Post Punk Kitchen Forum

i also hear this approx 4 times/day.

although......................considering how my marriage is sliding down the slope (and this is both of us, not just one), i would say we adults are also lacking in Vitamin Listening......

I am so sorry, torque. I will say that having one person who doesn't listen to me in the house is better than two.

well, to be fair, none of us listens to each other, so i get what i deserve, right?

I have been festering about this lately a lot and i am just going to drop the bomb and say it right here.
ready?

we've been talking a lot about college stuff, as it's time to start making plans about where to study, graduate, tests to take etc.
kid does not want to go to US and potentially use her legacy status.
my kid wants to go to japan and enter the fisheries research program at a certain university.
she knows that fisheries=whaling.
we can't have a civilized conversation about it so i am just pretending i didn't hear it. maybe she said it just to push my buttons, then i think about how much i hated my parents and was so 100% diametrically opposed to any and all of their opinions, so should it be any wonder that she is 100% opposed to mine?

so again, i am pretending i didn't hear it, and not debating with her, but it hurts inside a lot. i wonder what i did wrong, but i don't really have any place to talk about this. thank you for listening, Dr PPK.

ETA: i do think it is kind of humorous that i've always planned to spend my retirement cooking on a sea shepherd boat (though god willing they won't need to be around by then); maybe my kid and i could yell insults in japanese/throw rocks at each other.

I wish I could give you a big hug right now T!

I am sure that it hurts, even though you know it is very likely to shift, in part because it sucks when someone you love is doing things on purpose to make you hurt. There is a good Sea Shepherd presence in NYC, so maybe there will be events for her to visit when you are here, because they do come across as bad-ass and awesome when you meet them or tour the boat, and its hard not to feel like you want to ship out to go fight the good fight for the whales. Oh and do the Harlem shake in Antarctica :)

you are always so positive, you made me feel better. should i tie her to a chair and tape her eyes open and make her watch it?

You're probably better off telling her absolutely not to watch it, you forbid it, and then leave it open on your laptop :D

I really want to hug you lady! You have so much on your plate, and I can only hope to be as loving and kind as you are when L is a teenager. I have no idea how to be with a teenager who wants to do something that isn't good for them. Heck, I can't make L brush her teeth, let alone promise never to be a whaler. She does however do a mean Harlem Shake.

Best advice ever.

Sorry everything is so difficult right now, torque. hugs <3

Also: I once threatened to cut Shae's foot off when he told me wanted to go fight in wars.

He decided I was joking and still laughs about it. (and the military idea left his head years ago)

you just made me laugh so hard!

We had the same sort of "discussion" with D. He was sure he was going to go army. I was sure he would wake up missing a limb. Then he decided that he would try to get on the Sea Shepard and fight a better war. I am on board with this plan.

However, first he may want to try to graduate high school. (Let's not discuss my frustration with having a drop out)

((torque))

omg I hate "Bad Girls Club" so much. Hiding in bedroom until it's over.

UGH. The following may frustrate some.

Our neighborhood high school is the worst. Both my older two struggled in different ways... my son dropped out, my straight A daughter transferred to a charter school because of harassment from teachers about her sexuality. Now that the youngest is almost in high school I am looking at making sure she won't go there. She is fighting me on it and now her dad is too. Well, sort of. He says just let it play out. I just can't bring myself to let them screw her up too. I could write pages about their incompetence, about the harassment, and about the actual lies we were told.

I just don't know what to do to convince her that she needs to be at a different school.

Do you know why she wants to go there?

There are a couple of reasons she has voiced. 1) she doesn't like change and 2) her friends. Both are valid and I would address them. The third reason is that she really doesn't want to ride the bus to school... which I would also address.
I just would like her to at least shadow people at the two other options. And she keeps shutting that out.

Is one of her "friends" possibly a romantic interest? I know I gave my parents hell about a school situation when they tried to move me out of particular school to a much better set-up. Of course I didn't SAY that was the reason I didn't want to leave, but it totally was.

ugh. you know that screen time discussion they're having over there in the little kid thread?
i'm still having it with the teenybopper.
today we (the parents) decided that she can't use the computer during the week, end of discussion.
She gets so obsessed with this one forum that she literally doesn't have any involvement with her environment whatsoever. I was working late last night (skype calls) and she was supposed to be studying for her test this morning, instead she was on the computer the whole damn time. Forgot to make her lunch (which is also for her father, so they both will go without lunch today- which for me would mean go without lunch, but for them means they get to go out, the mustards), do the dishes, and get her stuff ready for today. Also, forgot to study for the goddamn test (there is one test per quarter, so big fuckup potential here).

