Is "blog" the onomatopoeic term for the sound one makes while spewing emotionally in one's journal?

[merimask]

So, yeah.  Charlotte's little needy friends are no longer going to call my house "home" for a while.  The Great Social Experiment of '06 comes to a screeching halt as of today for a number of reasons, not the least of which is I got her report card today and she went from all "A"s to "C" and "C-"s in just one quarter.   Her friends aren't bad kids, but they have NO structure, no one cares whether they get home on time or do their homework, and so Charlotte has gone right along for the ride and I'm freaking sick of having to yell at her about it.   Her little girlfriend with the fucked-up family is a total goof-off and they never do their homework (even though when they get home that's what I tell them to do)...Char got so many incomplete homeworks this quarter that (in spite of getting 100% of her tests right) she's lucky she passed a few of her classes.   All I can say is Wow.  My mom was right.  Your friends really CAN drag you down.  *sigh*

So now I have to go back to being the heavy, and micro-manage her life, and I freaking HATE that but *shrug* what else can I do?  

Frankly, I DO worry about "Nature vs Nurture" all the time, because I DO believe we're genetically hotwired for certain tendencies.   Her biological father (my ex) was notorious for being utterly unable to stay on task.  In the eight years we were married he went through over 22 jobs..  22!  Seriously, I kept track!  So I worry about Char being flighty and y'know, she really is.  I'm not sure how much of that is just being a kid and how much is inherited from her dad...but I do my best to keep her focused.  It was a lot easier to do when she was really little.  The older she gets, the more she...wanders, and the more I worry.

I was a bad student myself, partly because I never learned to study (I have an eidetic memory) and partly because I was thrown to the wolves in public school in the 70's, when advanced courses or GT programs were unheard of and being smart was tantamount to asking for an ass whupping (so I played dumb an awful lot).  Char can't use that as an excuse...she's been in GT classes and advanced study groups since she was in kindergarten, and today's public schools (at least here) are ultra-sensitive to bullying and stuff like that. 

No, she just has a penchant for drama and I think she's trying to "fit in" with these poor kids (my Mom has been calling them "The Orphans" which is uncharitable but accurate, as not one of them has a responsible adult in their lives).  I just wonder what the heck is going on...last year all her friends came from families with involved, present parents, and most of them were in GT classes with Char.   This year, she's been drawn to all the kids with the MOST screwed up homes.  Every one of them has major problems...not one of her friends has what you'd think of as a "normal" home, in fact I'd say that they're all neglected or abused.   Why does she seek these kids out?    I have to wonder if this is fallout from that stupid-ass custody battle I went through with my ex last year.  

Crap.  Maybe more counseling is in order.   

Comments

[golden-meliades.livejournal.com]

Yikes. Hmm, that's just never happened to me. I don't even walk to the beat of my own drummer...I hired a flautist and a harpist to play me down the path and told the drummer to take a hike :) And my sisters never fell into bad influences either, but more because my parents were so serious about things and new they couldn't get away with it than because they simply couldn't have been tempted to do as their friends did.

Naturally, it won't hurt Char to get bad grades for one quarter, but until you know where it would stop, it probably *is* best to limit her association with anyone who might be causing/influencing this shift in things. I don't wonder at her need to fit in but I do wonder why she wants to fit in with these girls (or just 'girl'?) in particular, rather than the popular kids or the smart kids or whatever cliques her school has. (My junior high had them ALL.)

If Charlotte *needs* micro-managing then I hope you'll manage not to feel too bad about it, because it's more important that she not get all messed up in ways that will last than it is for her to 'like' you; most teens hate their parents for a good portion of the time anyway. :/ (I got seriously annoyed with my dad and never my mom, but that's how it STILL is, and I was a weird, weird teen. But my baby sis was HORRIBLE to my parents for at least a full year, maybe two. Really horrible. And it was just her age, nothing else...nothing bad was happening to her and there were no particularly bad influences of any kind in her life.) Hopefully Charlotte sees past any new rules and discipline to the reasons behind it and accepts it as gracefully as one could expect from a thirteen-year-old. :) (Fourteen year old?)

[merimask.livejournal.com]

I hear you...I was very independant as a kid, too. I'd rather be alone than be grouped with kids I didn't like. My sister, though, HAD to belong to a group, any group, to feel loved and I think Char's father was the same way. Char has always had friends, many of them, but this year the kind of children she's gravitated towards has changed drastically. It has me really worried, because those kids really distract her and it's obvious that they are influencing her. When all her friends were GT kids, having them over here was a slice of sunshine because you didn't even have to ask them to go do the homework...they'd just do it. These poor kids though...they're bored and rudderless and all they want to do is hang out and goof off, it seems.

Like I was telling Shveta, I think her relationship with her father is a major part of the problem. Since he lost that custody thing he's been taking out his frustration on her, and been really mean at times, and that upsets her. There's only so much I can do or say to him (if he was the kind of person who could listen to reason, we might actually still be together), so I'm pretty helpless in that respect. So counseling is looking like my best bet. I have to get to the bottom of this before high school happens...it'll be too late by then.

[golden-meliades.livejournal.com]

What's happened to all her old friends? (I don't know what GT means, but I assume those are the equivalent of the 'smart kids' from the way it was mentioned.) Did she suddenly stop being friends with all of them? I mean, I know friends change, but if her whole group of friends has switched...that's just a bit odd, to me, because then there would either have had to have been a problem between them and they pushed her out or she would have had to choose to get into a new kind of group and leave the old one behind, and I doubt anyone would do that without a reason. So I'm just curious about her old friends and what's happened to them...are they *all* hanging out with these new kids?

I don't envy you a teenage daughter. If I was the type to want children, I think remembering the word 'teenager' would put me straight off. I thought teenagers were impossible when I WAS one, lol. They (we, at the time) are just so darned insane! Up, down, up, down... EEEEK!