TOO MUCH!

I can't even begin to tell you how much is going on! I seriously long for the days when it was just school that was hard. Throw in some teenager antics and life, I feel like, is nearly impossible to handle.

Yeah math is hard. Yeah chemistry is hard. Yeah it has been difficult to balance everything, but I would MUCH rather try to balance school and normal home life.

It all started the last week in September. I got a call from the school saying there was an altercation with Nae and another student and I needed to come get her and talk to the vice principal. Dirty and I jump into the car, totally shocked that Nae had gotten into a fight. Once we got all the details, it turned out that Nae had defended herself. Granted, she didn't do it in a timely manner and instead of standing up for herself IN the moment, she waited until lunch. We have always taught her to defend herself, we never made it clear to do it AT the time. She knows now, as does Zilla. So, she was suspended for a FULL week because of the aggressiveness of her actions and the other girl was "only" suspended for 3 days. We felt grounding her wasn't the way to go so we gave her many talks and went about our business. Her nose was pretty swollen and by Monday when the swelling had gone down, we noticed it was crooked. Dirty took her to the hospital while I went to class. Sure enough, it was fractured. SON OF A BITCH! And of course, the only ENT in our network was out until November and we needed to get her nose fixed BY the 10 day park of the injury, otherwise she would have needed a FULL rhinoplasty. I take her to the only ENT in our area and he suggested surgery. It is only called "surgery" because she was going to have to be put under and it will be done in an actual operating room. This was all on a Wednesday. The surgery/procedure had to happen BY Monday, otherwise, real surgery was going to be the only way to fix it. Of course, our insurance didn't feel the need to jump right on the request to have an out of network doctor do something, that would have made things far too easy. Friday afternoon/early evening, I FINALLY got the call that everything was a go. Thank you universe! Monday we all wake up at the ass crack of dawn and drive to the hospital, get her nose fixed and then go home. She missed the next week of school because her nose was so fragile and if she got bumped again, her nose could cave and obviously we didn't want that. So, that's 2 weeks off of school, so far. She was doing her homework and I was in contact with her teachers the whole time.

The Monday she goes back to school, she goes to hang out with her friends and I get a phone call from the kid's mom saying the 2 were involved in a car accident!!!! Nae is fine and her son probably has a broken hand. We go to the hospital AGAIN to pick her up and find out what the fuck was going on. I wasn't aware she was in a vehicle with this kid, not only was she NOT suppose to be in his car but she told me he had fell and broke his hand that way, via text messages. I was pissed, Dirty was angry but chalked it up to her being a teenager. His way of thinking was that when he acted up as a teenager, he got all his freedoms and EVERYTHING taken away and it didn't matter, he just got more angry and acted out more. I never did this kind of shit as a teenager, so I was allowing him to make the final decision on punishment. Ahhh so cute how naive I was! So, instead of grounding her for the rest of her life, we decided to go with the "you almost DIED today" route. Which is true, I saw the condition of the vehicle after the accident and had there not been airbags, I would be telling a COMPLETELY different story. That is a very scary thought! And on that hasn't been far from my mind since I got the phone call. So yeah....scary.

We kept her home from school on Tuesday because she was pretty sore and banged up from the accident. therefore, she wasn't able to get into any trouble on Tuesday. Wednesday, we found out that on Monday, she wasn't just late to class, but she ended up missing the last 2 periods AND is failing one of her classes. I try to direct Dirty on how to approach this, but he's just so convinced that "coming down hard" on her wasn't the right way to go. I'm telling him "we've given her a lot of freedoms and I think we need to reign her in". He keeps going to the whole "if my parents had just talked to me instead of punished me and took away all my shit, I think it would have been better", finally I have to blurt out that our daughter is having sex and is not making good choices right now. He proceeds to freak the hell out, rightly so and wants to ground her for the rest of her life. I try to tell him that we can't ground her for having sex, but we do need to get her back on the right track. She gets home and we all talk and she gets lectured for 2 hours, informed that she is grounded and she isn't allowed to leave the house unless she's going to school. Her friends were allowed to come over to help her finish up any homework they are doing together, but they do not leave the house. We also informed her how close she came to dying, we even brought up the guilt factor and asked Zilla what he was thinking when we had to run to the hospital to get her. He cried and said 'Nae I was so scared, I thought you died, please don't die!" SOOOO sad! She cried harder and they hugged, it was cute and sweet. The rest of our evening went on, we were a happy little family and Dirty and I are patting each other on the backs for such great parenting. But...no.

Thursday one of my friends saw Nae walking home from school SMOKING a cigarette! She and her friend get home and I ask them what they were doing on their way home, I gave Nae every opportunity to come clean, she didn't. She gave me some bull shit story. I asked my friend if that's what she could've seen, hoping SO hard it was. It wasn't, apparently Nae had been smoking for a full block, so her story of "I was just holding it for so and so" was not true. Weird, I know. So after getting the real story from my friend, we confront Nae again and she comes clean. Pissed off once again. She got ALL her stuff taken away. No TV, no cell phone, no stereo, and no PS2...its all gone! She also has to ride the bus to and from school, no hanging out after school with her friends. Last weekend was the first weekend of her sentence and it was hard. It sucked for everyone. I don't like being mean and neither does Dirty, no matter how much we know it's for her own good. It still sucks!

Now, we just don't know what to do. We can't ground her forever, although that does sound pretty sweet, but there is going to come a time when we have to allow her to make her own decisions, no matter how stupid they are. We haven't even reached the one week mark and Dirty wants to cave. Thankfully we both want to cave at different points, so hopefully, there's no chance of caving. I just don't know exactly how to go about this. I'm not the great parent I was, I feel like an idiot now. I'm embarrassed, disappointed and pissed off! If only I knew for sure she had learned her lesson. If only.....