Monday, 24 April 2017

Oldest daughter (16) had a party while my husband and I were out of town. Things got out of hand and we had to cut our trip short. Husband and I don’t agree on how to handle the situation.


We left on Friday night (driving) and our oldest daughter, I guess we will call her Mary, was staying at the house. She has a job and a car but in spite of a recent rebellious phase we generally trust her to be responsible. We had a neighbor who was going to check in a few times too. Our youngest is 14, lets call her Jess, and was supposed to stay at her friends house for the weekend.Apparently Jess wanted to get in on whatever her sister was doing that weekend and snuck out, & came back to our house while our oldest daughter had some friends over. Jess has never done anything like this before. The friends parents noticed the girls were missing, we were called, the police were called and we turned around and got back there as fast as possible.When we got back Jess was at home with Mary, and they are both clearly upset with each other but so far I haven’t been able to get anything that sounds like the truth out of them about what happened. Mary says she had some friends over and Jess came into the house around midnight and wouldn’t let Mary take her back to her friends where she was supposed to be. They got into an argument and Jess left with her friend and then came back a couple hours later by herself and holed up in their room until we got home. Mary hasn’t really denied any of that, but also hasn’t given a story telling “her side” of things which worries me.Anyways, what actually happened between them isn’t the main issue right now…My husband and I don’t agree on how to handle the situation at all. In my opinion both of the girls are guilty of something, Jess sneaking out is not ok, and Mary having a party is also not ok.He agrees with me about Jess but not about Mary. Realistically we always knew she was going to have a few friends over. She’s a teenager and that’s to be expected. But regardless of what we know is realistic, we set a “no friends while we’re gone” rule so I think there should be consequences for breaking that rule… and I know that a “couple of friends” was a full on party. She had some time to clean up but I’m not an idiot.When it comes to Mary my husband has always been kind of blind, I think he honestly believes sometimes that she can’t do anything wrong. He will not talk about this though, and I don’t think constantly letting her get away with things is healthy. She’s not even at fault for her own bad grades in school, she tells us some teacher is singling her out and messing with her grade and he will always storm the school in her defense. I know not all teachers are fair, but I find it hard to believe that she hasn’t gone through a single class since jr high where she doesnt have a target on her back.So when it comes to Mary I always have to be the bad guy….I try to pick my battles carefully, but on this one I really want to put my foot down. She had a party, disrespected our rules and our house…and I don’t want to ruin her life over it but I want her to face some consequences. That and with how the girls are acting i’m positive something more happened and I might never know what it is.I suggested we take her car away for a couple of weeks and my husband just exploded on me and said that I’m always out to get her and the real issue here was Jess sneaking out. etc. I agree that Jess sneaking out is a problem, but we don’t disagree on that so that’s not the focus of this post…I kind of want to have a family meeting type of thing and get everyone to sit down and talk about what went down this weekend. I want to get Jess to open up, I want Mary to tell the truth, and I want my husband and I to find common ground somehow to we can agree how to handle this.How should I approach this? I posted on r/relationships and they sent me here.TL;DR: My husband is wildly defensive of my oldest daughter and she can do wrong. How do I talk to him about having her face some consequences for the party she had at our house this weekend? via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2p0977v

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