myself, shocked at her. I sent her to my big sister for a few weeks where the trial of Jeffrey Daumer was imposed upon my daughter.

When she was 16, she threatened to kill the both of us again. Again she was angry about money and the freedom to party and dance on bar tops at night.

At this point, I took her to my parents for their help as she sprayed perfume in my eyes as we drove down the highway.

At 19, she pulled up to a house that I had cleaned for the past twenty years and began to make a scene, wanting to take her 12 year old brother to a party on Lake Travis. She and her friend, Th., jumped out of the car, music blaring, engine gunning, hips falling out of their cut-offs.

I turned them down and they began to scream at me, running around the car and making a scene, as I took my son and went back into Sue and Dave Fowler’s house to clean, utterly mortified by the behavior of my grown daughter.

When my son and I returned home that day, TH and my daughter called her 12 year old brother on the phone where Th proceeded to tell him I was a hypocrite because I “smoked pot”. I heard her scream. Who was this strange young woman looking to injure my family? I did not know much about Theresa.

When my daughter brought her up decades later and I asked her why Th tried to wound my family, my daughter flipped her nose into the air, declaring, “We don’t lie to our children. They know that we smoke pot.” forgetting that she lost custody of both her children and caused the entire family years of distress because of that decision, when CPS learned from her son that she smoked pot around her kids. Did she think that I had forgotten? I didn’t say anything to defend myself. She was determined to turn it on me. She’s always been determined to turn everything on me.

The worst was yet to come.

My daughter’s fiance was in jail for snagging an old woman’s purse and running away with it, according to her, so she began living with his mother, waiting for him to get out.

I was appalled to learn of his crime, but again, said nothing about it.

At the same time, her best friend, Th, ran up a $300 phone bill at my daughter’s house, and Th also had an ex-con who was angry at her and looking for her because she had thrown out all his clothes while he was incarcerated.

I finally found a small 2 bedroom house on Martin Luther King Drive, slightly larger than the apartment we had been living in for years.

My daughter wanted to move in before my son and I had even unpacked. We made an agreement, or so I thought, that she could come and live with me so long as Th, and other criminal friends, did not know our address. I was terrified of Th coming over while I was not home and running up my phone bill. I was also terrified of the criminals that seemed to follow her wherever she went.

We had an agreement, but it broke into pieces when my daughter got in a fight with her boyfriend’s mother and ended up moving all her things out that very night. It just so happened that I was cleaning the sorority, Alpha Beta Pi, who I had been cleaning for the past 3 years. I had a very good relationship with the girls who lived there. They were hard working girls, almost all of them studying to become teachers.

I was surprised to learn that some sororities are not a bunch of spoiled girls. These were hard working girls who were putting themselves through college with part time jobs. They gave me gifts every Christmas to show their appreciation. I was a very good maid.

The evening of her fight with her fiance’s mother, I was just finished cleaning the sorority, the girls were upstairs watching their favorite sit com and I was putting away the broom, mop and vacuum, shoving them into the closet underneath the stairwell when my daughter came in through the back door.

She told me about her fight with the fiance’s mother and she was fit to be tied. She told me she had all of her things and asked for the key to my home. I told her to hold on while I was shutting the closet door when you exploded in a rage, “Just give me the fucking house keys!”

I was stunned into shock. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t give her my housekeys. I was sickened to realize that although six years had passed since the last time she spoke to me this way, she had not changed at all.

I drove to the house like a paralyzed zombie, realizing to myself that I could not ever live with this kind of abuse again. I could not live with a bully again.

When I got to the house I saw Th standing beside her and I refused to get out of my car. I realized I could not return to this life of being bullied by my daughter and her criminal friends. My 12 year old son was with them and they all got angry with me when I wouldn’t even roll my window down. I just didn’t want to hear any of the threats or yelling.

Suddenly, both my daughter and son threw their Sonic drinks at my car and one of them kicked the car. At that point I drove away, got on the highway, not knowing where I was going, pulled over at the first rest stop and spent the night in my car along side large 18 wheelers.

I was 3 months away from my degree in math,

3 months away from a job where I could get off my knees and stop scrubbing toilets.

What my daughter did to me in retribution would almost destroy me and prevent my graduation.

She went to my big sister, the person who’s wanted nothing but my destruction for all her life, and encouraged my sister to call authorities on me four different times, with false claims. On the 4th visit, the authorities who came told me I had the right to sue my sister for harassment since she had called so many times.

This destroyed me for a spell, brought me to the lowest point of my life, and I’ve never fully recovered.

Trust is gone. Trust is over.

My grandchildren have been fed lies for all of their lies, as I’ve stayed in the background the whole of their lives. Some might call it negligence, but for me, it was the only way to survive.