I wonder how people do it when their class content is on ipads or laptops. i literally have taken the battery out of her laptop and put passwords on all the computers or she would be on them like (insert rude addiction stereotype here). do you think with free range the kids just learn, or what?

We went through that with both my older ones. Right around age 14 with both of them. They would fight brutally over who got time on the computer. We actually had to set a schedule and keep to it strictly. Now (at ages 19 and 16) neither show much interest in the web or in t.v.

Kfad, it sounds like things around the issue are pretty positional. When do you have to make a decision? Can you just back off the topic for a few weeks and then revisit together? And how hard would it be to switch out of the HS if things did go bad? Fwiw, my mom refused to let me go to public HS and I was sent to a private girl's school instead, and I hated it for 4 years and it caused a ton of tension and also was just so much less challenging/rigorous than I needed to be happy. I don't think you want a short term win, where you make her go to a charter school, and have her resent you. I hope this isn't overstepping, but I almost think that, unless its really hard to switch out, you might be better off showing her that you trust her and make her own choice to go to the HS and be ready to support her if things don't go well.

Sending tons of good thoughts!

I have a year + to make the decision as she is only in 7th grade. It is hard to get into standard schools, but we have an in at a charter school. I have time.

The problem is that the HS is really the worst. I am not comfortable sending her to a school that has already forced out her siblings.
This is the school that just told us Alex is a year behind in math. Which is interesting to us as she was in AP and passed all her AP classes with straight A's. How is she a year behind as a sophomore with three years of hs math already?

And I know I sound defensive. I have been dealing with the school for 5 years now. Not a single quarter has gone smoothly, including the last two and I don't have kids there right now... Stuff keeps popping up.

I am sorry. That sounds really awful and hard. If you have a year, then maybe just take it off the table for a month, so some of the defensiveness on both your sides can dissipate and then have her sister invite her to shadow at the charter school, if they get along? That way its not coming from you, and her big sister may have very relevant information to offer her.

What is going on at the HS? It sounds worse than the general run of the mill incompetence.

i remember some of the troubles you shared about the school. much as i think you have to let the kid have some say, i think it's sometimes OK to make an executive decision. you are the parent, and after this school continues to fork things up without fail, i think it's within your rights to say, ok, enough.
she doesn't like change. yet sometimes change is necessary. people have to move, changes happen. even the change from middle to HS is a big one despite having the same group of kids.
are there multiple other school options or just one? could you have her get invested in the choice between other options? and about friends, how about proposing participation in some sort of extracurricular where the friends go [some kind of class, club, YMCA, etc] where she could maintain friendships?

I don't know if this is helpful at all, so feel free to trash it if it's not, but this was my experience as a teen in a situation kind of like that. When I was 16 I basically demanded to go to a school program that I thought would be really good and helpful for me. My parents were dead against it, especially my mom, but ultimately they gave in and let me go. Now, it ended up being just about the worst situation imaginable for me, lots of horrible and traumatic shiitake happened to me at that school, and I know my parents regret that they let me go (and they don't even know all the details). But, here's the kicker: I think my relationship with my parents today is a lot better than it would have been if they had stopped me from going. Yeah, it was awful, but I think it would have actually been a lot worse for me if my parents had refused to let me go and I'd spent the rest of my life thinking that this school would have been so great for me like I thought when I wanted to go there. I really had to learn for myself the consequences of making a decision like that. Of course, I hope you have a better relationship with your kid than my parents had with me at the time I made that decision, and that may give you a stronger footing to be able to get what you want out of this situation.

I talked to her a bit. She is willing to shadow at the art school. That is progress.

The middle one just lied to me to get what she wanted. I am pretty peeved about it. There is very little that will set me of faster. I am trying to pick m words carefully. Sometimes though... it feels like they pick their words just as carefully in the opposite direction.